So I was a little hesitant when I started reading "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline, the fourth story in this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. That concern was misplaced. Yes, the zeitgeist of Los Angeles in important to this story, but not because the author is making some great point about the city itself. She's not really saying anything new about the city, but rather relying on what many others have already said about LA and the reader's assumptions about that place to add power to her punches at her real target, which is the bad choices of youth.
A one-paragraph digression
The compilers of the BASS series usually offer some forward in which they try to assess how the stories are somehow reflective of the times we live in. This story, especially, came with some auspicious timing. "Los Angeles" is all about bad choices young people make, and as I write this, we've just put a new justice on the Supreme Court after weeks of debating his bad choices as a young man. A lot of people suggested we should overlook those mistakes, because youth is youth, right? This story has an interesting take on that notion.
Now, on to the story
Alice has been in LA for three months. It's not clear what she did between high school and coming to LA--college, maybe? But there has definitely been some time between high school and moving to LA, because she feels responsible for acting like a big sister to seventeen-year-old Oona. She gets a job at a clothing store that sells crap, but relies on hiring sexy, young women to make the clothes appear appealing.
Alice is in LA to have a go at acting, although we don't really see a whole lot of love for acting on her part. Rather, it seems to have been something she settled on as a default:
Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reason Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.
Alice does take acting classes, which her mother pays for. She doesn't seem to think the acting classes are really that wonderful, but at the same time, she needs the classes in order to feel better about herself: "If Alice wasn't taking a class, if she wasn't otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter."
When her mother, who lives back in some unnamed but presumably flyover-country-ish and dull place, threatens to quit paying for acting lessons, Alice has to confront this very fear. So she tries an extremely unwise method for making money, one she learned about from Oona. She starts selling her used underwear to men.
Alice's rationalization
Alice is not a fool. She's not getting swept away with the glitz and glamour of LA. She sees behind the facade of the place. When Alice sees the photos of women on the walls of her store, she supposes they've been doctored "to make sex with them seem more likely." When she sees a box of the t-shirts the store sells come in "all stuffed together and flattened in a cub without tags or prices," she realizes that these shirts the stores sells for exorbitant prices are really just "junk." Alice knows enough to be shocked when she learns from Oona about the idea of selling used panties to perverts, and Alice often feels like she is supposed to be the responsible one when others are around. Yet Alice still talks herself into selling her used underwear to men she meets on the Internet. Why? Why does she allow her mind to "glaze over, not unpleasantly" in LA?
Part of it can probably be explained by the powerful effect of Los Angeles itself. It's possible to know that LA is a superficial town and still be influenced by its superficiality. Alice seems to have something of a contempt or pity for the people who stayed behind in whatever mid-western town she comes from. Maybe she feels like she has to embrace the zeitgeist of LA, even if she realizes that zeitgeist is foolish. If she doesn't, what did she come all that way for?
What is this zeitgest of LA? Well, it's pretty similar to what many others have said about the city. I was reminded throughout the story of earlier meditations on the city, such as Steve Martin's "LA Story" or how Southern California is depicted in Sheryl Crow songs or what Bojack Horseman said about the city:
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| "What's great about Los Angeles is nobody cares where you're from or who you are. It's a superficial town where you can worry about stupid shit like keeping your pool clean, and what artisanal nuts to put on your salad." |
What Cline adds to this mix of LA as a superficial town or a false paradise at the end of the rainbow is the notion that LA doesn't take itself seriously. Everything is a big joke in LA. This is made clear from the story's opening lines, where fake snow is being put onto the windows of stores as a Christmas decoration, "as if cold was just another joke." When Alice first learns about selling her panties online being a thing, she thinks it's insane, but "then, like other jokes, it became curiously possible the more she referred to it in her own mind, the uncomfortable edges softening into something innocuous." When Alice is in an uncomfortable situation with someone buying her panties, she tells herself it won't seem so bad once she can tell Oona about it and turn it into a funny story, "dramatizing incidents so that everything took on an ironic, comical tone, their lives a series of encounters that happened to them but never really affected them, at least in the retelling, their personas unflappable and all-seeing."
