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METROLAND May, 1990 CIRCUMSTANTIAL RESONANCE by Shirley Nelson Author Janice Eidus, a former Albany resident, explores disturbing characters in absurd and amusing situations. Janice Eidus admits to "an irrepressible urge to be funny," a compulsion to joke that inserts itself into her most serious moments—not always convenient, but always essential and releasing. Humor seems to operate the same way in her fiction, she acknowledges, discussing her writing in a recent telephone interview. It's true that people laugh when Eidus reads from her work publicly. Her stories are absurd, at times preposterous. But those of us who heard her during the years she lived in Albany also remember the voice. Within the unmistakable New York City accents (the Bronx) a little girl speaks with a faint lisp, defying all earnestness, all possibility of pretense. The speaking voice and the writing voice are identical, a disarming blend of street smarts and innocence, sober wisdom and mischief. That combination is intrinsic to the tone of the stories in her collection of short fiction, VITO LOVES GERALDINE (169 pages, $7.95), issued this spring by City Lights Books. At least four of the 18 pieces in this collection were written in Albany between 1979 and 1983 and shared with audiences in familiar places, including Cathy's Waffle Shop on Lark Street, also the setting for one of the stories. Since then Eidus has moved—not just back to her "hometown" but forward in her career. A novel, FAITHFUL REBECCA, has been received with high praise in both America (The Fiction Collective) and England, where VITO LOVES GERALDINE has also been published. Her short work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. The title story of VITO LOVES GERALDINE, first printed in THE VILLAGE VOICE, will be included in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Story Collection. Throughout this time, Eidus says, her sense of herself as a writer has been shaped by the "gifts of validation" offered at both public readings and writers' retreats (she has been a guest at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, among others). But more than anything else, FAITHFUL REBECCA has secured her identity as a writer. A risky book with an unlikable heroine, both its creation and its success have helped to focus the scenery of Eidus' subject matter. "Darkly amusing," THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW described it, a tale of narcissism and manipulation in a half-real, half-surrealistic context. Rebecca, a young seductress, already well-acquainted with evil, sets off to find her kidnapped baby on a trail that leads to a terrifying commune of Amazons. More than one myth is at work in this coming-of-age story—the search, the journey, rites of initiation and utopian dreams—all recognizable, if you stand on your head to see them. "I find I'm drawn to the idea of playing with myth," Eidus says. "Achilles, Candide, Hamlet, with contemporary settings and characters, subverted in an almost perverse way yet still honoring the myths themselves." In the title story of VITO LOVES GERALDINE, a woman waits for her man across an entire generation. But Eidus' "Patient Grisilda," though also Italian, is a gum-popping girl from the Bronx, and her man (Vito) a doo-wopper with acne and a greasy pompadour. American myth especially takes a joy ride. The final entry in the collection concludes by describing itself: This American love story, you can see, involves the things we all know and love well: cars and fast foods and early sex and divorce and marriage and maybe even a little adultery... and high school and college and high grades.., and farms and cities and taxis and careers and apartments and houses.., a love story about the people we really love best. Though Eidus' style of feminism is more universal than exclusive, women play the key roles in most of her fiction. "I like to explore women in unusual circumstances," she says. Daughters, wives, friends in traditional relationships may be outwardly conventional while their inner lives open doors to the extraordinary. In one story, VANNA, a bored computer operator, becomes a performance artist and in the process converts to her own character. Another woman chooses life on the road, self-imprisoned in her own car, rather than live with a dominating husband. In ROBIN'S NEST, two children invent a secret language that liberates a repressed mother. Concrete objects take on magical significance: A stone becomes a metaphor for love, while a comb forms a spelled-out message in its teeth. Few of the characters are attractive, men or women, yet all get under your skin. Eidus likes characters who disturb her, who won't let her off the hook. Too much fiction is dishonest, she believes, with characters molded to represent the writer's point of view. If Eidus' characters are sympathetic, it's in the redemptive qualities of their imaginations, perhaps only in the hopeless aspirations to change their lives, the wrongheaded but determined decisions with which they jostle themselves off dead-center. The reader, too, is not spared. Drawn instantly into each story, one finds few easy comforts, and the signposts that at first seem clear lead to baffling emotional spaces. How are we supposed to feel about characters who are weird and laughable, but whose problems are desperately real? The writer is mocking—or is she? She takes her characters seriously—or does she? In TO BOSTON, a college student, a young woman of genuine promise, weary of being exactly that, climbs aboard a Greyhound bus to escape those who care for her most. There is no resolution, only that "she was able to step up, able to board the Greyhound bus undetected, feeling tidy and ready and not young at all, with two chunks of Saran-wrapped cheese, an apple, a novel, and a cardigan sweater to slip over her shoulders in case she grew cold." Resolution, along with everything else, is fair game in these stories. In THE RESOLUTION OF MUSCLE a woman with little to live for, obsessed by Sylvia Plath, writes dreadful poetry (quoted) and tries to deal with the "real issue" by weight lifting. Her husband unwittingly leaves her a note: "Dear, whatever you decide to do, we will be behind you..." THE DREADED FEMALE LOCKER ROOM TALK, a story with teasing lesbian allusions, tells us only what the "talk" is not , and it is not about recipes for banana bread and stir-fried vegetables in ginger sauce... Nor exclusively about the latest in painless bulimia. Nor how to snare a man.., nor how to perform exotic tricks in bed nor how to find God, nor how long to remain safely in the sauna...nor how to confront your boss without crying... nor breast feeding, nor mortgages...nor the first signs of Alzheimer's Disease...nor whether love lasts and hatred never expressed turns inward and causes cancer. Every story in VITO LOVES GERALDINE is full, however brief, with characters rich enough to support a novel. The writing is inventive and often brilliant. Comparisons to other writers are needless, and terminology that might be used (metafiction, postmodern) gratuitous. It seems enough to say what seldom can be said of a book in any given year, that it's just plain good. As for Janice Eidus, she is deep into another novel and another collection of short stories, still exploring the magical territory between the real and the fantastic, the ludicrous and the serious. "And I will do that," she says without hesitation, "for the rest of my life." Read the next interview... |
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