Miami Vice

Mirroring her own life, Godwin's heroine begins a writing career.

QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD

A Novel

By Gail Godwin

Random House. 336 pp. $24.95

If we're finally done beating up on memoirists who fictionalize their lives too much, let's start complaining about novelists who don't fictionalize theirs enough. Gail Godwin, a three-time National Book Award nominee, has portrayed plenty of lives besides her own, but this winter, with the publication of the first volume of her journals, The Making of a Writer: 1961-63, also comes Queen of the Underworld , her most autobiographical novel, which demonstrates a severe lack of authorial distance.

It tells the story of Emma Gant, an ambitious young woman who leaves home after graduating from the University of North Carolina with a journalism degree to take a job on the Miami Star in 1959. People in the know can match up some of the other characters to real-life counterparts on the Miami Herald, such as Al Neuharth, who appears here as a slick editor nicknamed Lucifer, years before he founded USA Today.

And yet Queen of the Underworld isn't a juicy roman ? clef. There's no score-settling here. Like the journals of an ambitious young person, it's self-absorbed, rambling and dull, despite a number of fascinating side characters and the makings of a fantastic plot spread over 10 action-packed days: Emma comes down to Miami to escape her abusive stepfather and be with her secret lover, a married man (20 years older) who owns a beachfront club that the mob is targeting. An old family friend takes Emma under her wing and enlists her in arms smuggling. The hotel where she's staying is filling up with wealthy Cubans waiting for Castro to fall. (Now there's a hotel bill!) And when a hurricane sweeps through the city, Emma meets a suicidal woman -- the Queen of the Underworld -- who once managed a notorious whorehouse. But nothing really ruffles Emma's beautiful hair except the thought that one of her little feature stories might get trimmed by the copy desk.

Choosing to write this most personal story in the first person was Godwin's first mistake; leaving her sense of irony locked in a drawer was her second. Emma may be a promising journalist -- she and others tell us often enough -- but again and again it's clear that she's not up to the task of narrating this novel, which suffers from a deadening lack of psychological insight and a maddening unwillingness to allow events to resonate as they could. We have here, for instance, various kinds of revolution -- personal, cultural, sexual and political -- but Godwin fails to connect them in any meaningful way.

The Queen of the Underworld cries out for a storyteller who can treat her own youthful vanities with some illuminating distance, maybe even a little humor. "I made up my mind," she tells us early in the novel, "to adopt this concept of 'Emma-ness' as a talisman against those loss-of-self times that flattened me." But in fact, it's the flatness of her perspective that drains the passion from her affair, the terror from the Cuban revolution and the comedy from her ridiculous feelings of envy toward anyone with more responsibility at the paper. Sneaking into the newsroom library to read her editor's clippings, she says, "My jealousy animal reared up dangerously on its hind legs when I laid my hands on Norbright's corpus: six stuffed envelopes in as many years. If I was still here in six years, how many would I have? I would be twenty-eight. Would I have a novel published by then? Would I have won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting? Oh God, so much to get done. . . . The positive thing about my envy of others was that it could be depended upon to rev up my incentive motor. I sat up straighter at [the] Remington, pounded its keys harder, and mentally steamrollered over my picky inner critic."

Rise up, inner critic, we need your picking! The trouble isn't that Emma is naive and vain (though she is), it's that her clunky, pedestrian voice -- all revved up -- steamrolls over any potential insights about what's happening to her. Godwin hasn't supplied anyone in the novel to place Emma's ordinary human foibles in an interesting context; nor has she spiked Emma's voice with any dramatic irony to imply some larger or more mature perspective, which would make all the difference between analyzing a self-absorbed person and being stuck with one.

Toward the very end of the story, Emma receives a bureau assignment that she fears will retard her skyrocketing career. Pouting in her room, she wishes she had a television to watch Ingrid Bergman in "The Turn of the Screw." Could that allusion to the Master's tale about an overconfident young woman be intentional? One can't help but wonder wistfully how Emma's story might have been handled by Henry James -- or even the novelist Gail Godwin. ?

Ron Charles is a senior editor for Book World.