Here in America we have Cher and Madonna. In France they had Colette. Hard though it may be for today's MTV or VH-1 viewer to believe, in the mono-named babes sweepstakes. Colette beats out her American rivals both in the talent and the outre sexual escapades departments.
During her 81 years (1873-1954). Colette was a major "figure in French culture. She wrote some 50 books (including the Claudine and Cheri novels), dashed off newspaper and magazine articles and appeared onstage as an actress (often in scanty outfits). She was thrice married and had notorious affairs, one with a stepson half her age. several with women. And don't forget the chain of cosmetics shops that sold Colette brand makeup: she could often be found in the stores offering her personal beauty secrets—most of which had to do with eyeliner, lots and lots of eyeliner.
Of such colorful lives are juicy biographies written, but this isn't one of them. Lottman, the author of earlier biographies on Gustave Flaubert and Albert Camus, makes Colette's story seem curiously fiat.
Then again, given the bare facts of her life, no book about Colette could be totally dull. Lottman does come up with occasional graceful phrases or amusing scenes, such as one in which artist-writer Jean Cocteau, after lunching with Colette, then 80, notes in his diary that her deafness is a problem. "Colette," Cocteau wrote, "has placed herself in a sort of naive mist in which she hears only what she wants to. and she uses it to keep her distance from our world." Lottman adds sharply, "The contrast between this "mist' of Cocteau's and the sharpness of her letters from this time, however, makes us wonder whether she may not simply have felt that communication with this man was not worth the effort."
Were Colette able to read this biography, she might well feel the same about Lottman. (Little. Brown. $24.95)
by Denis Johnson
With his fourth novel. Johnson summons up another feverish vision—in evocative, discomfiting prose that should appeal especially to readers who like their fiction to create bizarre, vivid little worlds.
After a failed attempt to hang himself in a lit of depression, ex-medical equipment salesman Leonard English drives from Kansas to Cape Cod. There he finds that in winter. Provincetown seems inhabited primarily by burly, flamboyant transvestites.
English stays, splitting his time between working the graveyard shift as a radio station disc jockey and conducting surveillances for a small detective agency. That leads him into a strange affair with a lesbian as well as into a convoluted conspiracy that includes the region's Catholic bishop and a right-wing paramilitary outfit.
Since his first novel. Angels. Johnson has suggested an American cross between the cynical French novelists Camus and Celine. His characters here are not just disconnected from the mainstream but menaced by vague forces. As one confides to a coffee shop waitress. "I think our world could really be some form of Hell, you know what I'm saying?"
Johnson knows. He has created two indelible scenes, one in a lab that designs medical instruments and one in a hospital emergency room, worthy of Hieronymus Bosch in their nightmarish qualities.
The terrain is baleful: intimacy is intimidating: the most banal of events, pieces of overheard conversations, are disturbing. The only lightness comes with movement, but even that uniquely American stratagem of salvation through restlessness doesn't work in this case. Despair commutes.
Johnson spins out of control by the end of the book. He sends English off on an improbable quest to the mountains of New Hampshire and returns him to the cape on a demented mission from God. In his earlier novels. Johnson gave us a clearer sense of what haunted his characters.
If, though, the origins of the alienation that dogs English are tough to trace, the novel is still transporting—and often viscerally disturbing. (Farrar Straus Giroux, $18.95)
by Richard Neely
Children shot at random on city streets. Parks overrun with dealers and addicts. The elderly huddled fearfully inside dark apartments. Homes barred and double-locked against the threat of theft or worse.
In many neighborhoods across the country, this is a picture of daily life, and here, Neely, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, tries to find a solution.
Civil libertarians won't do handstands over Neely's methods, nor will liberals find much to smile about, but this book probably wasn't written with that audience's well-being in mind. It appeals straight to the hearts of those who can only shudder at the thought of leaving home after dark. Yet Neely has done his homework and presents his case in an intelligent, concise manner.
Neely's plan breaks down into a vigilante system, with citizens forming their own anticrime patrols. Neely fuels his argument for such an approach by citing both history (citizens' patrols were the norm in both the U.S. and England until the 19th century) and the law (a citizen has the constitutional right to make an arrest).
The anticrime patrols would be structured much like many volunteer fire departments, with a citizen's training program run by local law enforcement personnel. Once that step is taken, the program can expand: "If the local police and political authorities favor a neighborhood crime-control group, they can lend or give the group some very expensive resources, one of which is trained lawyers. Burning down a crack house, while perhaps satisfying, is not nearly as effective as seeking an injunction to tear the building down as a public nuisance."
The book's weaknesses are many—chiefly the flat, often preachy writing—and the chapters are bogged down with throw-away statistics. Still, books of this nature aren't read because of the author's way with words. They are read because they present provocative arguments. In that regard. Take Back Your Neighborhood delivers. (Fine, $18.95)
by Stanley B. Burns, M.D.
Photographs by Lucinda Bunnen and Virginia Warren Smith
These two fascinating books reflect varying perspectives on how Americans view death.
Burns, a New York City ophthalmologist, founded the Burns Archive, a comprehensive collection of medical photography. His unique book (Twelvetrees. $40), an album of memorial postmortem photographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, argues that "just as sex was the 19th century taboo, death has become the 20th century taboo." Where people once used images of their dead loved ones as a way of confronting their loss. Burns says, we approach death more indirectly: "Personal (intimate) death is not a socially acceptable topic."
Bunnen and Smith"s book (Aperture, $40) shows how people use grave ornaments and markers—from ridiculous to sublime—to lessen their grief. It is the result of a trip the two Atlanta photographers took through the South and Southwest in 1980, seeking photogenic grave sites.
Scoring in Heaven takes its name from a 1964 Tennessee headstone that shows a bowler making a strike, a mother's tribute to her 31-year-old son. Bowling, in fact, was one of the common themes—along with empty picture frames, empty chairs and beds, hands and telephones—encountered by Bunnen and Smith. But they also, spotted a six-foot Styrofoam Bugs Bunny, a huge cowboy boot filled with daisies and the ultimate in one for the road—tequila bottles.
If many of the Bunnen-Smith pictures suggest a certain whimsy toward death, the photographs in Burns's collection are deeply sentimental. The Victorians took their grieving seriously—and formally. The mourning period for a child. Burns notes in his absorbing text, was two years and for a sibling one year. Small photographs of the deceased were often carried in lockets, kept close to the body for greater intimacy.
Photography was costly, and these photos were sometimes the only remembrances families had of their dead' loved ones. In 1846 a noted Boston photo studio advertised, "We take great pains to have Miniatures of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural."
To modern eyes, these pictures are often unsettlingly morbid. But they are never sensationalistic. In the ca. 1895 photo "Young Girl on Couch with Her Doll," a pretty child appears to be taking an afternoon nap dressed in her Sunday best. A ca. 1890 photo titled "From Carriage to Coffin" shows a very young child "sleeping" in a carriage while a coffin waits in the background.
In some ways the images in Scoring in Heaven are more disturbing. As these long-departed ones faced the end, did they realize they might become "immortalized" by a gigantic Bugs or have an empty bird cage placed on their grave or be remembered by a photo on their headstone taken while they were feeding the chickens?
>From Sex: "The Most Fun You Can Have Without Laughing"...and Other Quotations, compiled by William Cole and Louis Phillips (St. Martin's, $13.95):
Don't accept rides from strange men—and remember that all men are strange as hell.
—Robin Morgan
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- David Hiltbrand,
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Maddy Miller.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
