Flyleaf by Finuala Dowling

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Flyleaf is a tired sigh of rambling detail. Part of its weariness is perhaps the result of the fact that I’ve read this story before, in Dancing Naked at the Edge of the Dawn by Kris Radish. In both novels, a university-educated woman who has unwisely married too young leaves her unfaithful husband and goes to stay with her best friend, giving her a chance to ‘find herself’ and decide what she wants out of life. The best friend is a beautiful, free-spirited, self-confident hippy, in stark contrast to our dull, meticulous protagonist and her insecurities. Yawn.

Dancing Naked at the Edge of the Dawn went to great dramatic lengths with this, as only American novels can, flying off to exotic locations on journeys of self-discovery, while beautiful female sages spew forth New Age pseudo-feminist philosophies. Flyleaf is at least more down-to-earth. The place is Cape Town and its surrounds, the philosophy is linguistics. Middle-class married women take note.

Violet Birkin teaches English literature and designs Adult Literacy courses, but this leaves her exhausted and miserable. The pay is poor, and although she loves teaching English lit, the college is less interested in an appreciation of literature and strictly focused on teaching their clients according to neat pre-defined goals. Violet however, takes a personal interest in her third-year class, and would like to nurture rather than simply teach them. She is envious of all the possibilities lying before them, and wants them to “explore, discover and act upon their full humanity” and realise “just how extraordinary they were” (218).

Violet’s newly discovered passion, however, is linguistics. After leaving Frank she tires of her PhD on doors and windows in Virginia Woolf’s writing, and concludes that “[a]ll i really want to do is write things down on index cards… to record all the wonderful things people say and look at the deep structure of their utterances”. For the narrative, this means that Violet occasionally gives the reader little lessons in grammar using phrases that grab her attention, from a neighbour’s crude retort “Go suck another man’s cock” (25) to the slightly desperate “What are you going to do?” (248).

As an English major, I’m should be the sort of person who should appreciate this: the academic context, the literary references, the lessons in grammar and linguistics. And in other books I have, but in Flyleaf these are all as flat as the story and merely add detail rather than illuminating anything. I didn’t take much interest in Violet’s experiences as a lecturer, or in the depictions of her students, many of whom frustrate her with their need for easy answers and their general lack of interest in English literature. We get snippets of their lives but it seems these are meant to be interesting in themselves, as they have little or no bearing on the story as a whole. In fact much of the novel plodded along indulging in detail for detail’s sake, which would have been fine if this detail were amusing or particularly poetic, but it’s not. Every now and then there’d be a sentence or reference that would make me smile or elicit a nod of admiration, but more often I’d cringe. At one point Violet makes a terrible joke about honking geese failing to read a sign reading “HOSPITAL NO HOOTING” (118). Perhaps the worst moment in the book is when Dowling rips off a scene from the movie American Beauty for a flashback showing Frank and Violet happily in love: “Once in a late night street… we were intrigued by a passing plastic bag. Gusted by the southeaster, it seemed to have a personality of its own.” (39).

And then it becomes ludicrous: “Frank just ran with the idea, delivering extempore the bag’s stream of consciousness as it entered gutters or was briefly wrapped about a telephone pole. He even danced a little way down Belvedere Road in an impromptu pas de deux with the floating filament of plastic” (39). To be fair, Violet mentions a line later that they feel like actors, like this isn’t real life, so perhaps this is intended to be a reference, not just a rip-off, but we’re still left with a man narrating the ‘thoughts’ of a plastic bag and then dancing with it.

Besides being bored with the details and the language lessons, I found nothing engaging about Violet either. She’s mostly quite passive, and instead of empathising with her concerns about being dull, I tended to agree that she was. Her hippy best-friend Marina is also a little too bourgeois. She lives off an inheritance and has no need to work, so she spends most of her time indulging in various hobbies that she discards once she reaches proficiency. Marina actually doesn’t ‘believe’ in employment because it’s “self-defeating” (30). She gives a little speech explaining this while lying in a hammock drinking gin & tonic, just in case you mistake her individualism for a socialist or communist ethic. Marina isn’t wrong about employment and no doubt most of us would love to be free of it, but in Cape Town, in South Africa, with our appalling unemployment rates, Marina’s unquestioned luxury seems rather insensitive.

