The skeleton of the book follows Alison as she goes to a cleaning job, complains of pains, and tells us she is suffering from incurable hepatitis. Feverish, she walks in the rain and recounts her life, focusing much of the story on an unlikely friendship she struck up after her spectacular rise – and fall – at the pinnacle of the fashion world in Paris. Back in New York, she takes a night temp job proofreading. Veronica, who is described throughout the book in garish terms, has died of Aids. Alison uses her memories to come to terms with the death of her friend.

The story revolves around our perception of beauty – the super model – and the ugly backstory of that life. Alison tells of a career begun on her back – and the degrading role sexual encounters play in the world of glamour. We see a woman who is constantly praised for her beauty, yet who does not accept her beauty or the true beauty in her friend Veronica.

The lack of love shown in the degrading sexual liaisons and a lack of understanding of true love becomes the core of the story. Alone and broken, no longer beautiful, Alison finally sees the love around her she never recognized. The opera “Rigoletto,” used at first as a reference to Veronica’s favorite song, becomes a framework for the story.

Gaitskill’s static, but beautifully imagined, present narration flows continually into flashback, giving the arc of the story. Her prose shows us beauty through words, at times seeming more an extended prose poem than novel. “They were stout and barrel-chested, with a damp, testicular air that was wounded and bellicose and longed to be loved.” The air is “prickled with wind chimes.” As Alison and her father listen to Rigoletto, “Loud voices leapt in declarative oblongs, then divided into fine, vibrant strands of delicacy and strife; father and daughter sang against each other.” Alison hears the story of the opera from her father “as if the idea of a daughter’s honor was like a precious jewel to him, a jewel the world no longer valued.” It is these jewels that retain their value and that make this a remarkable novel that sees beneath the veneer of mere beauty to love.

Review: Goodbye Madame Butterfly

by Suzanne Kamata 

When I first heard the title of Sumie Kawakami’s new essay collection – Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage, and the Modern Japanese Woman – I assumed it was a volume on the empowerment of Japanese women. Well, it is and it isn’t.

Veteran journalist Kawakami, whose first book, published in Japanese, was on women who commit adultery, was struck by the gap between the highly sexual stereotype of Japanese women – and Japan itself, with its soaplands and strip clubs - and the reports in the media that women weren’t getting any. According to the Global Sex Survey by Durex, the world’s largest condom maker, Japan ranked 41st of 41 countries in terms of sexual activity. Although people had sex an average of 103 times a year, “the Japanese reported having sex an average of forty-five times a year.”

Kawakami was compelled to find out the truth about the sex lives of several Japanese women, including Chami, owner of her own bar, who is mourning the accidental death of her faithless lover; landowner Emi, a polished mother who puts up with her husband’s infidelities; and Mitsuko, a company owner who remained a virgin until the age of 52. Although Mistuko ultimately married a younger man and lost her virginity, her husband went back to his doting mother when he found that Mitsuko was spending more time on her business than taking care of him. In one very interesting essay Kawakami even writes about her own efforts as a divorced single mother trying to break off an affair with a married man after being advised to do so by a Yin Yang Master.

In the West, Kawakami writes, people often turn to therapists to help them with problems. However, in Japan troubled individuals often visit fortune-tellers. “If you say you are going to counseling, it sounds to the Japanese as if you have a mental problem. But if you’re going to have your fortune told or a purification ceremony done, there is no social stigma attached. The Japanese tend to rely on others as they search for a solution. A sense of duty drives them, while issues of responsibility and cause remain vague.”

The Japanese women featured here also seem to be much more pragmatic than their Western counterparts when it comes to men and marriage. When Shoko is forced to choose between two men, she chooses Masanobu, who is destined to become a Shinto priest, over Nobuyuki, whom she loves, because the latter has a weak heart. “I love him,” Shoko says, “so I worried about whether I could bear it if he died or whether I could raise a child alone. It was during these times that I started to realize that love and marriage were two different things.”

For Westerners, who tend to combine the two, these women may appear utterly unromantic. As an American who married for love, I can’t help wondering if in these essays Kawakami has not revealed the truth about a problem in modern Japanese society. Japanese pundits wonder why the birth rate is falling. Perhaps, quite simply, Japanese husbands and wives need to learn how to relate to each other better, and to have more sex.
Kawakami presents a frank portrait of Japanese women today, via these compulsively readable, expertly crafted essays. Further kudos should go to Yuko Enomoto for her seamless translation.

Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

The Curse of the Singles Table: A True Story of 1001 Nights Without Sex

by Suzanne Schlosberg
Warner Books, New York, 2004

reviewed by Nicolette Westfall

Although I am not well-known, I share several commonalities with Suzanne Schlosberg and Condoleezza Rice; we’re independent women, over 30, and we’ve all dealt with the publicly crippling label “single.” In Puritanical times, widowed, single, or powerful women, especially as old and obsolete as those in their late 20s or early 30s, were seen as threats to the establishment. The example of Bridget Bishop quickly comes to mind here. She, being an agent of the Devil, managed of her own design to run two thriving taverns and even had the nerve to argue with her various husbands in public (1). While being an independent woman or a woman who encounters prolonged single hood can be quite a freeing experience (reviewer’s personal account), it is not without its modern day backlashes.

Condoleezza Rice is the most recognizable and accomplished female political representative of the United States of America, yet on the international front, she has been reduced through foreign opinion to the only denominator important in a woman’s life (next to motherhood): her marital status. Consider Russian LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s rebuttal against Rice, who criticized Russia’s relations with the Ukraine, “Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all. (2)” Zhirinovsky’s quote at first appears absurd to my modern western woman’s eyes, and yet, as I eagerly dive into Schlosberg’s The Curse, its surreal glow begins to wash away…

What emerges in its place is the horrifying reality that heterosexual women (especially celibate women) do indeed spend an awful lot of time thinking about our marital status and the most important appendage attached to it, the almighty penis. Here I do not profess to claim to know what Rice’s sexual orientation is—nor do I care to, for I am not one of those members of society who demands that people identify themselves according to their sexual preferences (3). Suzanne, however, is like me, admittedly, a woman who enjoys companionship and sex with a man.

There is one overwhelming problem that sticks out like a rusty nail in her otherwise independent and stable life as a professional writer. It runs throughout the book as a nagging theme that digs and cuts and tears at the core of Schlosberg’s very existence—she can’t find the right man to be part of her life and as a result, encounters the temporary demise of her sex life. It doesn’t help that her friends and family harass her endlessly about her shameful singledom. To lighten the burden, she makes jokes a plenty as she spends countless hours looking for Mr. Right (1358 days, to be exact). Her endless search for the man that gives off the right spark is where she and I differ. My “dry spell,” which lasted all of 870 days, was not about searching, longing, or chasing after a man; it was about running as quick and as far as possible in the opposite direction. Where Schlosberg obsessively reloaded match.com, I fanatically avoided all propositions and invitations to end my brutally torturous celibacy streak.

I reached the last dry patch of Schlosberg’s book, when she discusses how visiting Provideniya, Russia finally put an end to her obsession with finding a suitable heart beat with penis attached. I knew that we’d both traveled the waters together; she chasing, I running. Regardless of our approaches, we were both like so many millions of other women out there—saturated by male influence. A man can be present or absent, either way, his affect on the heterosexual female is quite dominating. She suddenly learned to be happy simply by being. In an ironic twist that Zhirinovsky might find insulting, Schlosberg discovers that contentment comes from an inner source, not the search for external joy through finding and latching onto a man.

Of course, in the end, as with all fairy tales, she finds Mr. Right and marries him. As a woman over 30 (4), she ultimately ends up consulting with a fertility specialist and kept a fertility log (5). Finally, she is fulfilled and she can stop searching for what is missing (a man and babies).

The transition from free loving early 20s to the late 20s and nervously sitting at the singles table at weddings to obsessively seeking out the right mate once the 30 benchmark has been reached doesn’t necessarily mean that Schlosberg tosses in the feminist towel. According to a study by Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan (6), having serious heterosexual relationships is something that does not take away from being a feminist—in fact, feminism improves heterosexual relationships (7). Despite such optimistic reconciliation of heterosexuality and feminism, I find therein little consolation, for it is quite disturbing that both sides of the coin have spent most of our spare time and energy focused on men instead of ourselves.

(1) Bishop was executed in 1692. University of Missouri-Kansas, School of Law: “Bridget Bishop” [web page on-line] (U MK Law, accessed 31 October 2007); available from http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_BBIS.HTM: Internet.

(2) Yaroslava Krestovskaya, Pravda. “Condoleezza Rice’s anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems.” [online edition] (Russia, 2006, accessed 31 October 2007); available from http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/88/354/16724_Condoleezza.html: internet.

(3) As someone who is not threatened by other people’s sexuality, I subscribe to Kinsey’s Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale. Visit The Kinsey Institute online for a comprehensive explanation of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/ak-hhscale.html.