Alice has, in other words, talked herself into accepting a familiar mythology about young adulthood, that's it's the time for making mistakes, that in fact making mistakes is good. "It was that time of life when anytime something bad happened, she could soothe herself with that forgiving promise: it's just that time of life. When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned."
I've seen this way of thinking championed in meme form before:
The entire story can be summed up in one line, when Alice is trying hard to enjoy herself at a party she doesn't feel comfortable at: "She was having fun, wasn't she?"
There's a perverse logic that people take to the pain our bad choices leave us sometimes. We think that if it gives us a good story to tell, then it's worth it. A lot of story writers have fallen into this trap, intentionally making their lives a mess in the hopes it will help them write better. Back when I was still an evangelical, I heard a preacher who felt he had to convince young people that you shouldn't go and make bad choices in your life just because it would give you a more interesting testimony of how God had rescued you; it was fine to just say you'd made good choices your whole life and that because of that you'd been spared from needing God to pull you out of the gutter.
The truth is that your life is not a joke. It's worth taking seriously, and it's worth avoiding going down wrong roads that waste your time or lead you to somewhere dangerous. That doesn't mean you need to spend time later in life regretting those decisions, of course. If you've tried to make good choices and failed, it's okay to try to find something redeemable in the time you spent going down those wrong roads. I've certainly made a lot of choices I regret, choices I'd do entirely differently if I had another chance. I can still try to mine those bad choices for stories to tell, but that doesn't change the fact that those were still the wrong choices. The fact that you can redeem parts of a bad choice isn't a reason to make choices as though they don't matter.
Something I can't quite figure out in this story
So selling panties to men and trafficking off her own sexual desirability is a wrong choice for Alice, but is it a wrong choice for everyone? Are Alice and Oona just two different people, and what might be a wrong choice for one might work for the other? Every time Alice is shocked by the sexual behavior of a man, Oona just laughs it off. When Alice wears clothes that sexually objectify her, she literally feels them attacking her, but Oona "was easy and confident, already well versed in her own beauty." Oona seems to even have a natural understanding of how to use her beauty for profit. She gets men to buy clothes at the store, from which she will get a commission. She has been offered a commercial, if only her worried parents would allow her to be in it.
I was wondering if Oona's different relationship to her own sexuality could be seen as recalling an old argument in feminism. Some feminists feel that it is fine for a woman to use her sexuality as long as she is profiting by it and it fulfills her. If you enjoy sex, and people will pay you for it, then you are using what is normally dis-empowering in society (being a woman) to achieve power in the form of money.
Oona seemed to fit this category of woman, except for one scene. At a beach party, we see that Oona is wearing a one-piece. A man looking at her (gazing at her, to use the feminist term) complains about her choice of swimwear. "I hate those one-pieces she wears...She's embarrassed about her tits."
It could be that the man who said these lines was just projecting. He's just seen Alice's bare breasts, because she was pretending to be brazen by sunning topless. He might have just been pretending that he admired Alice's choice by comparing Oona badly to her. But he might also have known something Alice didn't, that Oona's whole act was just that, acting. I'm still not sure how to read that part of the story.
Notes on the writing
Damn, this story goes down easy. There are a lot of stories I have to force myself to get through, but this one read as easily as watching a sitcom on Netflix. I could have binge-read a couple more like it.
Cline is one of those writers who makes me feel like shit, because she's capable of creating lines that are just concertina-wire sharp. I don't have a gear like that I can shift into. Here are a few of the better lines I haven't quoted already:
-"Inside, the store was bright white and shiny, a low-level hum in the background from the neon signs. It was like being inside a computer."
-"The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and beach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness."
-"Completing classes had the sheen of building blocks, tokens being collected, no matter if they had no visible use."
-"Everyone wanted to enjoy their tea more than anyone else enjoyed theirs."
-"Worse: the ones taken on the shores of a lake or in front of sunsets, photos name-dropping the natural world, the plain, dull beauty of the shore."
