THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW March/April 1994 GUERRILLAS IN THE BLISS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JANICE EIDUS By Lance Olsen One quick reviewer compared Janice Eidus' second book, the short-story collection VITO LOVES GERALDINE (City Lights, 1989), to "an unusually imaginative NYC wall of graffiti: colorful and daring, unafraid of new forms or old sentiments." That's Eidus' fiction in an envelope: deeply urban, playfully iconoclastic, unconventionally conventional, meticulously tuned to myriad voices and social registers, and like that wall of graffiti, each day just a little different from the day before. The result has been two recent O. Henry Prizes, publication in dozens of magazines as diverse as THE VILLAGE VOICE and NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, and a healthy number of appearances in such hot anthologies as Serpent's Tail's SEX AND THE CITY (1990) and St. Martin's MONDO ELVIS (1993), not to mention her lauded debut novel from the Fiction Collective, FAITHFUL REBECCA (1986). Eidus tells about how, growing up Jewish in a tough housing project in an Italian-Catholic neighborhood in The Bronx during the fifties, she began writing poems almost from the get-go, her first fiction by the time she was 11. She proudly presented her first story, a surreal piece about a therapist wackier than his patient, to her pharmacist father, a political progressive and literary conservative. "He told me I couldn't write about shrinks because I'd never been to one, and I couldn't take on a male's point of view," she recounts. "So after that I almost never again showed either of my parents any of my writing." She dodged her way through the New York City public school system ("a grueling, demoralizing experience") and, after a very short first marriage, put herself through the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins by working two years as a secretary. She published her first story when she was 23, yet it wasn't until more than a decade later that FAITHFUL REBECCA, a dreamlike and quirky novel exploring, among other things, nontraditional sex and nontraditional ideas about female relationships, appeared to something close to pure plain praise. Eidus spent a full year in therapy (she's been seeing various therapists since she was 17) pondering whether or not she should let her parents see it. She ultimately decided she should, she says, "to prove to myself that no matter what they said, I could handle it, since I was a real writer." Now an increasingly well-known author on the New York scene, Eidus lives with her second husband, John Kastan, a sociologist working in health care, on a busy block in midtown Manhattan. Although she's taught in a few colleges and universities, she currently runs a series of private writing tutorials from her apartment "for the simplicity and autonomy of it." Her goal, like that of many of her characters, is to script her life down to its (sometimes contradictory) essentials. "I write," she says. "I teach. I read. I spend a lot of time with my wonderful husband. I try to keep up my many friendships around the country. I indulge my chubby, very needy deaf cat, Antigone. I go to my therapy sessions. And I spend an awful lot of time at my health club, on the treadmill, doing Nautilus, and swimming. To me, exercise is akin to writing. Athletics for me is a very private, introspective activity." Reviewers, as reviewers are wont to do, have repeatedly attempted to find the right label for Eidus' work. But if there's one true trend in her fiction, besides the fact that it's written out of postmodern pleasure rather than romantic agony, it's probably that there is no true trend in her fiction, Its a shape-shifting, tastily and aggressively independent project that dodges easy classification in the same way Eidus herself dodged that restrictive system back in high school. "I was once up as being part of 'The Brat Pack,' "she explains. "And once an article stated I was part of a 'movement' of women writers who were writing something called 'Chic Lit.' I'm often called 'cutting edge' by critics. But my commitment to the literary life over the long haul is really terribly old-fashioned. I've never wanted to be the flavor of the month." Her new novel, URBAN BLISS, will be released in June 1994 by Fromm International, a house known for years for its translations of European work, and presently expanding into the American fiction market. Eidus' protagonist, Babette Bliss, an endearingly high-strung and not-just-a-little-desperate, Bronx-born, 35-year-old Jewish woman living on the West Side of Manhattan, is busy juggling three huge life crises. First, she's getting older every day and starting to wonder if having a child might not really be for her, despite what the media and her friends say. Second, she's associate director of the Theater Art Gallery, dedicated to performance work too risky for Broadway (or Off-Broadway, or Off-Off-Broadway, for that matter) and the building that houses it is being threatened in a big way by some unsavory condo-developers. And third, and maybe most important, Babette has this nagging suspicion that her lawyer-husband, George Harrison (as in the same name as the Beatle, Babette's romantic ideal), is having an affair with his cool slinky colleague at the firm. Amidst therapy sessions run by a wacky woman (not unlike the psychiatrist in Eidus' first childhood story) who sings in a rock band called Mild Neuroses, and an edgy antsiness about whether she should be writing plays instead of quartering them, Babette leaves her husband (ironically, after he's already ended the halfhearted affair he had indeed been having) and launches on a comic journey of self-discovery. Like so many of Eidus' characters, Babette is a sympathetic and unconventional female protagonist who can't figure out why she acts the way she does. She explores alternate modes of living, not in order to suggest how we should all be getting along, but in order to simultaneously put forth and problematize diverse possibilities. Along the way she learns about the ethics of infidelity in an age of uncertainty, whom you can trust and whom you can forgive, and Eidus creates a whimsical, clean, and fast-paced read, both sexy and savvy, about punctured promises and deception. URBAN BLISS is a profoundly New York novel, Eidus' narrative universe aswarm with car horns and construction-site drilling, artsy types and mad taxis, out-of-work actors and homeless people. But it is much more than that as well. Appropriately, its major metaphor is drama, because here is a novel about the slow, sad commodification of art in the last decade of this century, about selling its heart to those condo-developers for a quick buck, and, more resonant still, about how people spend their existences stumblingly learning the lines to their own scripts, the roles they both want and have to play. In transit, those people discover that their scripts are always being rewritten, that life is always a surprise, and that their drama's clever conclusion is, like that of URBAN BLISS, ultimately anything but conclusive and Eidus' seriously funny world anything but safe. The Bloomsbury Review: Your first novel, FAITHFUL REBECCA, is a surreal problematization of late 19th-century feminist utopian novels by such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The pages of your short-story collection, VITO LOVES GERALDINE, are packed with magical realist and metafictional ropes. In comparison, URBAN BLISS seems much more traditional, even conventional. How does it grow out of your earlier work? How do you see it differing from your earlier work? Janice Eidus: If I kept writing the same book, or in the same mode, I'd stop loving the writing process, which for me is very much about constant reinvention and renewal. Also, I write out of my own obsessions at a particular time, and I can never predict what will obsess me when. I'm an extraordinarily obsessive person. Often my work is playful, and although some of it can be quite sad, much of it is fun, even if the subject, or subtext, is serious. Someone once said my work has elements of standup comedy, which thrilled me. I'm that way in my social life, too—usually, no matter how formal the occasion, some internal imp insists that eventually I become a tad subversive. And in my fiction the humor keeps it accessible. Since I'm not writing the story of my own life, as many writers do, there's no obvious autobiographical continuity from book to book. My concerns are somewhat different. First of all, I'm interested in telling a good story. But I'm also brimming over with all sorts of big ideas, you know, about the nature of passion and obsession, of good and evil. I also have a great love of language, which is very sensual for me—the sounds and rhythms of words. This is one reason I give so many readings of my own work. I want to share that sensuality. Also, in some sense, I set out to create, on its own terms, a whole universe in each piece I write, and again there's that sense of play, of exploration, as I do so. But I would definitely say that one theme that recurs in nearly all my work is the triumph of the imagination. In URBAN BLISS, for example, Babette ultimately does triumph because of her own imagination. And I feel that my own life has been about that. I got out of the projects and the New York City public school system because I could imagine another way to live, and many of my friends couldn't. TBR: Speaking of imagination, you've said that the initial impulse for FAITHFUL REBECCA came from what happened to you and your childhood best girlfriend, how in your early 20s your lives branched and began to grow in very different directions, And that the title story of VITO LOVES GERALDINE developed both from a retelling of the old narrative of the woman who waits years for her man to return, and as a kind of homage to the northeast Bronx neighborhood in which you were raised. Where did URBAN BLISS come from? JE: URBAN BLISS probably came from my rage and sorrow about the homelessness problems in New York City. One of the central metaphors of the book is that Babette is always running into homeless people, giving money to homeless people, worrying about them. And she works for an avant-garde theater that's soon destined to be "homeless," because this huge real estate developer is going to have the theater's building