I suppose because I went to film school, I think of my story as a sort of film. In a film, this part would be under the credits, opening with an establishing shot from a high angle, perhaps the Eiffel Tower, panning tiny scenes far below of the foreign city, life as watched from the wrong end of a telescope. Closer up, the place is identified by cliches of Frenchness – people carrying long baguettes of bread, old men wearing berets, women walking poodles, buses, flower stalls, those Art Nouveau entrances to the metro that seem to beckon to a nether region of vice and art but actually lead to an efficient transportation system, this contradiction perhaps a clue to the French themselves.
This is the opening paragraph of the prologue to Le Divorce, a novel by Diane Johnson that I picked up the other day at the library. This opening paragraph is so striking that I had to read it again – in fact, I typed it up for the pleasure of all to read. I didn’t expect such eloquence for a chick lit. Usually, the writing is all mediocre and colloquial, kind of like reading a blog.
The first paragraph of the first chapter is just as great. Anyone who uses the word juxtaposition in a chick lit must be well-read.
I think of life as being like film because of what I learned at the film school of USC. Film, with its fitful changefulness, its arbitrary notions of coherence, contrasting with the static solemnity of painting, might also be a more appropriate medium for rendering what seems to be happening, and emblematic too perhaps of our natures, Roxy’s and mine, and the nature of the two societies, American and French. The New World and the Old, however, is too facile a juxtaposition, and I do not draw the conclusions I began with. If you can begin with conclusions. But I suppose we all do.
I wonder about this Diane Johnson, who can describe film and art1 and poetry2 so eloquently, who talks of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, and James Jones, who uses words like juxtaposition and repository and exigency, who quotes from Voltaire… all in the first 5 pages – I wonder whether this woman really is a writer of chick lit. She seems so much more well-read and knowledgeable than your typical 20-something-New-Yorker who ends up turning her dating experiences into a book. And indeed, as I flip to the back inside cover, I realize that she has also been nominated for her works in non-fiction and biographies. Yet still I wonder if her talents are wasted in this particular brand of fiction.
Perhaps it is even unsuitable for her to write in such a way for an audience who has little appreciation for big words. After all, didn’t I take out books in this genre for the sole purpose of replacing mindless television with mindless stories about heroines who are misunderstood and eventually meet the man of their dreams in a round-about yet predictable way? Wasn’t the whole point to read something where I wouldn’t have to think?
And yet here I am, blogging about this book, of which I’ve read less than 10 pages, thinking.
“One time, this friend of mine met a hot guy at a bar, then found out he was a plumber,” FF said the word ‘plumber’ like ‘terrorist’. She rolled her eyes as if to say “That was the end of that.”
I shaved my legs. I clipped and painted my toe nails. It was necessary, since I had to wear a dress to The Business School banquet. But shaving at the end of winter is a key component of my spring grooming ritual. This ritual marks the end of winter and the beginning of a glorious, but brief, season known in Canada as “construction” or the rest of the world as “summer.”
So last night was The Business School banquet. I wish I could say I kept my composure. I didn’t.