{"id":83819,"date":"2015-03-19T12:37:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T16:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83819"},"modified":"2015-03-19T15:33:48","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T19:33:48","slug":"2-i-had-been-working-my-tits-down-to-nubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/2-i-had-been-working-my-tits-down-to-nubs\/","title":{"rendered":"2: \u201cI Had Been Working My Tits Down to Nubs\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

From \u201cMartin Wade Leaves a Party\u201d through \u201cSekopololo,\u201d pp. 29\u201355<\/em><\/p>\n

\"mating\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the second entry in our\u00a0<\/em>Mating\u00a0Book Club<\/em><\/a>. Read along.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy God, that\u2019s awful!<\/em>\u201d This was, by her own account, Elsa Rush\u2019s reaction<\/a> to one of the most memorable\u2014and one of my favorite\u2014lines in her husband\u2019s novel: \u201cI had been working my tits down to nubs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some context: Our unnamed narrator is trying to ferret out what her current paramour, a British spy she calls Z., knows about the elusive Nelson Denoon, an iconoclastic figure in the anthropological world. Denoon, who has been hovering on the novel\u2019s margins since its very first pages, will soon become\u2014and I trust this is no spoiler\u2014her lover; but, for the moment, he is merely \u201cthe pinnacle of whatever vineyard I was laboring in as a groundling,\u201d the object of her \u201cressentiment.\u201d \u201cI was thirty-two,\u201d our narrator explains, \u201cand a woman and no doctorate yet, no thesis even, and closing in on my thesis deadline. I had been working my tits down to nubs in the study of man, with the result that my goals were receding farther the faster I ran.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u00a0Those tits have engendered some controversy. For some, they exemplify the folly of a man who tries to write a woman. Asked, during his Art of Fiction interview, to recall any useful bits of writing advice he received from his wife, Rush said,<\/p>\n

\n

There were so many I can\u2019t recall them. What I remember instead are a few lines I kept in over her strong opposition. One came back to haunt me when a reviewer picked it out and said, No woman would ever say that: \u201cI had been working my tits down to nubs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the London Review of Books<\/em>, Michael Andr\u00e9 Bernstein called the line \u201cwildly implausible<\/a>\u201d; in Slate<\/em>, Christopher Caldwell wrote, \u201cNo human being would ever say this<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The assertions of these esteemed\u2014male\u2014reviewers aside, I would like to vouch, at least in part, for the tits-to-nubs line.<\/p>\n

\"Fotothek_df_tg_0007625_Landwirtschaft_^_Pflanzenbau_^_Weinbau\"<\/a>

Toiling on the vineyard. A German copper engraving from 1695.<\/p><\/div>\n

As Elsa admits, \u201cit\u2019s not really a defensible position to say that no<\/em> woman would say something.\u201d Indeed. Even if it\u2019s supposedly \u201ca poor metaphor for the effect of hard labor,\u201d I have had this precise tits-to-nubs thought several times since I first read Mating<\/em>, and I\u2019m prepared to defend it as plausibly feminine. During months when I worked sixty or seventy hours a week\u2014months when I often made dinner out of Luna bars grabbed at delis on the way to readings; months when I couldn\u2019t manage more than five hours of sleep a night\u2014my breasts, small enough already, shriveled and drooped. I can remember looking at them in the mirror and thinking, Well, not quite nubs, but close enough. I make no claim to universality. My sympathetic reading reveals as much about my own fraught relationship with my body qua<\/em> body\u2014my insistent desire to take up less space, to degenderize the space I do take up\u2014as it does about the novel. But Rush\u2019s narrator is hardly an everywoman, and in her voice, the sentiment reads not as jarring but as apt.<\/p>\n

She is, after all, obsessed with bodies: both hers and, thanks to her field of study, those of others. Nutritional anthropology, she writes, \u201ccombined the two things most compelling to me, food and man.\u201d She fixates on weight, especially on her own avowedly robust proportions.<\/p>\n