razed. And she fears, too, that she'll be homeless if she loses both her husband and job, which may happen. Although it's a comic novel, I see it brimming with class rage, rage at mammoth real estate developers, rage at the way the arts are being neglected. And Babette is also filled with rage because it's not in her nature—which is essentially kind of wild—to be monogamous, and yet she's been monogamous in her marriage, while her husband, who'd always been the monogamous type, is the one who had an affair. This really makes her crazy. She went against her own wild nature in honor of their marriage, and then he goes and screws things up. TBR: It seems to me that, like the Amazonian utopianists, Garcia Marquet, and Carter, you simultaneously subvert and extend the narrative tradition in which you work. Is this also true of URBAN BLISS? JE: I'm a big subverter. I could wear a scarlet S on my chest for Subversive. Yes, URBAN BLISS appears, perhaps, on the surface, to be a very witty, realistically written story about a woman who has to make a bunch of big decisions about her life; and the fun for me is that she's not at all conventional in her actions, or how she decides things. And the ending isn't necessarily the ending one would expect. I've subverted all the expectations everyone had for me in my real life—my family, my teachers. I can't help being subversive, even a tad demonic in my fiction, even when I'm also being sweet. I loved, as a kid, reading books and seeing films about "devil children" like VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and THE BAD SEED. TBR: Part of this idea of subversion in your work seems to involve providing the reader with questions rather than answers, another departure from traditional literature. Yes? JE: Yes, exactly. I'm not very interested in instructing people in how they should live their lives, which is what a great deal of fiction does, moralizing—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. I'm far more interested in encouraging readers to question why they live their lives as they do, as well as to look at the possibilities of changing, the alternative ways of being, of living. Those are my kind of endings. TBR: At one point in URBAN BLISS, your narrator comments at her health club: "I want to stay here all day, watching these women, imagining their lives, which ones are faithful, which ones are unfaithful, which ones are reconciled to the way things are in their lives, and which ones—like me—are never reconciled, to anything." Your work is largely about, and therefore possibly intended for, women. Do you think of yourself working within the tradition of feminist fiction? JE: When Jack Kerouac writes about going out on the road and hanging around with the guys and screwing the babes, lots of women read him. I always hear it said that women read books by both men and women, but men only read books by other men. Well, I can't imagine why a very funny novel about a woman who's having all sorts of crises in her life relating to career, adultery, fears of homelessness, and having children wouldn't be of interest to men. Men have all those same crises. At least, all of the ones I've ever talked to have. I consider myself a feminist in my life, definitely, and I've lived my whole life in a spirit of fierce independence, to the best of my ability, with mistakes and missteps made, of course, since I'm only human. But my work, well, I'd be furious at men who don't consider those issues universal enough to merit their interest, simply because the narrator is female. If women can read books in which fly-fishing is a metaphor for maturation, then men can damned well read books in which one naked woman lies in a locker room, stares at some other naked women, and wonders about their lives. TBR: One woman who plays an especially large role in URBAN BLISS is Babette's delightfully weird sister, Maya, an interior designer who lives in an all-pink apartment. Your own sister recently died after a long struggle with cancer. Is this novel in any way a conscious working-through of your relationship with her? JE: This last year—other than career-wise, which has been terrific—has been the worst year of my life because my sister, who was three years older than I, passed away, and although she had had cancer for nine years, and the doctors had made it clear that her time was limited, I was still emotionally unprepared for it, and in many ways I fell apart. I think, actually, I've been apart all year, and it's only now, really, that I'm beginning not to think of her every minute of every day. She was a very difficult person, not an easy person at all. We weren't close. And yet her death devastated me, consumed me. In superficial ways—the way Maya Bliss dresses and behaves like a southern belle even though she's a Jewish girl from The Bronx—that may be a slightly camp version of my real sister, who did dye her hair platinum blonde, and who was very flirtatious with men in an old-fashioned, Kim Novak sort of way. But Maya in the book is very wacky. As you say, she's "delightfully weird." My own sister, who was struck quite young with a rare, debilitating cancer, which made her last nine years on earth hell, wasn't delightful. She