Lucia Perillo, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain. W. W. Norton.
I have always tried to be alert about what governs my
reaction to a new story I read: Do I
like, or not like, a story for personal reasons, or do I like, or not like, a
story for critical reasons?
For example, when I read the first paragraph of the first
story—“Bad Boy Number Seventeen”— in Lucia Perillo’s collection, I reacted
negatively to the narrator/central character, who is attracted to “bad boys,”
but I liked the language she uses to describe those boys: “Coming, they walk
with their shoulders back like they’ve got a raw egg tucked inside each armpit,
and they let their legs lead them.
Going, you can count on the fact that their butts will cast no shadow on
those lean, long legs.”
This was my experience with most of the stories. I did not particularly like the central
female characters, but I liked the language Perillo gives them. The characters were self-indulgent, but the
writing certainly was not. This creates
a particular dilemma for me when, as is often the case in these stories, the
story is written in first person, and I am torn between the meaningless
behavior of the character and the nicely turned phrases that come out of her
mouth.
When you see that the author of Happiness is a Chemical
in the Brain is a poet, and a Pulitzer Prize nominated poet at that, and
that she has won one of those so-called “genius” MacArthur Awards, you may have
some expectations of lyric language as you settle in. But these are not poetic stories, either for their lyric language
or their tightly unified structured. The emphasis is on a certain kind of
blue-collar woman with a voice that moves easily between educated eloquence and
rough talking slang--a fairly familiar persona in much modern fiction--the
female equivalent of the cliché ideal male—a truck driver who is also a poet.
The central character of the first story goes through
several Bad Boys, beginning with Number One when she was a high school
freshman, who had her doing his pre-algebra problems while he “worked on the
science of breaking-and-entering,” and moving through Number Eight who tattooed
a snake on her hand and arm that made job interviews problematic. She decides not to tell us about numbers
Nine through Sixteen, moving quickly on to Seventeen.
The narrator’s mother and older Down syndrome sister,
Louisa, live in a trailer after her father left them. The mother’s luck with new men is not much better than her
daughter’s: “capital-L Losers—we’re talking bankruptcy and Thorazine.”
The narrator meets Number Seventeen in a bar, but he soon
disappears and leaves her with a dog because his wife is allergic to it. Louisa loves the dog, and the story ends
with the narrator watching the two of them trot off down a field together. She
thinks about warning her sister about this doggy Bad Boy, but says she will
think she is trying to keep him for her own private thrill: “The thrill of
being smashed into and crashing, when he knocks her down and they go rolling
through the weeds”—an obvious reference to her own inexplicable attraction to
Bad Boys.
Near the end of the collection, Perillo includes two more
stories about this narrator, her mother, and sister. (I’m not sure why she did
not link them together in the same place.)
In the second Louisa story, “St. Jude in Persia,” the narrator is just
out of rehab. The focus here is mostly
on the mother, who is still enraged at her husband for leaving her with another
woman. The narrator, in her usual,
tough/snappy tone, says, “My mother may be short and squat, a victim of too
many shortbreads with her tea, but she’s still not a woman you want to go up
against when she’s got a bee in her bonnet and a gun in her hands.” The Mother has a road rage encounter with
her ex and his girlfriend, goes after his horse with a rifle, and tackles the
barn with a backhoe—all of which the narrator describes in her usual
comic/clever way.
In “Late in the Realm,” the third Louisa story, and the
final story in the collection, the narrator begins “doing the deed” with a man
called Doctor Doodle. Even more than in
the other two stories, here, the narrator’s tough-talking voice and poetic
sensibility mesh emphatically. Doctor Doodle likes to quote poetry, reciting
passages from William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens’ “Idea of Order at
Key West”—e.g.: “The lights of the fishing boats at anchor mastered the night
and portioned out the sea.” The story and the collection ends with what the
narrator calls a poem—a celebration of energy in a boat: “Louisa lets out a scream of joy that rises
above the engine noise, as the Doctor yells for me to give it everything I’ve
got”—the narrator’s usual careless, full-speed ahead, attitude. In all three stories, it is supposed to be ironic
and sweet that the Down syndrome Louisa is the only character who seems
blissfully happy with her life.