You might be wondering where all of this goes, but it’s hard to say because there isn’t much of a plot. Life goes on, things happen, Violet agonises over things, then decides what she wants to do with her life, all without too much fuss. If you enjoy meandering through this sort of narrative, then this could well be a good read for you, but I really can’t stand this kind of whine.

Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this novel for an ‘I’ll Read Yours if You Read Mine’ challenge. I was challenged to read it because I don’t like chick lit. Well, I still don’t. This book tries to be feminist, but it’s just a lot of New Age blather that simply ignores men.

It’s the story of Meg, a middle-aged, middle-class American suburban wife and mother whose life undergoes a series of drastic changes after she watches her husband Bob having an affair with another woman. The event leaves Meg broken and she goes into a lot of detailed whining, but as the narrative progresses it seems to be the best thing that’s ever happened to her, causing her to escape the life that has made her so unhappy and start a new one more in tune with her passions and friendships. Meg finds solace in a multitude of strong, wise women who are always available to listen and have no shortage of inspiring metaphors and anecdotes. These women and Meg’s friendships with them are nice but unreal – wonderful as they are, the way they pop up wherever Meg needs them is terribly contrived.

In fact, given the people and influences in Meg’s life, I couldn’t understand why she’d married Bob in the first place or why she’d allowed herself to become so unhappy. Each flashback chapter shows a ‘feminist’ influence in Meg’s life, but none of these seem to have had much impact on her. She encounters several women whose stories show that marriage (at least in this society) is bad for women, turning them into unhappy servants of their husbands and children and reducing their aspirations to daydreams. At one point, she admits that she doesn’t know of any happy marriages except her grandparents’. Other characters encourage Meg to follow her passions rather than submit to social pressures. And yet she still marries Bob at 20. I don’t think it’s impossible for something like this to occur, but given the circumstances, I found myself waiting for an explanation, a glimpse of Meg and Bob’s early relationship. I felt Radish owed it to the reader, but it never came.

I was also left wondering why Meg, a well-educated woman with so many strong, outspoken women in her life, never seems to have talked to her husband about her unhappiness and tried to work things out, either before or after learning about his affairs. Despite the novel’s strong feminist tones, the conclusion it offers is that women are still the weaker sex. They may have the strength to leave their husbands and stay single, but they don’t have the strength to face the men in their lives and confront the problem of sexism. They can escape, but they can’t fight. If they’re lucky, they will find kind men with egalitarian sensibilities who will not pose a threat. Or they can just live with other women, and avoid men.

Divorce seems the only solution posed for an unhappy marriage then, because it’s always going to be unhappy. Women must find solace in each other, or in themselves. But on the whole, this feels like a fantasy. There are mythical women like Elizabeth, Linda, Dr Carol Kimbal – goddess-like in their wisdom, strength and beauty. There are magical places – Elizabeth’s apartment, Mexico, Meg’s new apartment. There are New Age ideas and practices throughout and the ending is a lovely dream of success. To me, all the wonderful things the novel celebrates feel unreal, a New Age fantasy. In contrast, there’s a ‘real world’ where men like Bob are still in control and that fantasy falls flat. I wanted the novel to solidify into a biting feminist tract or just veer off into a thrilling reckless fantasy where Meg parties and has wild affairs on gorgeous Mexican beaches. Unfortunately, it falls somewhere in the middle, trying to impart serious messages about empowerment in a way that makes it all to magical to be real.

Nevertheless, I still found aspects of the novel inspiring, even if I don’t agree with the way Radish has expressed them. The voracious appetite for change is so exciting, the suggestion of being happy while staying single is both calming and thrilling. I also valued this perspective on middle-aged women in suburban middle-class America – a culture far from my own. It’s clearly something that speaks to them, and to women elsewhere. And I too would love to do some of the things Meg does as she changes her life, but for me this novel could only work as an inspiring fantasy, nothing more. And for novels about women, there are many others that are better-written, more fun, more feminist…

Why can’t more ‘chick lit’ be like this? Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying

In a recent reading challenge, I read a chick lit novel whose idea of feminism was to avoid men and portray women as either victims of their unhappy marriages or single and thus empowered to almost mythical proportions. Whatever its noble intentions it made feminism look like a new age joke. The best thing I can say about it is that it made me long for something far bolder, more complex, and better written. I’d had Fear of Flying on my shelf for a few years and had started it a few times without finishing. Now I found myself in the ideal circumstances to really enjoy it.

