{"id":111521,"date":"2017-06-07T14:11:53","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T18:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111521"},"modified":"2017-06-08T10:42:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T14:42:00","slug":"suicide-blonde-twenty-five","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/07\/suicide-blonde-twenty-five\/","title":{"rendered":"Suicide Blonde<\/em> at Twenty-Five"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of the first edition of Suicide Blonde<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWas it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?\u201d so begins Darcey Steinke\u2019s \u201csensational\u201d second novel, Suicide Blonde<\/em>. I put the word \u201csensational\u201d in quotation marks because a host of similar adjectives (\u201cshocking,\u201d \u201cdaring,\u201d \u201cscandalous,\u201d and so on) greeted the novel at its publication in 1992. This may have given the book a well-deserved public velocity, but insofar as such adjectives also reflect the prudishness and insularity of many reviewers and readers, it also ran\u2014and to some extent still runs\u2014the risk of occluding some of the novel\u2019s truest achievements, all of which are on display, in miniature, in its unforgettable opening sentence.<\/p>\n

The swirl of bourbon, blonde hair dye, and vaginal lips is audacious, sure, but it\u2019s also funny, and evidences a fairly rare and delightful phenomenon I might call feminist camp. Feminist camp\u2014which can be practiced by persons of any gender (see John Waters, who regularly identifies as a radical feminist)\u2014doesn\u2019t waste time exhibiting its feminist credentials. It simply moves with invention and forcefulness into a new field, one which both belongs to a canon of outlaw writers (Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Alexander Trocchi, William S. Burroughs, et cetera.), while also creating new ground to stand on (Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick, Virginie Despentes, and more). Suicide Blonde<\/em> belongs to both of these traditions, as well as to other notable subsets, including noir, queer lit of the eighties\u00a0and nineties\u00a0(Michelle Tea, Leslie Feinberg, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles), classic twentieth-century fiction featuring itinerant, urbane women experimenting with dissolution and desire (Jean Rhys, Iris Owens, Renata Adler, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith), maybe even erotica (Steinke remains one of the few writers I know whose writing about sex manages to be both literary and hot).\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Suicide Blonde<\/em>\u2019s opening question makes clear, its home base is the consciousness of a questing female, for whom the words \u201cabjection\u201d or \u201cdebasement\u201d are someone else\u2019s, insistences of a culture stubbornly deaf to the mess of female journeying in extremis. Indeed, what some reviewers mistook as an attempt to shock (\u201cSo self-consciously seeking \u2018that exquisite kick of perversity,\u2019 this callow fiction comes off as something along the lines of a much more sincere American Psycho<\/em>. All the more pathetic,\u201d wrote some stooge at Kirkus<\/em>), I hear as an uncommonly confident, entertaining over-the-topness, especially re: bodies, as in: \u201cPig\u2019s head dropped lower. She gagged and a long line of glittering burgundy ribboned down the stairwell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turning wine vomit into glittering burgundy ribbon is just one of the alchemical transformations regularly performed by Steinke\u2019s prose. This alchemy isn\u2019t a sign that Steinke is on the run from materiality, however\u2014despite (or because of?) Steinke\u2019s Christian background, vomit remains vomit. Instead she\u2019s after the glittering, the way the sublunary world flickers with possibility, divinity, multivalence, from the inside out. The novel\u2019s tone shares this commitment to flicker, or suspension: it feels melodramatic and restrained, mordant and good-hearted, suffused with high-order irony and casual sincerity. Likewise, the novel reads like an allegory set in any dystopic, late twentieth-century city (opaquely emblematic character names such as Bell and Pig further this impression), while also offering a portrait of a very particular time and place\u2014the San Francisco of the early nineties, of the Lusty Lady, of parties at which one might meet \u201ca feminist trying to destroy the myth of the aesthetic canon, musicians who insisted house music was the blues of the nineties and a performance artist who covered himself with animal blood and said narrative was dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like all of Steinke\u2019s novels, Suicide Blonde<\/em> has been lauded for its \u201cgorgeous prose,\u201d and justly so. I\u2019d like to pause here, however, and disrupt the critical tendency to act as if \u201cgorgeous prose\u201d were a kind of decorative accent on a novel, which could survive without this value-added. Certain novels may be palatable, or even compelling, in spite of their unremarkable or unlovely sentences. But those cannot be great novels. Despite the hopes of mediocre sentence writers everywhere, novels cannot be separated from the prose that\u00a0comprises them. So if I reiterate here that Steinke\u2019s prose is gorgeous, I don\u2019t do so to turn an A into an A+. I mean to underscore that she is writing in a tradition of novel writing that doesn\u2019t depend on tricks of narrative momentum or emotional setups to make us endure uninteresting prose. Rather, Steinke\u2019s sentences reliably deliver concision, beauty, and surprise, either via unexpected, unlabored metaphors (\u201cWe entered the noisy bar full of men\u2019s faces, numerous and similar as kidney beans,\u201d our narrator Jess says as she faces the group of men for whom she will whore for the first time) or unusual, amusing progressions of thought (Jess again: \u201cI remembered the story of one saint, a virgin, who cut off her breasts rather than succumb to a rapist. I made myself think God is dead<\/em>, but it seemed dangerous. Then I thought, my pussy is the same color as this carpet. <\/em>This comforted me somehow.\u201d) Steinke also has a poet\u2019s feel for imagistic patterns that\u00a0accrue into their own kind of plot or argument (keep your eye on the color burgundy, as per the wine vomit), as well as a poet\u2019s instinct for hotshot lines that move us in and out of her novels. The feeling I typically get when I finish a Steinke novel is one of exhilaration and relief, as I realize with delight that her performance has sustained its unique pitch from start to finish, no wobble.<\/p>\n

