The novel composed of interwoven small-town lives has a long tradition in the United States. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is a classic. But Palomar is not in the United States; it is somewhere south of the border. And although the strip sometimes goes out of its way to pay homage to a painter, the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, there is nothing in the least ‘literary’ about Heartbreak Soup. Nevertheless, Hernandez shares the same project as Erdrich and Anderson: the recreation of a place and time that explains why and what we are, here and now.
Erdrich and Anderson were raised in communities much like the ones they write about. Gilbert Hernandez does not even speak the Spanish which is the mother tongue of his characters. That gives his project an even greater urgency.
He says that the stories came, mostly, from his mother, told with her apron on while she was making the dinner or ironing. Stories about Mexico, when she was a girl, and her first years in the States. Gilbert and his brother, Jaime, creator of the comic strip, Love and Rockets, live in Oxnard, sixty miles outside Hollywood. In California, the signs in bus stations are in both English and Spanish: bilingual education is a burning public topic: the state is re-Hispanicising itself while you watch and yet its image and aspirations remain securely Anglo.
But the Spanish arrived in California first. Hence the place names: San Diego, La Jolla, Sacramento, and so on. Indeed, they got to the entire bottom bit of the USA first: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida. After a century or so in the back seat, the Spanish are staging a come-back, recolonising the lost territory of the Mexican Empire to such effect that there are towns like Palomar deep in the heart of Texas – towns just as fly-blown and dirt-poor, teeming with barefoot kids, in which English, if spoken at all, is a reluctantly acquired second language. This invasion has been caused by economic desperation, not a desire for cultural expansion; what will happen when the barefoot kids, children of recent immigrants, grow up and demand a share of the All-American apple pie is anybody’s guess.
Oxnard, however, is suburban, multi-cultural, Los Angeles in miniature, with ‘nothing to do at night’, say the brothers. Neither Gilbert nor Jaime speaks more than the odd phrase of Spanish. Their position is complex. And Palomar is, for them, the Old Country. The foreign place where one’s parents grew up. ‘Home’ at second hand, of which the knowledge is our inheritance, not our birthright. It is a place known only to the children of immigrants and therefore one with a special resonance in the American imagination, and, increasingly, the British.
The daily life of Palomar is a cruel parody of the chaste suburbia pictured in that family newspaper strip of my childhood, Blondie. It is a world of brawling kids and feckless, licentious, drunken men, dominated in every sense of the word by endlessly fecund earth mothers, furiously sexy women who might have come undulating straight out of the crudest kind of male fantasy if they didn’t pack such big punches. Such big punches that a man can boast of them, even regret their absence; a grieving widower laments, ‘She needed no dishes to render me into submission, her flying dropkick was enough.’
Sexiest and most furious of all is Luba of the big breasts and uncertain temper. The strip charts her progress from humble beginnings, crammed with her kids in the van where she plied her original trade of bath-house keeper, to cinema proprietor and a nice house, with porch and fence in a decent part of town. Not that any of this changes Luba; ‘None of my daughters know who their fathers were . . . and I’m keeping it that way. They’re too young to have to know what kind of men their mother was stupid enough to get involved with.’
These are matrifocal families, in the main. Sisters, or female relatives – Luba lives with her cousin, Ofelia – share a selection of children. A foundling, like the irrepressible Carmen, will be fitted in somewhere. Paternity, as Luba notes, is hypothetical. And the men are often away, anyway, working or looking for work; employment opportunities are few in Palomar. Money is a problem.
After the routing of an incompetent male sheriff, law and order rest in the capable hands of one Chelo, former bath-house keeper, former midwife. Indeed, she brought most of Palomar’s inhabitants into the world. Now, in the name of the law, she occasionally dispatches one of them from it. But, although Chelo has the power of life and death, and Luba is eternal mother, the mythic dominance of women in the community does not, it should be noted, prevent the men of Palomar from treating them like shit from time to time.
