Marcy Dermansky
Bad Marie
240pp. Harper Perennial. 9780061914713

"Sometimes, Marie got a little drunk at work." So opens Marcy Dermansky's hilarious and gleefully unrepentant Bad Marie, a novel about what happens when a lady stops being polite, as they say, and starts getting real. Marie's a baby-snatching, husband-stealing, bad-decision-making stone fox, and it's a testament to Dermansky's skill as a novelist that each staggeringly poor choice on Marie's part only makes the reader adore her more. After Marie's release from prison (accessory to armed robbery, but it wasn't her fault), Marie's old friend Ellen does her a good turn by hiring her to nanny Ellen's two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Caitlin. Unfortunately, Ellen is as patronizing as she is insufferable, and Marie ends up preferring the company of Caitlin--along with Benoît Doniel, Ellen's passive French-novelist husband, whose dolorous paean to a suicidal girl obsessed with sea lions Marie read obsessively while serving out her sentence. Marie steals Benoît, Caitlin, and Ellen's favorite red kimono, and runs off with these items to Paris, where she is beset by a series of increasingly ludicrous situations, with Caitlin (a passionate advocate of the restorative powers of macaroni and cheese) an ever-present companion. Oblivious and irredeemable, Marie is also quite lovable, and her winningness transforms what would otherwise be a bleak novel indeed into a wicked, funny portrait of a remarkable lady whose singleminded pursuit of a good chocolate mousse is admirable in the extreme. Untimely pet death, movie stars, bank robbery, ill-advised trips to a variety of countries: Marie gets to have all the adventures a lady could possibly want, and then some. It is a good thing we did not have this novel as a teenager, is all we can say.

Bad Marie is the September book club book at our beloved WORD bookstore, which means it is TEN PERCENT OFF ONLINE AND IN THE STORE FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER, AHEM. You can purchase it here. If you live in New York you can eat chocolate pudding and discuss the novel with Marcy Dermansky at WORD on October 2; you can also see her read at the KGB Bar on September 9 (an event that's a benefit for Behind the Book, a super awesome nonprofit to whom you should give many of your hard-earned dollars). We are not making up the chocolate pudding. We told you WORD is the best bookstore ever!

Le R. Mère refused to relinquish custody of our first query unless we agreed to publish this item concomitantly, which we present to you without comment, other than to say apparently we were on a roll that day, and that this missive did not secure us an appointment with the president.

Dear Mr. Reagan,

I am going to Washington D.C. I will be there for three days, March 25th thru 28th. I want to see the White House. I am 7 1/2. I like you very much.

Wishing you well,

[The Rejectionist]

[Address]

p.s. My Mommy and Daddy always vote Republican!

Dear Dorrance and Company, (1)

I am 7 1/2 years old (2), and I am writing a book (3) called "The Mystery of the Growling Dog." It is about Kitty Detectives solving a mystery about (4) some strange noises in Kittyland (5). A few weeks ago, I won $25 (second place) in a mystery writing contest (6). I was wondering if you published children's books (7). I would still like your brochure, and my adress (8) and phone number are on the coupon if you would like to call or write to me.

Thank you very much,

[The Rejectionist]

p.s. I would like it if you wrote back to me (9). Thank you!

1. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? Oh, you mean the part where this query is HANDWRITTEN? Do we WRITE OUR QUERIES WITH A PENCIL, Author-friends? Or do we TYPE THEM? HMMM?

2. No one cares how old you are. Child prodigies are a dime a dozen these days, as are teen authors. Leave it out.

3. Do we query before our books are finished, Author-friends? NO WE DO NOT. NO! WE! DO! NOT! WE! FINISH! OUR! BOOKS! BEFORE! WE! QUERY!

4. "About" used 2x in the same sentence, second time improperly; sloppy.

5. What is the mystery? Why should we care? This is not a synopsis! Where is the hook! the intrigue! the pizzazz! Where is Kittyland! Are we talking a Kitty Noir, here? A sendup of the genre? A straight-faced mystery featuring cats instead of people? COME ON KID MAKE IT SNAPPY. THE ASSISTANT IS NOT INTERESTED IN THIS STORY AND IT IS YOUR JOB TO INTEREST THE ASSISTANT.