This exquisite technique does more than impress. It also builds trust. In the case of Steinke\u2019s writing, this trust is especially crucial, insofar as she traffics in transgression, gliding with Fassbinder-esque grace from scenes of abuse to rape to suicide to high glamour to boredom to pleasure to abandon to myriad other forms of exaltation and ruination. (\u201cBecause fucking, when it\u2019s good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember that things are horrible, until you are hardly alive,\u201d Jess tells us while fucking her gloomy, bisexual boyfriend, Bell.) Smart sentence by smart sentence, dicey scene by dicey scene, exceptional novel by exceptional novel, I have come to trust Steinke to the point where I will follow her anywhere she decides to go. Most often, she takes her heroine\/the reader to the cusp of a deep badness, then pulls back; sometimes, most notably in Jesus Saves<\/em>, things go all the way bad. (I\u2019ll never forget my first time reading Jesus Saves<\/em>: I felt sick about the ending, I wanted to undo what the novel had done; maybe I even felt betrayed. But upon reflection, I could see why Steinke made her narrative choices; over time, I\u2019ve come to respect that ending as a kind of limit test of what is possible in her novels, an edge she knows how to topple over or ride.)<\/p>\n

Suicide Blonde<\/em> doesn\u2019t go all the way dark\u2014as in most Steinke novels, not everyone survives, but (spoiler alert) our heroine does. We\u2019re never entirely sure of her fate after the story ends, however, because Steinke is into ongoing odyssey, not moralistic parable. Unlike some of my favorite dissolute novels by women\u2014I\u2019m thinking of After Claude<\/em> or After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie<\/em>, for example\u2014Steinke\u2019s daring or wit is not wrought from a certain meanness or nihilism. Suicide Blonde<\/em>\u2019s antihero, Madison, may tell Jess that \u201cthere are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself,\u201d but no matter what experiences Jess undertakes or surrenders to, she seems almost quizzically unable to kill her soft parts, probably because her soft parts and her hard parts are marbled together. I can barely think of another writer\u2014much less a religiously infused writer\u2014who so naturally eschews binaries, who feels and renders the world\u2019s marbled complexity with such poetic ease.<\/p>\n

It comes off as easy, but I doubt it is\u2014writing well isn\u2019t easy for anyone\u2014but Steinke\u2019s writing has been marked by a kind of languid sureness from the start. Like so many naturals with a singular vision and an unyielding gift, Steinke wrote a perfect book nearly right out of the gate, one which both emanates from its time and will last the test of time. I\u2019m glad, on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, for Suicide Blonde<\/em> to come around again, to show us how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

Maggie Nelson is a poet and critic and the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/em>The Argonauts, which won\u00a0the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.<\/em><\/p>\n

A\u00a0twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of <\/em>Suicide Blonde<\/a>, by Darcey Steinke,\u00a0is available from Grove Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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