Story lines are as absorbing and inconsequential as the ones a neighbour tells over a back fence, or a stranger in a bar. You feel somebody, one of the characters in the strip, or Gilbert Hernandez himself, is taking you into their confidence about Palomar, telling you its secrets. While you are reading the strip, Palomar becomes ‘our town’, even if you’ve never been in a town like that.
When is all this supposed to be taking place? Hard to say. Note that television has not yet come to Palomar. In the early days of the strip, nobody remarked on it. Nowadays, however, visitors congratulate the inhabitants on the absence of TV, and the inhabitants congratulate themselves. Indeed, their lives are already so much like soap operas, why should they feel the need to watch them?
But the absence of television, like the relative absence of cars, like the characteristic hour-glass shape of the women and the ‘Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice’ type shorts they like to wear, like the flat-top haircuts of the men, are evidence that the town is stuck in the Fifties even when its calendars tell you that the Eighties are here. The roughest edges of poverty are absent too, edges as rough then as they are now. I don’t think this has been done on purpose, as a cosmetic exercise; it has happened because Palomar is already suffused with the glow of second-generation nostalgia.
One of the inhabitants of the town who is bang up to date is the prim, rather bourgeois wise woman, who charges ten dollars a throw and prescribes aspirin more readily than eye of newt. A more folkloric witch visits occasionally, toting a fetish bag; she, however, is given to bouts of prediction as follows: ‘American moviemaker Steven Spielberg wins an Oscar for his adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye in 1998. Art then is legally declared dead.’
This is one of those moments when you might almost suspect that Gilbert is making mild fun of those among his admirers who, confusing the teller with the tale, assume the creator of these simple, vital peasant types must be a simple, vital peasant himself.
Enter the ghost of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Well, not ghost, exactly; he isn’t dead, yet. Shall we say, the vexed question of the influence on the Hernandez series of the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its unique, remote, fantastic township of Macondo. Heartbreak Soup has been consistently compared with One Hundred Years of Solitude since the strips began to appear in the early Eighties. Evidently Gilbert Hernandez didn’t get around to reading the novel, although urged to do so, until a short while ago, but it soon made a personal guest appearance in the strip. Carmen and Heraclio, one of the few more-or-less happily married – indeed, one of the few more-or-less married – couples in Palomar come to blows over it. Carmen hates to see him reading. She throws One Hundred Years of Solitude away: ‘This is the last time you’re going to ignore me for this junk!’
There are things about Heartbreak Soup that make me think Gilbert Hernandez must respond sympathetically to the politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude; but, of course, he didn’t have to know about Macondo to invent Palomar. They are both places that existed once, in a continent caught between post-colonialism and neo-imperialism; but to think of Heartbreak Soup as a sort of Classic Comics version of Garcia Marquez is to do Gilbert Hernandez a great disservice. What Heartbreak Soup is most like is life.
Both Hernandez brothers cite Federico Fellini’s movies as a real influence, and it is easy to see why. Think of Fellini’s own home town, with its top-heavy women, horny youths, venomous feuds, as he recreated it for his autobiographical film, Amarcord, a word that in the dialect of Fellini’s part of Italy, means ‘memory’.
Heartbrea
k Soup is put together with such imagination and verve that it is easy to talk about it as if it were a novel; and it isn’t, of course. But it is fiction, a category that includes novels, movies, soap opera, sit com, tragedy, comedy, and comic strips. Gilbert Hernandez is using the comic strip to tell us important stories about love, and death, and poverty, and grinning and bearing it, and the past we all carry with us wherever we go.
(1987)
• 28 •
Louise Erdrich: The Beet Queen
Perhaps most writers in the US simply do not know how strange its daily life is. Certainly Louise Erdrich’s writing, violent, passionate, surprising, arrives in the midst of a torpid time for American letters. She deals with small towns, the prairies, people trashed by circumstance, sexual obsession – all the matter of the classic American novel, in fact. But most people haven’t been tackling these immense verities for ages. The Beet Queen, her second novel, imparts its freshness of vision like an electric shock.