(4) For explanation regarding lowered female fertility rates with aging, see Speroff, L. “The effect of aging on Fertility,” Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology. 1994 April; 6(2) 115-20.

(5) Schlosberg, Suzanne. The Essential Fertility Log: An Organizer and Record-Keeper to Help You Get Pregnant, Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2007.

(6) Rudman LA & Phelan JE (2007). “The interpersonal power of feminism: is feminism good for romantic relationships” Sex Roles (DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9319-9)

(7) As reported in “Feminists are sexy, study finds.” (World Science, 2007, accessed 15 October 2007); available from http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071015_feminist.htm: internet.

Nicolette Westfall has made it this far, despite being openly guilty of accepting her natural state (womanhood.) She’s been published in various spaces including Bust, Word Riot, and Mississippi Crow.

Redemption by Kay Langdale

Transita. Oxford
November 2006

Kay Langdale’s debut novel is, in the simplest of terms, an account of love and marriage. Avoiding entirely the clichés of romance or “chick-lit” genres, however, Langdale’s approach in crafting Redemption is refreshingly, compellingly alternative. Six women—wives, daughters, a grandmother still a virgin, an unwed mother of sixteen, an aging mistress—inextricably but unknowingly bound to one another, are compelled by coinciding circumstances to determine and face the truths of their married lives. Beginning with Sarah, a middle‘aged working mother whose happy but familiar life with husband Michael is threatened by a fantasy desire which, when combined with opportunity, tempts her to consider an affair, Langdale subsequently winds her narrative between and within the lives of Kate, Isobel, Martha, Sheila, and Judith. With each new perspective comes a fuller understanding of characters at once varied and connected, of experience unusual yet utterly believable, and an ultimate collected realization of what it means for each woman to be, and to have, a marriage partner.

Langdale’s work derives its greatest strength from the confluence of an elegant, adept use of language and a singularly insightful evocation of the mature female psyche. Spread as it is between six women, who stand united as much by their flawed and honest humanity as by the workings of Langdale’s plot, that insight lends the novel a resonant validity—one which, I imagine, would suffer had Langdale chosen a narrower scope, and the delineation of a single heroine. In light of Redemption’s ultimate argument for marriage made in the face of social challenges and modern skepticism, the novel’s structural effectiveness takes on thematic significance as well. For the work*’ breadth of understanding and accrued wisdom, resulting from an intent focus upon female honesty, proves the strength of a sustained bond to redeem misuse or abuse of marriage vows, and even transform that bond to the greater empowerment of each woman’s individuality.

Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Harper Collins. New York
October 2006

First impressions of both the setting and synopsis of Haweswater promises the reader an English historical romance soaked in social and geographical commentary, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell or, according to The Independent, Hardy and Lawrence. Despite the clear applicability of these comparisons, however, Sarah Hall’s debut novel, together with a fierce heroine and surprisingly unique locale, defy categorization as merely one amongst their predecessors. Something about Hall’s creation, lying perhaps in its comparative modernity (the novel is set in 1936) or the strangely violent, animalistic nature of her protagonist’s independence—but most likely an amalgam thereof—lends it a compelling distinction unlike most prior novels of its kind.

Haweswater takes its name from a dam construction project, begun on the site of a tiny and rustic outpost of anachronistic existence located in the far north of England’s Lake District. The village of Marsdale nurtures its erratic own (as showcased by the Lightburn family, upon whom much of Hall’s background narrative is centered) in relative isolation. Then a representative of Manchester City Water, herald of modern industry and innovation, breaks into the Marsdale enclave with the news of the intended reservoir; and Janet Lightburn, a blue-blond anomaly of a woman with a dangerous energy that seethes beneath an oddly feline aspect, takes up immediate defense of her home against the stranger. Somewhat predictably, Janet’s quarrel with outsider Jack Liggett soon evolves into a passionate, secret, and scandalous affair. What is thoroughly unpredictable, however, is the way in which Hall crafts and unveils their fate, increasingly and inextricably linking both lovers to the land and water from which their passions are born and made.

Allusions to Hardy and Lawrence automatically portend a tragic end for Janet Lightburn (as do Hall’s own early indications her heroine’s penchant for self-destructive behavior). But again, this author evades her forefathers’ trademark sense of futile hopelessness. She evokes an organic connection between Janet and the wet earth she works, lives and loves upon with an almost mythic vitality, one which is spread to Liggett, born within Janet’s brother Isaac, proves all-consuming in each case—and yet strangely, reconcilably so by the novel’s end.

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