Book Review - Further Out Than You Thought: A Novel by Michaela Carter
In literature, Los Angeles is notoriously the city of failed dreams and fantasies. Michaela Carter’s contribution starts off impressively with an erotically charged scene in an ugly box of a strip club. Gwen Griffin (stage name “Stevie,” after the English poet Stevie Smith) does two dances a set, one in costume, one nude, followed by a “table dance” with one of her regulars, a man who gives her advice about her life.
Gwen started stripping to put herself through graduate school. She could use some good advice. She lives in a squalid, roach-infested apartment with her slacker boyfriend Leo, who hasn’t worked in more than a year. Leo has a bad case of Peter Pan syndrome (his nickname for Gwen is “Tink,” as in “Tinkerbelle”). Gwen has just realized she’s pregnant and wants to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the cops who beat up Rodney King have just been found innocent — it’s 1992 — and buildings are going up in flames within blocks of Gwen’s apartment building.
Carter is an award-winning poet. It shows in her evocative language and descriptions. The novel, based in her own experiences, includes some intensely realistic chapters, especially in the strip club: “The Century Lounge was warm and red, like a womb. The walls were red, and the curtains – everywhere there were curtains. … Day and night were a constant gloaming, and always the room smelled of perfume, of sweat, of pussy and cigarettes.” The book is full of ragged, unexpected details that give the sense of something close to a memoir.
Gwen started at the strip club because it paid better than being a file clerk. She stayed because it allowed her to be a different person — to become the owner of her own body after a suburban adolescence marked by anorexia and bulimia. Leo, who refuses to take career or work seriously, is the polar opposite of her workaholic lawyer father. Gwen has to decide whether raising a child with Leo — or in Los Angeles — is even possible.
But the outcome never seems in doubt. Gwen’s protracted deliberation about whether to stay in the relationship is the least believable part of the novel. Not only is Leo clearly not father material, but Gwen already is annoyed with his unreliability from the moment that she arrives home from the strip club for the first time. She got fed up with him a long time ago.
In a misguided attempt to get away from the confusion of the riots, she drives Leo and a black friend, who is dying of AIDS, to Tijuana. This plot device gives Leo a series of tests that he predictably fails, as well as putting Gwen in touch with a helpful Mexican psychic (yes, really). Far from showing any signs of settling down, Leo seriously suggests they hitchhike to South America and later inserts himself into the middle of a knife fight. Cast as epiphanies, these might better be called “duh” moments, as far as his suitability as a parent. Back in California, Gwen’s decision is clinched when Leo sits happily stoned on the beach while she nearly drowns, in an echo of a line from her favorite Stevie Smith poem.
There are other problems with the book. One is that neither Gwen’s suburban background nor her graduate student status is very clearly realized. In particular, the only evidence we have that she’s a graduate student is the tuition bill that arrives in the mail and the stack of papers on her desk. She doesn’t seem to have a thesis advisor or fellow students or to be worried about missing classes or turning in assignments. When she decides to leave L.A. for good, she doesn’t spare a single thought to how that affects her degree program.
The other problem is social. It’s quite understandable that a young white woman from an Arizona suburb, pregnant and faced with urban unrest, would decide to pack up and move somewhere safer. But there’s an ethical issue here: Carter is using a major political upheaval as Gwen’s personal metaphor for the ugly underside of the city of dreams. Gwen (and, by implication, Carter) is aware of white privilege, thinking about her upbringing in a place where the only people of color were maids. She feels guilty about not staying to help rebuild the city. But people of color aren’t fully realized as characters in the book because they’re abstracted from their communities. Carter misses the fact that what’s happening on the streets of L.A. is not just a background disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane: Like the recent Ferguson protests, it’s about a whole group of people saying “enough is enough.”
The result is a story that holds a lot of promise, but ultimately fails to really delve into the urban realities under the narratives we tell about our cities, not only Los Angeles, but other cities (like Seattle) where gentrification and police repression are taking place. It’s a good story, but it could be much better.
Book Review - Further Out Than You Thought: A Novel by Michaela Carter