Like Toni Morrison and other Black women writers, Louise Erdrich approaches the American novel from a doubly marginalised position – that of women; and also that of an ethnic minority, in Erdrich’s case, American Indian. Perhaps even trebly marginalised; she was raised in the remoter parts of the farm belt, hick country. She is part of the wedge being driven deep into WASP fiction from new contenders for their share of the Great Tradition.
And WASP fiction is in a bad way. The vogue during the Reagan years has been for the sentimental petit bourgeois naturalism of which Raymond Carver is the most influential, and the most glum, exponent. The sensibility is grey, the mood one of discontented acquiescence.
You’d never guess, from reading Carver, that, as William Carlos Williams once stated, ‘The pure products of America go crazy’. That craziness shows up on TV news bulletins, rarely in the typical WASP well-crafted short story.
These craftspersons never even hint at the furious contemporary folklore of America enshrined in those magazines at supermarket check-outs brimming with the raw material of the marvellous – stories about UFOs, levitation, unnatural births (‘73-year-old mother’s 16-month pregnancy’), weird deaths (the girl who succumbed to hypothermia after eating too much ice-cream).
Back in the Sixties, this kind of thing provided nourishment for important writers – for Pynchon, Barth, Coover. Nowadays, most US writers are content to ignore the exuberance and variety of the imaginative life manifesting itself in all its convulsive beauty outside the creative writing departments that seem to constrain more and more of them. There are a few exceptions. Louise Erdrich is one.
The imaginative lives of Louise Erdrich’s vast gallery of characters are rich to the point of excess, although financially they run the gamut from dirt poor to just coping and tend to have eschewed the benefits of higher education.
The Beet Queen is closely related to the earlier Love Medicine, neither a sequel nor a prequel but an overlap – some of the same characters appear, some of the same landscapes. There is very much the sense of one continuous story, or, rather, a continuous braided sequence of interlinked narratives, and no real reason why, now she has begun, she should ever stop.
Like Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Louise Erdrich has appropriated the family saga as a suitable form in which to describe the processes of history at work amongst and within ordinary people. She has also chosen, as he did, a small town at the back of beyond.
The time span of The Beet Queen extends from the 1930s to the 1970s; the town of Argus in North Dakota survives the Depression in good shape to move into a prosperity we know with hindsight will not last. Around the town stretch the formidable distances of the Great Plains. There is a sense of isolation and abandonment, in which the travelling salesman is genuinely a figure of romance.
The Beet Queen, like Love Medicine, is composed of many sections of narrative in the voices of a number of narrators, because Louise Erdrich’s method with the family saga is to explode it. The very structure of her novels is unstable and not like other novels, as if she were experimenting with effects derived from the oral tradition. The impression is as of a river of memory bursting its banks and overflowing upon the page in an irresistible flood.
Yet there is a functional aspect to all this remembering. Ms Erdrich is out to reconstruct that most mysterious of sites, the recent past, the time of the lives of our parents before we were born; out of these family romances we make our identities.
The principal participants in Love Medicine are Chippewa who live on the reservation. Those of The Beet Queen are white and do not. The Lamartine and Kashpaw families live the tumultuous lives of extravagant poverty – in which love and violence are the only pleasures that cost nothing.
The mood of the first novel is epic. Mary Adare, her brother, her cousin, her friends, usually have just a little more cash and are therefore, on the whole, more repressed. The mood of The Beet Queen is one of lyrical desperation and black comedy.
There is a miracle in The Beet Queen. A face, taken by some to be the face of Christ, appears in a shattered sheet of ice in a convent school playground. The miracle is as inconsequential as the apparition of the face of the Virgin Mary in an oil slick on a pond in Oklahoma, which happened – no, really happened – last year. The mother of Mary Adare and her brother Karl, whom we meet in Chapter One, riding boxcars as in a Woody Guthrie song, has flown away in a small plane, while they watched her, flown away and never come back.
