This Is the Forest Primeval
By Tamsin Todd
Sunday, October 20, 1996
Here's a bright gem of a book -- literally. The jacket lettering is done in electric-blue and lime-green; a neon-yellow hairless dog is freakily emblazoned mid-page; and in the background are surreally rolling bubble-gum-pink clouds, which, if you remember, also featured prominently on the cover of Douglas Coupland's "Generation X."
Which reference is confusing, because the distinctive landscape Tama Janowitz explores in her fiction doesn't have much to do with Coupland's frighteningly candid cultural snapshots. Sure, there are disaffected characters in TamaLand and references to pop culture and lots of funky retro clothing. But in general TamaLand is an upbeat place. Often (as in Janowitz's "Slaves of New York" and "The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group") TamaLand is Manhattan, seen through the eyes of vaguely arty types: painters on the make, hat designers, staffers at obscure magazines. They live downtown, dress excellently, chat glibly, act quirkily, and know they're ultra-hip and getting hipper all the time.
"By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee" is set in Longfellow country, but don't be fooled. Substitute trees for sidewalks, trailers for skyscrapers, and you're back in familiar territory. Inhabiting this version of TamaLand are the Slivenowiczes: mother Evangeline and her five children. These include the acid-tongued 19-year-old narrator, Maud, whose pastimes include reading "The Encyclopedia of Poultry" and discussing the mating patterns of octopi and other invertebrates; her Longfellow-reciting sister, Marietta; and their precocious 6-year-old brother, Leopold, who cooks for the family and says things like, "I can be a flirt, but basically I have no intention of being deflowered." The Slivenowiczes live in the only trailer in a defunct trailer park near the town of Nokomis, which is 100 miles from the nearest mall, has a pizza joint staffed by a convicted child molester and a brand-new library without any books, where the librarian reads "Candide" during children's hour. Other characters include a born-again retired UPS stockholder; an English lord named Simon Halkett, who suffers predictably from boarding-school trauma; and a detoxed periodontist, who shares his supply of nitrous oxide with the Slivenowicz clan.
The first half of the novel takes place in Nokomis, where one of Evangeline's ex-lovers (a motorcycle-riding criminal who might be Leopold's father) holes up in the library and has a standoff with the FBI. The second half tracks the penniless Slivenowiczes' bizarre adventures as they wind across the country towards L.A., where they hope to make brother Pierce a movie star. What drives the novel is the speed of Janowitz's prose and the frantic weirdness of the scenes. Besides the standoff at the Nokomis library, there's a wheelchair chase, several carjackings, a kidnapping, and lots of farcical seduction scenes. The organization is episodic, and moving from chapter to chapter feels a bit like wandering around an amusement park: You go quickly from ride to ride, staying at each one just long enough to get a quick thrill, and then you're on to something new.
Janowitz's prose is popcorn-light, interspersed with moments of incisive satirical observation. A supermarket is "nice and cool" with the "faint aroma of decayed meat and rotting vegetables." In a hotel lobby Maud peruses brochures: "A place called Butterfly World housed more than five hundred different kinds of butterflies and their larvae. An ad for the Weeki-Wacki Lounge and Supper Club said the lounge had been in operation since 1957. Real Polynesian performers danced nightly, and there was a photograph of a Mexican waiter holding up a suckling pig on a platter in front of philodendron."
But all too often the writing is over the top. Metaphors are heavy-handed, as in this description of Simon: "He looked like an ethereal tuberculosis patient who wrote poetry on a mountaintop during the First World War." Maud's voice is more absurd than funny. One moment she's considering a career in prostitution, the next she's sounding like a Jane Austen heroine: "I wish I were dead. What's going to become of me? My own mother doesn't even like me. I have no money, no connections, no talents, I live in a trailer that isn't even good enough to be called a Winnebago."
Clearly this novel is a satire -- of dysfunctional families, discount malls, fast food, freeway culture, L.A. movie culture, Florida retiree culture, trailer park culture and much, much more. In the best satires we recognize something of ourselves; but here everything is so frantic and disjointed that it all seems slightly unreal, like the hairless dog on the jacket. In TamaLand you get to gape at lots of strange people. You speed all over the place and you get few thrills. Sometimes violent things happen, but no one gets hurt. Everything is slick and neony. At the end of the day you leave feeling pleasant, a little lightheaded, a little queasy, and also a little bit empty.
Tamsin Todd is a writer living in Baltimore.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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