queerlit50

I sat in bed one night with my partner lover, reading Close Calls: New Lesbian Fiction*; I turned to her, an impulsive inquiry springing from my lips. “Darling”, I breathed, “do you think our relationship passion is like a match flame that kindles a raging inferno which consumes the old growth acreage in our lives?” I gazed into her brown violet eyes, which once again, as they so often did, captured my soul and held it captive in their firey depths. My heart pounded as a wave of heat flashed through my body. She smiled with her velvet mouth, and as she shifted her silky limbs I could smell the intoxicating essence of her drugstore shower gel lavender and musk. I could barely breathe. Instead of replying, she leaned towards me and brought her luscious petals oh so tantalizingly close to my own…

Right, before I get too carried away, I will say that at least I didn’t spend money on this; I got it from the library. And it’s pretty typical of our public library’s collection of lesbian fiction, which mostly consists of copies from Bold Strokes Books, and Sarah Waters (but only because straight people happen to read her). Really, the enthusiastic blurb from Katharine V. Forrest on the back should have been my first warning (I can never forgive Forrest for subjecting me to giant vibrating clitorises in Daughters of an Emerald Dusk). It’s not even particularly new, despite the title — it was published in 1996. There are a handful of good authors in this collection — Ruthann Robson, Donna Allegra, Barbara Wilson, Anna Livia. And a couple mediocre stories that look great in comparison to the really awful ones.

I won’t go on about the really bad (REALLY BAD!) stories; and I guess it shouldn’t bother me so much — there are plenty of excellent examples of lesbian fiction out there. But it’s frustrating that this is the best the library can offer. I rely on anthologies to discover new authors, and since I’ve been unemployed for over a year, I can’t afford to risk my non-existent discretionary income on crap (but there’s only so many times I can read Emma Donoghue, you know?) And so much bad lesbian fiction sounds exactly like my first paragraph, and there’s so much of it out there! I’m just really irritated by the whole situation.

*edited by Susan Fox Rogers, published by St. Martin’s Press, if you’re dying to know.

A Piece of the Night is the story of Julie Fanchot, who is raising her young daughter with her lover in a communal lesbian household, as tenants of Julie’s ex-husband. When she returns to her native France to nurse her ailing mother, she has to reconcile her French Catholic heritage with her new radical politics.

Published in 1979, this is an astounding first novel. It took me a long time to read it (because many of the themes are near the knuckle for me), but it’s a novel worth savoring. Roberts is a master stylist, and knows how to use style to create a powerful effect in the reader. It’s not light reading: complex and intricately structured, the narrative shifts between omniscient 3rd person and 1st-person stream-of-conciousness without warning. It’s beautiful, though, and vigorous. It’s a novel about breakdown: of the family, of marriages, of religious faith, of mental stability. Julie is a complicated protagonist, not always likable. I appreciated Robert’s frank honesty about her heroine. Julie is interrogating her past, trying to understand how religion and patriarchy have shaped her life. She is full of rage, confusion, neediness, loneliness, and insecurity. The cover art of my copy captures the central conflict perfectly: an ironic reinterpretation of Bartolome Murillo’s Immaculate Conception, with red-haired, labrys-wearing, blue-jean-clad Julie as the blessed virgin dyke, ascending  into her own power and grace (and a sky full of  frolicing cherub babies).

I do have two main critiques: there’s a rape scene right at the beginning of the novel, and while it’s very effective, it’s never addressed later in the novel.  Maybe that’s Robert’s point, but it does feel kind of awkward, like Chekov’s gun that’s never fired. I kept expecting it to be revisted, and it never was. Secondly, the novel slips a bit into the Fantasy Ending that so much contemporary lesbian literature and film indulges in. I didn’t find it entirely convincing. I’m not saying we can’t have happy endings, but I do think it’s interesting that there are so few examples of realistic ones. But the novel as a whole is so impressive that those critiques didn’t really affect my enjoyment of it. It deserves far more attention in my opinion.

I keep thinking about this book. It is, frankly, a haunting novel. I think I’m gonna go ahead and start reading it again, because it practically begs you to do that. And it’ll be a different book the second time around, and I wonder what that book will be.

The Red Tree displays its literary influences proudly: Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King. I’m sure there are others that I didn’t recognize, given my limited knowledge of the genre. And it does it without being a pastiche or derivative; instead Kiernan has created something entirely her own, distinctive. Sarah Crowe’s ordeal at the Wight farm, her bizarre relationship with the red tree, is so compelling, so haunting. It’s an effortless synthesis of classic horror and gothic elements. It also manages to be an emotionally gripping, deeply satisfiying postmodern piece of meta-fiction. It’s fricking amazing.

Kiernan takes the psychological ambiguity of Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and runs with it. In Hill House, we’re not sure about the reality of Eleanor’s experiences; in The Red Tree, we’re not sure about the reality of the text itself.  Like Eleanor, Sarah Crowe’s madness — or rather, mental state, since its not really clear if she’s mad or not — is symbiotic with the paranormal events of the plot. Each seems to influence the other. But in The Red Tree, reality is blurred to such an extent it calls into question the nature of the book itself. It’s a novel, which according to its own internal logic, is explicity not a novel. It begins as a diary, turns into a confession, and becomes a research paper at various points, as well as a record of dreams. Unless, as the fictional editor of the book suggests, it’s an elaborate hoax, in which case maybe the text Sarah Crowe created is a novel after all.

The editor adds another layer of complexity; she’s an intrusive presence who provides footnotes and arbritrary chapter divisions — “for the sake of convention”, she claims. Which could stand as a metaphor for the whole novel. The editor tries to make sense of Sarah’s text, Sarah tries to make sense of her lover’s suicide, Charles L. Harvey’s manuscript tries to make sense of the red tree. All these attempts to make safe and comprehensible that which is unknowable, to resolve the inexplicable, are doomed to fail. Kiernan’s editorial preface lets us know from the start that such attempts only confuse things even further. It’s not even certain that Sarah committed suicide, although the editor maintains that claim from the first page. “We know how she died” states the editor — except the reader of the book doesn’t know this at all. It’s never described. This book continually undermines what the reader assumes to be true and reliable. There’s a scene, towards the end, in the attic, that made my hair stand on end it was so unnerveing.

Significant parts of the novel are taken from–or at least correllate with—Kiernan’s own life. How much of the book is baldly autobiographical, and how much merely seems to be, is a question she dangles before the reader throughout the text. How much of Elizabeth Tillman Aldridge (to whom the book is dedicated) is in “Amanda”, her fictional counterpart? How do we tell the difference between facts and inventions? Reality, Kiernan seems to suggest, is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Ironically, the atrocious cover for the book simply adds to the metatextual uncertainty. The cover is typical of a standard superficial urban fantasy; the book within it is anything but.  Nothing is what it seems. The closer you get to the red tree, the more unreal the world becomes.