6. "Mystery writing contest"? So what? Did you win an Edgar Award? No? Then no! one! cares! Leave the contests out UNLESS THEY ARE IMPORTANT. Nobel? Yes. MacArthur? Yes. "Mystery writing contest"? NO.

7. Do we do our research before we query, Author-friends! YES WE DO. YES! WE! DO! We have this thing called THE INTERNET! GOOGLE, MOTHERFUCKER!

8. Do we proofread our queries, Author-friends? YES! WE! DO!

9. Do we attach passive-aggressive postscripts to our query letters, stating the obvious? NO! WE! DO! NOT!

There you have it, Author-friends! Our first foray into the world of querying, for your delectation and edification! Don't say we never did anything for you!

I have a confession to make: I watch 24. I know it’s over, so you might think to say watch in the present is inaccurate, but my girlfriend and I don’t have TV, we have computers, so everything is observed on DVD. Therefore, I am still in the lull between seasons.

Here’s my official story: I watch 24 to keep up with what middle America is thinking about foreign affairs and homeland security. I want to know who my great aunt Ruth thinks she’s afraid of and why. If you’ve never seen the show, here’s the basic premise… some “other” people (usually Middle Eastern, but also likely to be Russian or some other vague Eastern European) are plotting to bring the U.S. down, Jack Bauer doesn’t want to be involved, but he gets involved, gets implicated, man, even the fucking President wants to take him out, even his friends question him (except for Chloe), then Jack Bauer saves the day. In the course of saving the day, Jack must torture (yes, torture, yes, graphically, on prime time TV, many, many people, sometimes men, sometimes women (the titillation!), Jack Bauer, Feminist believes in equal opportunity… There was this time he even electrocuted his girlfriend’s ex-husband with a table lamp! Now you’ve got ideas!). Also Jack gets tortured. If you’ve gone more than three episodes without witnessing torture, you’re probably not watching 24. Dear Fox Network Marketing Department, you can have that tag line.

I don’t condone violence. I don’t like violence. I once dropped a PC off the roof of my house because it ate a terrible 60-page story I was working on, and that violence felt good. But there’s never an excuse for physically hurting another human being or animal. Rejection hurts enough! Tell them they’re ugly! Or that you don’t like their shoes! Sentences! Hair color! Mode of transportation! I will watch a show or movie with violence though. I won’t like it, but I will appreciate the violence as an element specific to the story, specific to getting The Point across. Whatever the point is. In the case of 24, I need to know that Americans are afraid of a lot of people and that they wouldn’t mind beating the crap out of them for the sake of Patriotism, er, protecting the Homeland. There is violence on TV and in movies because violence happens and also because we are at war, but the real point is that we are afraid. And we would like to see the bad guys get hurt; it makes us feel better.

When I say us, I mean you, middle America. Me, I’d rather watch sex on TV.

Which brings me to the real reason I watch 24: to watch Jack Bauer move. I dig chicks, but I love watching the way that man slinks around a dangerous scene. I can’t even describe it; you just need to see it for yourself. He’s a freakin’ ballerina with a gun and a nasty attitude. I am a dyke who watches 24 because Jack Bauer is one sexy mother—.

Am I represented anywhere on this show? No. Oh, well… there was the lesbian in the first season. She was a hitwoman/bad guy and was killed off so fast most people don’t even remember her. Also, the gay kid who was the black sheep son of somebody important and who gave the terrorists some information while having orgy sex with gay terrorists. I actually don’t remember the details, but this is my emotional memory of the fag content of this show.

Why am I talking about TV anyway? I watch almost anything. I read almost anything. TV’s easier to talk about though. There’s the passivity of letting the images wash over you. Shit comes into your living room without you even asking for it. Books you have to go out and get. There’s implication involved. There’s choice. You asked for it.

I love Henry Miller. William Faulkner. Hemingway. Misogynists are excellent reads. Homophobes. Sure. Them too. I mention these dudes because to mention current names (men and women) would probably get me into trouble, but you probably know some of them. And, like me, you’ve probably also read a good many of them. Their misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, geocentric worldview, etc, etc, is probably today masked to gain readership, or crammed into their characters, but you know who they are.

