Susan Minot wrote the screenplay to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Best known perhaps as the “breakthrough” role for Liv (daughter-of-Steve) Tyler, this film does an unparalleled job of recreating the feel of an artist’s life, as the late Donal McCann portrays a successful sculptor who is able financially to surround himself with the people & projects he loves. The film also treats an abstraction – virginity – as if it were a being, a member of the cast. You don’t have to agree with this point-of-view to marvel at how well it’s carried off. And I recall being surprised to discover that this film, which at some level is certainly a middle-aged male fantasy, was scripted by a woman, even as Bertolucci is credited with the “story.”
So when I read a rave review of a novel by Minot in the New York Times, I made a mental note to pick the book up & read it. Rapture was already in paperback by the time I acted on my impulse, but there’s often a gap on my part between idea & action. It took me another year to get around to actually reading the volume. It’s one of those projects that makes you furrow your brow & scrunch your nose. Rapture is the polar opposite of Stealing Beauty in that it’s intellectually stimulating, but with enormous gaps in the execution.
The premise of this novel is that it’s the tale of two lovers – with a third sort of hovering in the shadows – told through their thoughts as one, Kay, gives the other, Benjamin, a blowjob. That literally is the entire book. The back-story of the pair is that Benjamin is a struggling film director on whose film Kay once worked. They had an affair primarily while shooting in Mexico but at the time Benjamin was engaged to his girlfriend of eleven years, Vanessa. The affair fell apart because Benjamin was unwilling to abandon Vanessa for Kay. Now, quite some time later, Benjamin has left Vanessa & runs into Kay. One thing leads another & they’re in Kay’s bed for the first time in over a year. What Kay doesn’t know is that Benjamin has plans to see Vanessa later that same day.
The concept of the tale drawn out through reflection during an extremely contained frame story has been done before. Well before Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine shoe-horned a novel into a character’s ascending an escalator on his way to buy shoe laces, Wright Morris’ Field of Vision thrust a novel’s worth of thoughts into the minds of a few spectators watching a bullfight. One might even blame Laurence Sterne, whose “autobiography” of Tristram Shandy is perpetually delayed through digression, for begetting this trend of seeking plotless prose through cutesy narrative frames. Eventually someone will manage to cast an entire picaresque into a stifled yawn. It’s all just a question of scale.
At one level, Minot’s book is a part of the new, spare, postmodern prose fiction, a kin to the work of David Markson & Carole Maso – maybe your surname has to begin with an M to play in this genre – but on another level, Rapture feels much more targeted towards the women’s book club market than either of those, a little too frisky for Oprah perhaps, but not really of a different order. This is really all about the construction of the female character, the one in this book we are primarily supposed to “care about.”
A lot of that has to do with Benjamin, who is far more of an abstraction here than was Liv Tyler’s virginity in Stealing Beauty. For Rapture really to work, you have to buy Benjamin as character & he feels like a cardboard cut-out to me. In the constant narrative flipping betwixt characters – it amounts to an interior “he said / she said” – Benjamin’s simply not believable as a male receiving oral sex. Whether she is or not, I suspect, may depend on the gender of the reader, tho there are aspects to Kay’s relationship to fellatio that struck me as closer to male fantasy than Benjamin’s. It is she, after all, who has positioned herself so that Benjamin has nothing to do but lie there, passive as a blank sheet of paper. And it is she who experiences the “rapture” of the title without the slightest thought of reciprocity. Indeed, Kay wants to give sex, not have sex, & in that distinction lies a good part of the dynamics of this book.
I wrote just a couple of weeks ago about the problem of character in Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog. The principle difference between Socrates Fortlow & Benjamin, as a writing project, is that Fortlow is woven around a point of opacity – a core of residual anger – that renders him something of a mystery even to himself. Benjamin has no such core, no moment of opacity whatsoever. If he is opaque to anyone, it is only to Kay. Otherwise, he is every “nice-guy / bad-boyfriend” who ever lived.
Lucy, the Liv Tyler character in Stealing Beauty¹, at least has her virginity (which she herself – since she can’t know it, never having known its opposite or absence – displaces onto a search for the father her mother never named², who just turns out to be . . .). But the absence of any opacity on the part of Benjamin ultimately equals an absence of materiality, depth, credibility. Let me give a contrast that will foreground the difference: much of what is so compelling about the female narrator in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not that she’s convinced that she may be the only person left alive on the planet, but that she never really notices this – it’s a fact, not a problem. You could construct a novel around just such a blind spot, as Markson did.
Kathy Acker was right all those years ago in treating characterization as an – possibly the – interesting problem in fiction. Instead of working upwards syntactically & grammatically, as language itself does, the schemata of fictive frames refer to a posited, projected universe constructed around these Frankenstein creatures we call characters. Our experience of cohesive writing is thus projected onto a world that is, by inference, equally coherent. Building such constructions, however, requires much more than just names, facts, even attitudes. At the absolute core of another person lies, if nothing else, our experience of an Other, something impenetrable even in the act of penetration. There is a lot to be said about the problems of writing “in the voice of” another gender, race, class or age. Benjamin’s problem, tho, is not that he’s like your old lover. He’s really a lot more like Oakland. At least in Gertrude Stein’s figure for my lovely childhood city about the artificial lake, there’s no there there. Which renders a lot that happens in Susan Minot’s Rapture difficult to swallow.
¹ The film’s title in Italian, Io ballo da sola, translates literally into “I dance alone.” I’ve wondered just how different that film might seem had I thought of it as such when I first saw it eight years ago.
² Which just happens to mimic Ms. Tyler’s relationship with her own father, as every media profile ever written on her has treated as the major narrative of her life.
