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question turns out pre-empting all ofthe choices she's made in
her life asshe's lived it. In late middle age, shesees that she
must begin all overagain.
Enter, on the next East HamptonJitney--the nice bus where they
servepeanuts, juices and newspapers, justlike on the plane--Iris,
the narrator'spossibly suicidal thirty-five-year-oldlesbian
student. Iris and the narratorhave been flirting all semester,
insideand out of Rower's creative writingclass. Now Iris is coming
to visit, forreasons that only partly have to dowith photographing
herself walkinginto the freezing sea carrying stonesfor her
"Suicide Project." Rower hasn'thad sex with a woman since
herteenage romance with a dangerousperson named Grace. In fact
shehasn't had sex with anyone at all fortwenty years besides her
partner Jack,with whom she shares a rent-controlled loft and two
cats. She iscompletely freaked out.
"I realized maybe I was afraid ofgetting involved because I
don't want
to take my clothes off for her. Foranyone new. That I felt, not
what Ithought--old--but fat.
Possibly old and fat?" In a hilariousperformance of Platonic sex
where theroles are reversed, iris ties herteacher to the bed with
colouredscarves. But once the narrator beginsto lose it all the
way, becoming totallyaroused as she'd feared not everbeing able to,
her student decides toundress her. But she can't remove thejumpsuit
through the scarves, andleaves the room to ransack the housefor
scissors. "I was pleased," thenarrator reports, "I'd felt. I'd
gottenwet. I'd come. I wondered if myhappiness had something to do
withmy corny s/m fantasy not going sosmoothly, that there were
kinks in thekink...."
In this droll and deadpan manner, thenarrator records the
three-year
unraveling of her life. "Researching"
her "book" on Lee and Elaine, sheneglects all the legitimate
sources andhas little interest in either one's workor the facts of
their lives. Theimpossibility of rewriting the myth is
what drives her, and finally she'sdriven by impossibility
itself. Sheleaves Jack and the loft and movesinto a shoebox
apartment. There is alot of collateral damage.
In her previous books, ArmedResponse and If You're A Girl,
Rowerbrilliantly chronicles the tiny anxietiesof daily life. She
writes like she talks,only better, in a style once describedby
David Ulin as "a late night phoneconversation to a friend."
ThoughRower herself has a Ph.D. fromColumbia, her first-person
narratoralways plays dumb to great comiceffect. But in Lee &
Elaine, the anxietyisn't just social, it's internal and real.
It's no surprise that Rower's book hasbeen so widely dismissed.
Like Wilke,Rower turns herself into a mirror,using the pain of real
life to forgeconfrontational satire. She doesn'tapologize, she
doesn't explain. Henry
Miller and Jack Kerouac becameunderground heroes by telling
theirstories in the first person. Half acentury later, the female
first per soncan still only be the "I" of the memoir.Should a woman
dare write down thefacts of her life, she is expected to doso
within a narrative are that slinkstoward redemption. Rower refuses
todo this. Reviewing Lee & Elaine in TheNew York Times Book
Review,Catherine Texier, whose novelBreakup exemplifies this sort
of small-
minded memoir, takes Rower to taskfor "[her transparence] about
thenarrator's fantasies and motives, herfixation on artists,
hercompetitiveness with other writers,her lack of conviction in her
ownartistic beliefs."
It is precisely these qualities thatmake the book such a
stunningsuccess.
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Chris Kraus is a fiction writer and artcritic living in Los
Angeles. Her nextbook, Video Green: Los Angeles Artand the Triumph
of Nothingness, isforthcoming from Semiotexte/MIT
Press in Spring, 2004.
Hannah Wilke / What Does ThisRepresent? What Do You
Represent?(Reinhart), 1978-84, from the So HelpMe Hannah series,
black and whitephotograph, 152 x 102 cm. c 2002Donald Goddard,
courtesy RonaldFeldman Fine Arts, NY
Hannah Wilke / So Help Me Hannah:Snatch-Shots with Ray Guns,
1978,
from set of 40 black and whitephotographs. [c] 2002
DonaldGoddard, courtesy Ronald FeldmanFine Arts, NY