And indeed, Mary and her friends and relations are variously cracked, and crazed, and barking mad; but never, for all the elements of the fantastic, less than true to life. If Louise Erdrich’s fiction has the compulsiveness of remembering, then it has the dream-like exaggeration, the metaphorical quality of memory.
But at times this veers perilously close to a kind of Dakota Gothic. When Mary dreams of an imaginary lover: ‘His eyes were the same burnt-butter brown as his hair, and his horns branched like a young buck’s.’ Her cousin Sita’s restaurant (‘Chez Sita, home of the flambeed shrimp’) looks, thinks Mary, like the ship of the dead.
And there is a bizarre vignette of a spider weaving its web in a baby’s hair that would be at home in a Buñuel film, beautiful, but somehow uncomfortable, here. But Ms Erdrich is a writer who takes risks on every page, so it would hardly be fair if she did not, once or twice, risk a little too much.
It is impossible to make a synopsis of The Beet Queen. Too much happens; the flow and counter-flow of the narratives defy summary. But the many narratives centre, more or less, on the life-long friendship, which becomes almost a form of marriage, between Mardy Adare and a girl called Celestine James. The vagaries of this friendship encompass the birth of a child to Celestine, fathered by Mary’s errant brother. This child, squat, savage, fearless Dot, grows up to become the Beet Queen of the title, chosen to reign over Argus for a day when its prosperity peaks due to the cultivation of the sugar beet. How drab, how everyday, how James M. Cain; How magical.
This parsimonious sketch gives little indication of the infinite richness of the novel. Ms Erdrich is a writer who can give you a whole chunk of social history complete in one exquisitely precise piece of observation: ‘They were heavy people, Germans, Poles or Scandinavians, rough-handed and full of opinions, delicate biters because their teeth hurt or plates did not fit well.’
And she throws that away in the course of a description of a butcher’s shop. She is so thoroughly in tune with the surreal poetry of America that when you read her you can hear America singing, the discordant choruses of its multitude of voices, its rough music, its requiems for disappointed dreams.
(1987)
• 29 •
Grace Paley: The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
What can put you off Grace Paley’s stories is their charm. ‘An Interest in Life’ in the collection called The Little Disturbances of Man begins: ‘My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.
’ It is so scrupulously disarming an intro that it is bound to put people who like Joan Didion very much on their guard. And it is alarmingly easy to fall into the language of the Martini ad when writing about Grace Paley – wry, dry, tender, ironic, etc.
The snag is, her work has all these qualities: it is an added irony that, since the fin has come a little early this siècle and anomie is all the rage, wry, dry tenderness is a suspect commodity. Not that Paley appears to give one jot for psychosocial hem-lengths. She is, as we used to say, ‘for life’, and clearly cannot imagine why anybody should be against it. Not that the wonderful world of Grace Paley is all sunshine: the heroine of ‘An Interest in Life’ is kept from despair only by a Micawberesque sustaining illusion that the broom-giver, now defected, will return. (It’s obvious that, if he does, she’ll really be in trouble.)
But the charm is a problem, though, both infuriatingly irresistible and, since couched in the faux-naif style, verging dangerously on the point of cloy. The title story of the collection called Enormous Changes at the Last Minute almost goes over the top. A middle-aged social worker, Alexandra, is surprised into bed with a feckless hippy. ‘That’s my bag. I’m a motherfucker,’ he crows complacently. He impregnates her. Her aged father is justifiably enraged. ‘After that, Alexandra hoped every day for her father’s death, so that she could have a child without ruining his life at the very end of it when ruin is absolutely retroactive.’
But Paley contrives to transcend this Shirley Maclainesque scenario completely. Alexandra reorganises her apartment as a refuge for pregnant teenagers, setting an interesting precedent in social work. Her father falls, bangs his head, clears his brain, begins again ‘with fewer scruples’. The hippy composes a celebratory anthem about parent–child relationships that is a hit from coast to coast and is ‘responsible for a statistical increase in visitors to old-age homes by the apprehensive middle-aged and the astonished young’.
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