was bitter, and sick, and tired of being sick, and angry. So no, it wasn't a conscious working-through of my relationship with my sister. But perhaps I was trying to give her the gift of high spirits and wackiness, since those had been taken away from her. TBR: Thomas Mann was wary about undergoing psycho-analysis because he thought understanding his psyche might be the death-knell of his creative impulse. You've been in therapy for two decades now, and have obviously given Thomas Mann the lie. Has therapy actually helped your fiction, or does it exist on a different plane from it? JE: Well, I'm wary about learning to ski because I'm afraid I'll break my leg. Thomas Mann had his fears; I have mine. Seriously, though, I can't make any generalizations about how therapy would affect anyone else. For me, therapy has helped me to lead "the examined life" day by day, and since the creative process is a major part of my daily life, there's surely been some link between the two, but that's never been a concern or issue for me—how they do, or don't, link up. And thanks for saying I've "given Thomas Mann the lie"—what an extraordinary thing for me to have done! And I love Mann's work, actually. TBR: FAITHFUL REBECCA rewrites and re-rights 19th-century Amazonian utopian fiction. VITO LOVES GERALDINE thinks back through the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the dense allusive experimentalism of Angela Carter. Do you consider these writers your important antecedents? If not, who else? Are there contemporary writers or artists you admire and feel some connection with? JE: When Angela Carter and Manuel Puig died within the last few years, I was devastated. They were two contemporary writers whose work meant the world to me. And, they died too damned young. I've also long been a fan of James Purdy's writing. His novel MALCOLM, which I read when I was in college, changed my life. I'd never read anything like it, I'd read the Beats, but compared to what was in the pages of MALCOLM, the Beats seemed like a tame bunch to me. This was imagination at its least inhibited, and for me it was beautiful in a way that NAKED LUNCH, for instance, was never beautiful. Many of my favorite writers are gay men. Edmund White, for instance. His work is breathtaking. FAITHFUL REBECCA has been compared to Cindy Sherman's photography because they're both about women consciously posing to the world in various personae and roles. FAITHFUL REBECCA was also compared to the work of Joseph Cornell because there are layers of meaning in all the little nooks, and crannies. And, in fact, I do feel a kinship with both of those artists. I love music of all sorts—Luciano Berio, Guns n' Roses, Diamanda Galas, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely, The Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, Buffy Sainte Marie, Dinah Washington. And the best band, the absolute best band in the world, to get on the treadmill and work out to, is Aerosmith. Their beat, and Steve Tyler's voice, are Treadmill Heaven. And you know from reading URBAN BLISS, with a character named George Harrison and a main character who addresses her diary entries to the real ex—Beatle, that the Beatles meant an awful lot to me, and still do. TBR: Another tradition out of which you seem to write is regionalism. Your fictions are nothing if not deeply urban, deeply tied to the energy, sounds, voices, and personalities of New York City. Again, do you see yourself partaking of and manipulating this tradition? JE: New York City is in my blood. Whenever I've lived elsewhere, I've yearned to come back, even though there are things about it that can make anyone crazy. But, since it's in my blood, it's in my fiction. I've written about other places—L.A., the South, upstate New York, the Midwest, but my novels take place mostly in New York. And many, many of my stories do. And The Bronx, which is often referred to as "The Forgotten Borough," will never be forgotten by me. TBR: I read the whole story in URBAN BLISS involving the threat to the Theater Art Gallery building by the condo -developers as a metaphor for the commodification of the arts in New York in particular and America in general as we approach the end of the millennium. At a demonstration on behalf of the building, some displaced SoHo artists carry signs that say 'New York, Culture Capital of the World," with a line through "Culture" and the word "Greed" substituted instead. From your vantage point, is this what's happening? JE: I think, you're right. It is a metaphor about the commodification of the arts. Perhaps on one level, it's a work of political economics in the form of a novel, a la Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Garcia Marquez. Today art and literature are seen as "products." Writers are referred to by editors as "commodities." I've heard this. No exaggeration. URBAN BLISS is also tied to my strong feelings about censorship, which can come in many guises: moralistic, political, economic. And again, it's about homelessness, which living in New York City as I do, I can't forget about, not even a single minute of a single day. Read the next interview... Biography  |  Books  |  Other Works  |  Writing Tutorials  |  Links