Turn a good sentence and I’ll read you. I don’t need to be friends with the author of every book I read. I might not purchase some asshole’s book, but I’ll borrow it from someone who did, or get it from the library—the library loves misogynists.

What is interesting to me in watching or reading things so far outside of my experience is to find the universals. That’s what literature is about, no? Making connections? Finding the common thread in uncommon cohorts? Tony Soprano had a breakthrough in therapy?! I’ve had breakthroughs, too! We’re all human (those of us humans), what’s interesting to me is how my rage and desperation for knowledge can have me googling for hours, I might even go to the library. Jack Bauer has the same need and it leads him to stripping the cord of the nearest lamp and pressing it into sweaty flesh. We are one.

What wasn’t asked, but seems the more interesting question, is how to handle these characters in our own work. Or do we? Do we create a strange amalgamated caricature of violence and hatred so the reader knows THIS ISN’T ME! Or do we give the character the same care and respect and depth that we give our god-fearing, mother-loving, friendly-to-animals-and-babies characters? For the one or two or you reading this who know anything about my work, you’ll know that my stories and poems are filled with cruel people. They scare me, I’ve known so many of them, and that’s why they populate my work. Keep your eye on the ball.

Maybe people think they are me. My first book was just released last month. People I know are reading it. People I’ve slept with. People I went to high school with. People who live on my block. There’s a tendency in poetry especially for readers to want the “I” in every poem to be the man or the woman with the pen, but for me that’s just not the case. To mix it up, dear readers, the I is sometimes me, sometimes isn’t, and is more commonly some monstrous combination. I value a kind writer who can write about assholes. I value assholes who can write about themselves and other assholes, and write about them well. I want to know about all of them. About the racism and homophobia of the girl or guy next door. The expected and the unexpected. The homophobia of the homosexual. The misogyny of the woman. The self-flagellating straight white male, wherever he is. The fear of self-implication will only lead a writer away from the truth. And the truth is what matters, whatever form it takes.

How are you implicated in the ills of the world? You—every one of you—are an asshole, too.

What I won’t tolerate is something that doesn’t serve the art’s aim, but I’ve babbled too much to talk about the over-the-top violence in some recent books and films (i.e. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), where I think something has gone too far into pointless spectacle.

All I want is honesty. Honest characters in all their dirty. Wise as readers are, a false character or false moment will come off false. And this (I think) is the biggest offense of all.

Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of just released prose poetry collection Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books), and forthcoming flash fiction chapbook Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press). Learn more at her blog.

In high school, despite my aptitude for English and my love of reading, it did not even occur to me that I should major in English in college. My experience with 'academic' reading consisted mainly of books like Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, and 1984. Even the ones that I liked, like 1984, were books written by men, about men, and for men. I thought (not entirely incorrectly) that majoring in English would just be me reading a bunch of books that objectified women, erased women, or just plain didn't find women interesting. From my limited perspective, the whole history of English literature was a string of white dudes with no interest in writing about women, and a few female exceptions, who wrote romances for the most part, like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. And, well, fuck that. I'd rather study something else.

Luckily for me, I finally had an English teacher that introduced me to different kinds of books. The one that really changed my life was Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Not only was this book critical of racism and missionary work, but it made female narratives and voices its focus. The story is told alternately by each of a missionary family's five daughters and wife, and the father (the preacher and misogynistic, racist head of the household) has a voice only indirectly. Reading this in high school was a revelation: Kingsolver was directly addressing the fact that men have an excess of opportunities to speak and be heard. The father is a preacher, and when he speaks, people listen. In the Congo, they listen because he is a white man. In the U.S., they listen because he is a white man. In his family, they listen because of his abuse, which he can get away with because no one would listen to them anyway, as they're only women or girls. Even though the story is told by only women, the reader still hears the preacher's direct voice numerous times. His voice seeps into and co-opts their narratives. As a woman who felt unheard, who existed in a verbally abusive home, forced into silence about it because who would listen to me, and who wanted desperately to feel like what I had to say and had experienced were important, The Poisonwood Bible saved my life. I thought, this can be what literature is about. And so my freshman year of college, I declared myself an English major.