Most of the stories in this collection focus on women who
are always hooking up with Bad Boys—if not the narrator, then a mother, a
sister, a friend. For example, although
“Big Dot Day” is ostensibly about a boy named Arnie, his mother governs his
experience by going from one man to another--referred to primarily as “this
guy” or “the last guy.” Arnie knows the new guy’s name is Jay, but the old
guy’s name was Ray, and he fears mixing them up, for they are
“interchangeable: same boys—long-armed,
short, and barrel-chested—but with different heads.” The third person narrator
of this story sounds very much like the poetic/trailer trash female voice of
the first-person stories, e.g.: “The new guy snored like a car ignition trying
to catch, holding out the possibility of something about to happen.”
The title, “Big Dot Day,” is evoked when Arnie picks up a
tide table, which promisingly states on the front cover: “The bigger the dot
the better the fishing.” He looks
through the pages and sees that today is supposed to be a “big-dot day.” He hopes the new guy, who has talked a lot
about fishing, will take him, but the mother and the new guy are flopping
around in the bathtub “like a couple of seals”; so he goes out on the motel
balcony and practices his casting with a piece of pie on the hook.
When a gull swallows the pie, Arnie reels him in; he tries
to hypnotize the gull with his mother’s earrings as she screams in the
bathroom, finally grabbing the bird under his armpit and pulling out the hook:
“Then came the best part, when Arnie took the bird out to the balcony and
watched it fly off like a braggart, as if this were all part of a plan the bird
had itself dreamed up.” When the mother
and the new guy come out of the bathroom and find out he has caught a bird, the
mother has a grin on her face, a stunned look “as if she’d just been knocked
down by a truck.” She then provides the
thematic conclusion of the story: “See
how the magic works? You come to the end of the earth and then you catch a
bird.” As she holds Arnie, she says,
“It’s all part of the plan: movement, stasis.
Where else could this have happened?”
The thematic conclusion is deftly undercut when Arnie asks again if Jay
will take him fishing and once again he puts the boy off. The mother holds Arnie and says, “He’s
right, Ray… A promise is a promise.” “It’s Jay,” said the new guy, lightning a
cigarette.”
“Doctor Vicks” introduces a woman who is an addict and
adrift. The title refers to Vicks’ cough syrup, which the woman, trying to give
up alcohol, drinks by the six-pack. Her
husband has talked her into moving out into the woods because her son is
getting into trouble in the city, but she suspects that the husband is concealing
some secret. The teenage boy continues
to vandalize houses with a friend. She
watches him and his friend standing on a narrow trestle as the train thunders
past them at close range. She buys an expensive vacuum cleaner from a
travelling salesman because she sees a hole in his shoe is resigns herself to
doing what she can to save him: "Forty-five dollars a month is not much,
after all. And cleaning has always held
your interest.” The story ends when a vacuum cleaner saleswoman comes to the
house to give a demonstration. The
saleswoman is allowed to give the thematic final word, noting she could not
live out here alone: “Too much space with nothing here, and I’d always be
feeling like it was up to me to fill it up.” Although I get a bit tired of the
same lost, addict, female character, Perillo’s language is hard to resist.
“Report from the Trenches” begins with a fight between a man
and a woman; when Jill, friend, comes in after the man leaves and asks what the
fight was about this time, the central character replies, “You mean what’s the
name this time?”—once again reminding us of the serial Bad Boy theme. The friend Jill has the clever tough-talking
voice this time: “My brain was never in the same time zone as the other parts
of my body below my neck.” She tells a
story about robbing a mini mart with some bad boys, as the narrator hears her
baby upstairs crying “in a language that I do not speak”; it bypasses her
brain, she says, and goes straight to her glands “producing two wet spots on
the front of my blouse.”
