|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Blood and Guts in the Bookstore
| Article
# : |
19929 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
6,087 Words |
| Author
: |
Madison Smartt Bell
Madison Smartt Bell has authored tow collections of short
stories and six novels, the most recent being Doctor Sleep. He
teaches in the writing programs at Goucher College and Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore. |
Epigraphs can be a literary form of social climbing; pick the right epigraph, and give your text the chance to become high brow by association. A sampling from a stack of true-life atrocities: Wasted, Linda Wolfe's account of Jennifer Levin's murder by Robert Chambers, takes an epigraphs form Graham Greene. Fatal Vision, Joe Mcginnis' much-maligned report on Jeffrey McDonald's murder of his family, has an epigraph from Macbeth. The Only Living Witness, one of a number of books about Ted Bundy, gets its epigraph from…. Ted Bundy. Ever more highbrow than thou, Truman Capote's In cold Blood quotes a quatrain from Francois Villon's Ballade des pendus, in Old French. But the hands-down winner of the epigraph sweepstakes is Melanie Thernstrom's Dead Girl, which is festooned with epigraphs, chapter by chapter, from Sartre, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Niebuhr, Milan Kundera, Hans Christian Andersen, and many, many more.
The barrage of epigraphs is not the only way that The Dead Girl seeks to declare its high literary seriousness, but from the cold-blooded, calculating viewpoint of genre, it's a case of Interesting Wrinkle: The author is not just another ambulance-chasing journalist, but a close personal friend of the eponymous dead girl, Roberta Lee, a Berkeley student who was beaten to death in 1984, perhaps by her boyfriend, Bradley page, perhaps by a person or persons unknown. This book is less concerned than other in its category with police-procedural detail, less concerned with a reconstruction of the crime itself or with a re-creation of the inner experience of victim and murderer. What it offers instead is full participation in the feelings of a survivor, the author; the reader is invited to share her doubt and conflict and fear and trembling. In fact, the whole thing is flooded with what Jane Austen would have called an excess of sensibility.
Like others in its category, The Dead Girl has a distinct odor of exploitation. The Lee family senses it strongly enough to have repudiated Thernstrom and her book altogether. The person most thoroughly exploited, however, is not Roberta Lee, but Melanie Thernstrom. With considerable artfulness, the book redirects the reader's morbid curiosity about "how the body is laid out and what color her hair was," from the victim to the teller of the tale. The exposition of Thernstrom's waiflike vulnerability becomes tiresome at times (at a length of sixty pages, she compares herself to Andersen's "Little match Girl"), but in the end she succeeds quite well in laying herself dreadfully bare. The audience is free to share her suffering, or maybe just watch it. In Thernstrom's words, "it is not just that they suffer, as many or even most people do suffer, but that
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