I still had to wade through a sea of white manfiction, and as a graduate student, I no longer have the option of eschewing canon. And while I originally intended to focus on contemporary American literature, I instead find myself hard-core Victorianist, specializing in Victorian science fiction. Most of the time, I am at a loss as to how this happened. I mean, Victorian lit? Science fiction? And of all the unlikely books, Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks was my introduction to Victorian literature. If you haven't read it (and most people haven't), it's about a lady who makes it her life's mission to improve the social life of her middle-upper-class neighborhood. While this book isn't particularly radical or overt in its social criticism, it also makes absolutely clear the social limits placed on Lucilla Marjoribanks, because of her gender. She's so privileged, with all the money she could want, and no mother to usurp her place of queen bee in her father's home, and she still has to limit herself to her Thursday evenings and the exact right pattern for the walls of her drawing room. Lucilla is fierce and clever and a bit of a social genius; in another time and place, she could have been a diplomat or a Secretary of State, changing the world in much bigger ways. And Oliphant pokes fun at her, but gently, because she seems to know this, too, and to regret for Lucilla her lack of opportunities.

There's something that draws me to the Victorian era again and again, perhaps because I think the Victorians still live with us. How we picture ourselves in the world seems to echo from this tiny country that conquered the world, gave us soap, racist and sexist science, the imaginary East/West binary, as well as technology that changed the landscape of industry, political and economic policies that continue to disadvantage the third world, and an astounding amount of self-righteousness. They're so familiar and so utterly alien at the same time, and I find myself both comfortable and uncomfortable in their world. And, for some reason, I love this. But I never, ever apologize for them. Victorian authors are usually racist, misogynistic, and heterosexist, and I can never quite forgive them for that. They disappoint me constantly, and this, I think, keeps me from relating to them too much (although I have had multiple conversations about how much I would like to meet H. G. Wells and go ride bicycles with him).

As for the science fiction, I love science fiction. OH MAN do I love it. It is ripe with subversive possibilities and radical tendencies, even though those are ignored by a great majority of science fiction writers. The same was true in the Victorian era; while most science fiction was obnoxiously retrograde, it also attracted the radical social critics of the time. And, more significantly, it signaled how the culture was dealing with the increasing importance of science and technological feats in Western culture. That science fiction is becoming more and more mainstream today is a signal that we are again dealing with the scientific and technological nature of our environment. And how we see science and technology stems a lot from Victorian sci fi, which gave us our obsession with time travel, the Daleks (á la the Martians of Wells's The War of the Worlds ), and dreams of flying into the stars. Victorian sci fi was the first Western genre to systematically explore the conflicts between the body and science/technology, and our own ambivalence towards technological and scientific progress.

There's much to admire and to abhor in Victorian science fiction, but most important to me is that there is always something to learn from it. Even when my own experiences or body are misrepresented or erased in this genre, I can tie that back to contemporary or Victorian erasures of women in the culture of science and in science fiction. I can make the failures of literature productive, which is really what being a cultural critic is all about.

Courtney is a feminist, geek, gamer, atheist, and sci fi aca-fan. She's an English graduate student, specializing in Victorian science fiction. She blogs at From Austin to A&M.

How does a black girl from the west coast read the stories of John Cheever, the closeted bisexual drunk of Ossining? How can I relate to a world overrun with ferries, bridge playing, boarding schools, summer beach houses, silver spoons, Ivy Leagues, sleep-away camp, country clubs and highball glasses? John Cheever was a perfect channeler of upper middle class, white suburban ennui, a world I’ve never belonged to and shan’t. Then why do I LOVE reading Cheever stories when the one thing they are decidedly NOT about is being black?

As far as I can tell, the black experience in America has ceased to be relevant in fiction. Gone are the days when the Book of the Month Club features a novel about an earnest young black man who “rapes” and asphyxiates an “innocent” white girl before shoving her into her a furnace. Those ghastly imponderables that cut to the heart of the African American psyche with razor sharp precision have lost their edge. What has endured is the subject of slavery, the Sisyphean task of obtaining Freedom, overcoming severe degradation, the loss of one’s humanity. I get it and I wouldn’t dare trivialize it BUT I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the subject stale.