In one of her Bad Boy stories, Jill describes seeing a girl
through a pool hall door wearing a slinky green dress and one of those filmy
Amish hats; a man’s hand runs up her leg; the girl is smoking a cigarette
looking like she has been standing there all her life, “waiting for someone
like me to come along.” When the
narrator asks Jill how the girl fits in, she says, in the last line of the
story, “I just think of her often is all.”
Perillo is quite deft at these concluding metaphoric images, often
combining a woman being pulled toward dangerous adventures while being tethered
to domestic life.
“A Ghost Story” establishes the central metaphor of the kind
of man who attract these women: a man the central character, referred to as
“the girl,” describes as a ghost, noting that while sometimes you can “banish
the physical vessels in which these ghosts travel, the psychic border
skirmishes will continue on forever.”
After “the girl” is picked up by a man in a convertible while working as
a flagger on the highway, she goes to a motel and has sex with him. The third person voice of the story
identifies herself self reflexively: “On the first weekend they spent
together—don’t worry, there are only two weekends in this story. It’ll be over soon.” She describes the man as “like the phantom
that appears in those hitchhiker/truck driver stories” who has died a long time
ago, but leaves a piece of evidence, like a baseball cap to prove the
visitation. The story ends years later,
when the central character, who has become a lawyer, discovers a photo on an
old roll of film of her and the man.
She says even though she is the one in the filmy shirt, he is the one
who is insubstantial, “as if at any moment he might turn into smoke. And when he does, I’ll make a ninety-degree
turn and walk right through him. And my
solidness will churn whatever’s left of him to wisps.” This is one of the few stories in which the
central female character manages to kick the habit of hooking up with ghost bad
boys.
“Cavalcade of the Old West” is the most emphatic story about
the collection’s central theme of carelessly seizing the day. Two young sisters, Stella and Ginny, go to a
geek show at the fair called Cavalcade of the Old West. Stella has a sexual encounter with the
Salmon boy, an armless, legless black man of indeterminate years who wears a
satin shirt that make his stumps look like fins. Years later, Stella tells Ginny that when she is ninety years old
and peeing in a bedpan, she will always remember her for her night spent with
the Salmon boy at age fourteen. “When it comes to you, I’ll be fourteen
forever. And how much would other
people give for that, unh? To be
fourteen forever. If I could bottle
that, I’d make a mint.” Stella wonders
why it is that someone you love may dry up and blow away, whereas ten minutes
with the Salmon Boy is something that she will never forget.
In “Anyone Else But Me,” Ruth, fifty-six, is enrolled in the
senior citizen’s exercise group.
Prairie Rose, her daughter, works for the Miracle Management Response
Team, whose job is to oversee the image of the Virgin Mary in dark stains
running down a concrete seawall. She
often moves back in with her mother and sleeps on a futon in a walk-in closet
in Ruth’s apartment. When young, Ruth was a typical female loser; when she got
pregnant with Prairie Rose, she headed west and when she reached the ocean, she
tossed a coin and made a right-hand turn, ending up on Puget Sound. At the end of the story, Prairie Rose is in
the closet, using her laptop to try and find out who her father is. The final
image has Ruth crowded in the closet with Prairie Rose looking at a gray blob
of a man’s face on the computer: “They kneel on the floor, peering at the
image. And finally, when the face is
all there, Prairie Rose turns to her mother and asks: ‘Well, what do you think,
Ma? Is that him?’”
One reviewer says that Perillo “strikes a glorious balance
between wryly intelligent prose and emotional force, recalling Alice Munro at
her best.” Although these are clever
stories and for the most part well-written and well-wrought, I don’t think
so. Alice Munro at her best has a more
penetrating sense of the multiform mysteries of what motivates us.
The reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle says:
“Fans of Raymond Carver will enjoy Perillo’s mucky, Kmart realism. I don’t
think so; Carver’s character’s have more range than Perillo’s; and I am not
sure I know what the catch phrase “Kmart realism” really means. The only Carver connection the reviewer calls to mind is that one Perillo story features a vacuum cleaner salesman.
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