This obsession manifests itself most obviously in her relationships with men. She says she wants to meet Denoon \u201cin the flesh\u201d twice in four paragraphs. Her three pre-Denoon romantic partners are all described in terms of their bodies. There\u2019s the supernaturally attractive Giles\u2014\u201cHis beauty made him unusually goodnatured. You could revile him and be sure he wouldn\u2019t mind for long because when all was said and done he was still going to be the beautiful six foot plus guy you or somebody else wanted. This was not vanity. It was reality\u201d\u2014followed by the supernaturally emaciated Martin, \u201cso thin he looked like a weather vane.\u201d And there\u2019s Z., the British spy with scoliosis, who is less a person than a collection of physical symptoms she manages to soothe:<\/p>\n

\n

I mastered his back. I developed a rapport with it … I could sit on him. I could walk on him if I was careful. I could put my heels in the nape of his neck and grip his arms at the elbows and pull until he gave me a groan of pleasure that was absolutely specific.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With the specter of her obese mother looming over her, our narrator tracks her weight and her eating habits. \u201cWhen I was with Martin,\u201d she tells us, \u201cI was almost never hungry, partly out of involuntary corporeal sympathy and partly because there was a limit to how disparate from my skeletal boyfriend I could stand to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so of course her work\u2014the study of man<\/em>\u2014is considered in relation to its effect on her body. Of course the striving makes her both thinner and, specifically, less feminine, more masculine. (\u201cWe suck after the male imprimatur,\u201d she remarks at one point\u2014the choice of verb is suggestive.) And of course our narrator\u2019s travails are still not enough to raise her, in her own mind, from the ranks of the mediocre.<\/p>\n

All this gives the metaphor some potency\u2014but it\u2019s also why the metaphor doesn\u2019t, as Elsa correctly notes, quite make sense. Yes, hard work may lead to weight loss, but in a patriarchy, no amount of labor will turn a woman male. Tits the size of nubs are still, at the end of the day, tits. And yet: if only they could be erased, if only hers had been\u2014then, maybe, she would not be a mere groundling; perhaps, in a masculine form, she would be up at the pinnacle of the vineyard already, standing side by side with Denoon.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Vocabulary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mating\u2019s narrator boasts a daunting lexicon. We\u2019ve looked up a few of the more abstruse words so you don\u2019t have to. <\/em><\/p>\n

Gynecomastia (p. 38; \u201cHe was well built but still showing some gynecomastia\u201d)<\/em>:\u00a0<\/em>enlargement of a man\u2019s breasts, usually due to hormone imbalance or hormone therapy.<\/p>\n

Yakuta (p. 44; \u201cI did accept one gift, a beautiful ethereal blue and white yakuta\u201d)<\/em>:\u00a0<\/em>a casual summer kimono usually made of cotton or synthetic fabric, and unlined. Yukata<\/em> seems by far the more prevalent spelling.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Miranda Popkey is on the editorial staff at <\/em>Harper\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Norman Rush will receive <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Hadada Prize at this year\u2019s Spring Revel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next week: Wyatt Mason on the party where our narrator first encounters Denoon.
<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From \u201cMartin Wade Leaves a Party\u201d through \u201cSekopololo,\u201d pp. 29\u201355 This is the second entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. Read along. \u201cMy God, that\u2019s awful!\u201d This was, by her own account, Elsa Rush\u2019s reaction to one of the most memorable\u2014and one of my favorite\u2014lines in her husband\u2019s novel: \u201cI had been working my tits down to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17319],"tags":[8758,17479,1102,1526,6260,17478,813,747,17477,17322,795,17476,36],"class_list":["post-83819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mating-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-christopher-caldwell","tag-feminism","tag-hadada-prize","tag-mating","tag-michael-andre-bernstein","tag-norman-rush","tag-novels","tag-nubs","tag-reading-group","tag-revel","tag-tits","tag-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cMating\u201d Book Club, Part 2: Of Tits and Nubs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Miranda Popkey on one of the novel\u2019s most controversial lines.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/2-i-had-been-working-my-tits-down-to-nubs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"2: \u201cI Had Been Working My Tits Down to Nubs\u201d by Miranda Popkey\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 19, 2015 \u2013 From \u201cMartin Wade Leaves a Party\u201d through \u201cSekopololo,\u201d pp. 29\u201355 This is the second entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. 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