I was disappointed when I read ZZ Packer’s story for the New Yorker’s "20 Under 40" issue. She’s the only African American on the list and she writes about runaway slaves. Huh, I didn’t see THAT one coming. In spite of my initial disappointment, I enjoyed Packer’s story because she is an incredibly skilled WRITER and a damn good storyteller, and that is what I love about reading good fiction. You can write about anthropomorphized farm animals, or murdered prostitutes, or slavery, or vampires, or an underground network of homeless people staging a revolt against the rich; you can write about anything as long as it’s a good story—intelligent, well-written and well executed. That is how I judge fiction, but I wasn’t always this way.

Reading the great American novels in school was torturous. My white classmates relished in Salinger, Fitzgerald, Twain, Hemingway, and looked at me sideways when it came time to address themes of slavery and racism. Apparently, these were the only subjects I was qualified to discuss. Of course they were right to assume my interpretation would be informed by a totally different set of historical references, but this assumption also made me feel terribly awkward, alone, and shy. Hmmm, how do you explain to a bunch of white students and a white teacher that you think Atticus Finch is a racist? Over time I grew bitter. I mentally checked out of school and started to develop my own curriculum. It would have pleased my father a great deal for me to read Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War, a book he foisted on me since I was in trainers, but I didn’t want to read books about being black or the black experience or any one thing. I just wanted to read the books that IIIIIII wanted to read and how IIIIIII wanted to read them. After all, reading should be an intimate, personal experience (much like writing) and I wanted to enjoy that.

That time in my life shaped who I am as a reader and helped me overcome some of the resentment I had towards great American fiction in school. I learned to appreciate reading on a fundamentally selfish level. I started to separate the author from the text, to distinguish form from content—I became a critical reader, not a black girl who likes to read about black things by black people OR a black girl who likes to read about white things by white people (or whatever variation suits your fancy). I just became a Reader.

I’m still rubbed the wrong way when we talk about “great American fiction,” but this has more to do with the institutions that make arbitrary decisions about literary “greatness” than it does books and reading. As it happens, primarily white men run these institutions. As it happens, these are the institutions that select one African American to represent, ostensibly, the best of what today’s young African American fiction writers have to offer, and then proceed to publish said individual’s highly unoriginal story about runaway slaves. That same shall-not-be-named institution, however, is responsible for publishing one of my favorite short story writers of all time: John Cheever. How do I reconcile? Once again, it boils down to me the reader, the book and a good fucking story. Nothing else.

Cheever’s stories are flipping hilarious in that fly on the wall, I’m really glad that’s not me kind of way. Behind the doors of those Tudor-style homes with manicured lawns in the suburbs, crazy Shit. Goes. Down. Of course the conflict in “The Enormous Radio,” “The Swimmer,” and “Farewell My Brother,” has little to do with me as a black woman, but again, I don’t read fiction so I can analyze it through the prism of my blackness. I read fiction to escape. People who can’t enjoy a good story because it’s not about them are insufferable drips. Similarly, writers incapable of or unwilling to explore unknown territory possess little imagination. John Cheever had a great imagination. The world he wrote about so vividly was a world he didn’t really belong to—his family wasn’t very wealthy, he was expelled from school, bisexual, and a drunk. “A good narrative is a rudimentary structure, rather like a kidney,” he once said. “Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence.” It was Cheever’s commitment to excellence that propelled his career, not that he wrote about privileged snobs playing backgammon in the parlor.

I am an African American woman and I think about what that means every day of my life, but I don’t let it dictate how I read fiction because it would undermine my love of narrative, imagination, storytelling, language. That being said, African American authors—minority authors!—are not well represented in fiction, and those who are tend to follow the script lest they go unnoticed by the formidable Institutions Of Literary Greatness Recognition (cough, major book publishers and magazines still publishing fiction). My desire for more black authors does not coincide with a deep-seated need to read about my experience. I want more black authors because without them we are letting a tremendous amount of creative potential, imagination, excellent storytelling go untapped. So, yes, Hello, I am black. I love fiction. (Or, Hello, I’m a black author. I like to write fiction.) These two things aren’t necessarily related and we shouldn’t expect them to be. We should expect lovers of fiction to thirst for stories of all kinds from all walks of life and from all people, and that those stories carry in them a universal appeal.

Lauretta Charlton knows what it's like to be the only black person in book publishing. She lives in NYC, enjoys fiction, snacks and tigers.

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