FALL 2011/WINTER 2012

REVIEWS

Toxicology by Lara Stapleton

Jessica Hagedorn's Toxicology is a wonderfully dense, sad, lyrical tale of Bohemia. The structure is seamlessly multi-genre in a way I might not have even noticed if I hadn't been taking notes for a review. Though complicated, it is whole and deftly satisfying. Such complication in the hands of a lesser writer may have become self-conscious, posturing, but Hagedorn is as fun as she is heavy, as loving as she is ruthless, and though her characters are kind of broken in terms of their ability to connect to the world, a reader cannot help but connect to them.

Mimi Smith, one of two main characters, is the last renter in a building of West Village co-ops. Appropriately, she also seems one of the final holdouts of a value system for which New York, in specific, and Bohemia, in general, were better known in the past: the belief system in which the hunger of the artist justifies all gross indifference and self-flagellation. The director of one respected-but-not -terribly-well-known artistic endeavor, a horror film called Blood Wedding, Mimi is an addict, a shocking mother, and feels a failed artist. She wanders the streets at night looking for “product” while her daughter’s dog, fed every few days, dies of God-knows-what. At times, she appears to care more about the death of movie star Romeo Byron, whom she never knew, than she does the disappearances of her dealer boyfriend and domestic worker cousin. Mimi doesn't quite seem to process her cousin's suffering, she won’t allow herself, but we suspect some buried empathy when Mimi becomes enraged that the woman’s father doesn't either. In her forties, Mimi is not truly of pre-Giuliani New York. Out of synch, her decadence was never as glamorously successful as her neighbor and quasi-friend, the other main character, Eleanor Delacroix.

Eleanor is a generation older than Mimi, a writer who came of age in the era before, many claim, (and I disagree), Bohemia was dying. A lesbian long before such a thing was even mentionable in the mainstream, her work offered firsts. She began with cult following and reached international renown. Now a widow, her life is degradingly lonely. When she speaks to Mimi of the dying dog, “Make sure it's comfortable.... That’s all we can do,” we can't help but think on her partner's long, slow, rotting death-by-unstoppable-disease. “Watch how humiliating it is, this business of being old and alone.” Eleanor is now, or perhaps always has been, a little cruel. She's laughing at her young followers, and toys with their admiration, their desperation to be around her.

Mimi and Eleanor are not quite capable of friendship, though they do hover in each others' spheres; they're neighbors after all, and they both practice a L'Étrange-like detachment. When Mimi hears that her cousin, an undocumented domestic worker from the Philippines, has gone missing, she imagines her brutal murder/slow rot as part of a film, her own project. When Mimi and Eleanor do, for a brief moment, make a desperate attempt at intimacy the result is somewhat morbid.

Among the novel's many themes: brutality, that famous New York indifference, indifference of many other sorts, (or perhaps it's a kind of choking in the light of love), Lorca's duende, and the search for validation. The narrative is intensely layered in terms of plot and narrative structure. We're dealing with the walking wounded and their wounds reflect each other’s: doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of high notes and undertones. Some are missing, some are dead, more than one mother goes blind. The dog dies like a cousin or a long-term spouse. No one can quite form intimacy. Mother and daughter use. There are both assonance and dissonance in the point of view. Characters tell the tale, but what they tell may be imagined (this slipperiness is a joy; it reveals longings, like the way we use “like,” it doesn't matter if we really said it or not. “I was like, are you for real?” what matters is what we felt). When the narrator is third person, it sometimes speaks like a friend, is not entirely formal. We've got interviews, excerpts from Delacroix's memoir. There are moments of the wicked satire for which Hagedorn is known. Coco Schnabel makes a walk through appearance. At times, we're not sure what is a metaphor, what is a dream, and what are the “real” events of the texts. Delacroix lies. Maybe the dealer's mother does too. These layers are a very good thing, the balance of literal to figurative, of conscious to unconscious feels delightfully, and painfully whole. The word “post-modern” is hovering around, but that seems inadequate, even corny. There is something Lynchian, Wai-ian about the juxtaposition of the subconscious against the realistic events of the text: something whole, delicious, painful and beautiful

What is the Toxicology for, of? Shall we be literal or figurative? New York (as a symbol of Bohemia), and so: Bohemia, Art, Addiction, Anger: the Soul of the Artist, the Duende? Human disconnect? The Broken, the Abused, the Abusive? What will come back in the report? Soledad? Cocaine? Immigration? Dislocation? America? Art? Cyclical Generational Disconnect? Anger? Bohemia, Duende? An also-elderly woman moans, “The forest is lonely.... Lonely. Lonely. Lonely.”

Mimi has said, “New York is home.... Fucked up as it is. Fucked up as I am.” I have often heard New Yorkers longing for the old Escape from New York New York, the city that ignited the national imagination with its addicts and criminals and decadence and indifference, its thirty-eight still listeners to murder. That city, they say, was wrought with imagination, bubbling over with a lyrical truth. We live in an age in which painters and musicians are more likely to talk about quitting dairy than picking up an eight ball. In Toxicology we study the soul of that living Bohemia, sad and lyrical and beautiful and fucked up.