This month’s Across the Page features three noteworthy books: the new biography of Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Miss Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar; Amy Bloom‘s new collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out; and a striking collection by queer poet Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things.
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)
To put it simply, Joan Schenkar’s new biography of Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Miss Highsmith, is so engaging that I was sad when I got to the end of the 600-plus-page book. Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt, “the first American novel about a passionately ‘successful’ affair between two women,’ among others, lived a life worth exploring. She was born in the early 1920’s in Fort Worth, Texas, where her strong-willed and obstinate grandmother essentially raised her until her mother moved them to New York City to live with a new stepfather.
The move set off a life-long resentment between the mother and daughter pair that Highsmith would hold onto, as she did with most of her grudges, with a vengeance – she would later blame her mother and stepfather for everything from her failed relationship with her father to her lesbianism.
After the bright and well read Highsmith graduated from college, she was hired to write comic books – a part of her life and past she worked hard to keep hidden, but that Schenkar deftly connects to Highsmith’s later career as a novelist in terms of how it shaped her mastery of plot and the hero-criminal dynamic.
As a young woman, Highsmith was known for her striking beauty, intelligence and eccentricities. Schenkar captures her early adult years in New York City as she connected to other writers, developed her craft, fell passionately in and out of love and often interjected herself into the lives of other lesbian couples.
Even after Highsmith began to publish her work, she continued to struggle both professionally and personally. Eventually her beauty succumbed to years of alcoholism and lack of nutrition. As Schenkar reveals, Highsmith’s life was as filled with passion, complexity and (perceived) danger as the fictional worlds she devoted herself to creating.
Schenkar explores and focuses on the repetition and contradictions in Highsmith’s life – whether with her family, lovers or her work. She was an anti-Semite whose many lovers, friends and editors were Jewish. She was a lesbian and also misogynistic. “She makes is easy for us to be ravished by her romances, sullied by her prejudices, shocked by her crimes of the heart, appalled by the corrosive expression of her hatred,” explains Schenkar.
Schenkar opens the book with a note on the biography and an introduction to Highsmith as a subject: “She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman.”
But Schenkar’s analysis and rendering of Highsmith’s life and work is beyond generous. It is an honest and utterly gripping look at a brilliant and tortured mind. Highly recommended.
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom (Random House)
As with Amy Bloom’s other work, including Away and Come to Me, her new collection of interconnected short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, strikes a unique balance of presenting characters that are undeniably relatable and, at the same time, entirely new.
The first series of connected stories revolve around the lives of William and Clare. The middle-aged pair make for an unlikely but endearing couple. heir story begins as the two – married to other people – realize that there is something more intimate to their close friendship. This realization is complicated for many reasons, including their respective marriages, children, and William’s poor health. Bloom captures the tenderness and the selfishness of both Clare and William – their genuine love and ability to justify their betrayal – in four tight stories that switch points of view and take the relationship from it’s inception to its startling and heartbreaking end.
Another series of interconnected stories in the collection focuses on a family. When Lionel Sr. dies, Julia is left to care of their two children – her stepson, Lionel Jr., and her biological son, Buster. On the night of the funeral, Lionel Jr., nineteen years old and the spitting image of his father, crawls into bed with the grieving Julia and the two sleep together.
The event haunts Julia and Lionel in different but profound ways and Bloom shows how the secret affects the entire family over the course of the next thirty years. Julia takes other lovers – men and a woman – and Lionel moves to Paris where he finally settles down after dating a collection of distant and provocative women (usually single mothers).
It is in this series that Bloom reveals her unique ability to challenge the reader to see difficult and at times anomalous situations and characters from a different perspective – one of empathy.
The collection’s other stories are also equally worthy and feature distinct characters, from a young woman grieving the murder of her roommate by laying in her bed and talking to the woman’s mother over the phone, to a grown woman struggling to deal with her abusive and now aging father’s newfound fragility.
The stories in Where the God of Love Hangs Out capture how the mundane and the unexpected, the domestic and the bizarre, often co-exist in life. Brilliant storytelling.
Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King (BlazeVOX)
Queer poet Amy King is the author of six collections of poetry and was the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. Her book Slaves to Do These Things is a fascinating and highly thought-provoking collection of poems.
Slaves to Do These Things is structured like a five-act play and many of the poems explore the implications of the word, idea or concept of “slavery” in its many forms and restrictions. In “The Memory of Skin,” King examines intimacy from a distinct perspective by taking apart its source:
I am opposite marriage.
My dinner cake is made
guerilla style. Getting in
their faces sly,
shotgun raw, we spoke.
You held me well until
you closed with
the intellectual integrity
of a fucked-up life. To give
in to the grace
of a sudden condition,
that is the primacy of thought.
The powerful “Miracle on the Hudson” another example of King’s lyrical voice and ability to be both playful and evocative in the same moment:
One side strikes
the other: language cheapens?
We speak where all symbols
want power
such as a door which opens,
takes persimmons to its lover,
the other side, to no knock.
We can’t remind the lover
to love any more
than we can love ourselves
without the lover,
borne by the landing of light.
King teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and curates the Brooklyn based reading series, The Stain of Poetry, with Ana Bozi?evi?.