Fear of Flying has a chick lit plot pulled off with more flair, honesty and insight than that normally fluffy genre seems able to muster. Or rather, the novel feels like the strong origins of a genre that has since become watered down and weak. Isadora Wing is frustrated by her unhappy marriage to Bennett and longs for the elusive ‘zipless fuck’ – a ‘pure’ sexual encounter, an indulgence without strings, without power games. She thinks she may have found one in Adrian Goodlove, but in pursuing him she has to face her titular fear of flying – both a literal fear and a fear of freedom, of being single. As imperfect as her marriage might be, Isadora clings to its security and is not devoid of feelings of love and loyalty to Bennett. Also, she is more dependent on men than she would like to be:

“All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisaged myself tying up with another. I was like a boat that always had to have a port of call. I simply couldn’t imagine myself without a man. Without one I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined” (78).

And it’s true – without a man she does lack definition, at least for herself (less so for the reader). She’s dreamed of finding “a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable” (91) and in this seemingly impossible search for love she’s avoided defining her own identity and desires. “In the mornings,” Adrian tells her at one point, “I can never remember your name” (227).

This seems odd for the narrator of a feminist classic, but this is part of what interests me about Isadora – she’s a mass of contradictions and conflicts. What she has learned from her mother (who is indulgent and loving yet blames Isadora’s existence for her failure to become an artist) is that “being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves” (148). However liberated, Isadora has still grown up in a sexist society and been influenced by its dysfunctional ideals. In addition, she happens to be a lustful, heterosexual woman. She’s been a feminist all her life, she says, “but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies” (88). She wants to be married, but she also sees all the flaws in marriage. Currently, she’s torn between the dull security of her marriage to Bennett and the unstable excitement of an affair with Adrian. Having both passion and security, it seems, is too much to ask. Isadora (like Jong) is also a writer who has struggled for years to find the confidence and discipline to turn her craft into a profession. She may be intelligent and educated, but she can also be terribly immature and irrational. She’s not a heroine I’d aspire to be but I admire the fact that she articulates and struggles with her conflicts, and this is where the novel has its greatest strengths – it’s sincere and insightful in depicting dilemmas some women struggle with.

Jong pulls this off with witty, energetic writing. I love close psychological studies of characters and this one is as fun and inspiring as I’d hoped it to be, rather than being whiny like the watered-down ‘feminism’ of the chick-lit that led me here. However, it occasionally gets slow and dull. Fear of Flying is obviously semi-autobiographical, and Jong seems determined to show off Isadora’s – and by extension her own – intellectual prowess. There is far too much name-dropping and the narrative sometimes gets held up by history lessons, travel impressions and psychoanalysis lectures. This isn’t entirely irrelevant, but it can get long-winded. “I know you’re smart and educated,” I want to say, “so could you cut this short and get back to your sex life?”

This is not because Fear of Flying is a particularly raunchy book. It’s often fun, yes, but it’s the kind of amusement you get from witty rants. The book is about sex, not of it. It’s unabashedly graphic when talking about sexual relationships, but with the exception of the ‘zipless fuck’ fantasy in the first chapter, the sex scenes are brief and perfunctory, not naughty deviations from the plot.

The story follows Isadora across Europe as she vacillates between Bennett and Adrian, and regularly turns to the past as befits the psychoanalytic theme that runs through the novel. We learn about Isadora’s family life, sexual encounters, affairs, therapists, her career, and her first marriage (to a genius who unfortunately turned out to be a lunatic).

Overall I found it inspiring, not because it offers solutions (it doesn’t), not because I thought all Isadora’s problems applied to me or women in general, but because she is sincere and often funny in articulating them, she’s honest about her cowardice, but she also makes the effort to engage the conflicts she finds herself in. It’s the kind of book that promises rewarding rereads, and I’ll definitely return to it.