FOR ANOTHER LOOK ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S POST ON IT.
Well friends, once again several days later than I expected to, but yes, i would still like to make some comments, and then perhaps you feel inclined to respond. (BTW, Karen, I was pleased with the last story, that you were interested in my going on about Eastern European history and my adventures and such, but really, I am not sure I should be hijacking space here on Jake's blog to talk about that. If you'd like, I am happy to talk about that by email, and of course Jake, if you cared, i can cc you. I am always delighted to talk about my life, as most people are. haha.) So, most likely once again I will get very distracted here and talk about everything but Cline's story. But sooner or later maybe i will say something about it. Reading the blogs of the two of you tells me loud and clear, again, how happy I am to not be doing a blog. I am delighted to read yours, to comment, but don't really want to dig deep enough into the stories, making connections, to warrant my own space. Let me talk about the story at least a bit before I get to the tangential stuff. haha Jake, you say that this is a story about bad choices, and I think I can buy that. But you also say that the story went down easy, like a sitcom, and while you are finding that commendable, I read it, shrugged, went meh and who cares. Yes, the suspense is good and of course we are all screaming at her "no, no, no" and are relieved when it seems like she will not ultimately pay the big price for her poor choices. But still I left the story unimpressed. The lines you quote are fine, but not great, I don't think. And once again, and I am surprised this is becoming a refrain for me, I really hated the fact that she, in the end notes, says "I wanted to think about 'cost'". Where did she start , in her initial impetus? With character? With plot? With setting? Or with an idea: let me write a story demonstrating cost? Does it matter, what she started out with, he said, thinking out loud? Well, actually I think it does. If I hadn't read that comment at the end, did not know about it, would I still have felt dissatisfied, would I have known that she began with an idea rather than a character or a setting? I think so. Is the predominance of an idea the negative that I am objecting to? Clearly something that at least I have to think about. Did she only come up with the character of Alice to make a point? I am not sure. But that comment immediately grates on me.
ReplyDeletePart II: Yes, the thought that LA, and everything about it, is a joke, yes, I buy that and I think if that is as far as she went, I'd be fine. But "let's talk about cost", no. So moving now to the more tangential: my mother. Begins to work as a successful writer at the age of 16, marries at 20, telling her father who is quite dubious about the whole thing that "if it does not work, we'll just get a divorce," has a child at not quite 22, and plants the child with her parents for the next six years, because she is too busy writing and living the bohemian life. Divorce of course, too, eventually. Her refrain to the child, years later, whenever there was a choice between acting and not, even poorly, was "well, we can always write a story about it, Andrew, can't we." She lived it, personified it. Bad choice after bad choice and always a shrug, a laugh, and it will be a story. Quite recently, as she was eighty, and had a sense of death coming soon, she said to me, "You don't still think that I abandoned you when you were a child" and as much as I tried to be loving and supportive to her in her last years, I could not lie on that one, because I DO think she abandoned me, and it is pretty hard to forgive. So, bad choices and stories, yeah, I have feelings on the subject. I appreciate her work as a writer and am glad she produced it. From the perspective of the child, though, the work does not justify that choice. Sorry, Mom. Love you, but...I am grieving you, but...Is life a big joke? Or good fodder for stories? Well, sure, but someone pays the price.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew - I, too, wasn't really captured by this story. I did see a couple of elements that interested me, and they fit with Jake's idea of bad choices and the author's stated idea of the cost of those choices: Alice submits so easily to sexual exploitation, from her job interview to selling panties, as this becomes normalized to her. I'm hypersensitive to the process of normalization of the bizarre right now because it's happening everywhere (this morning, I saw a notice that there's an organization teaching students how to stop massive bleeding after a school shooting, for instance; we no longer try to provide a safe society for our kids, we teach them to adapt to violence).
DeleteI think your comments about your mom are fascinating and show a connection to the "bad choices" aspect of the story that you may not have consciously recognized. In these blogs, since I lack Jake's writing training and experience, I tend to focus on my own reaction to the story, and try to pin it down: what did the writer do that brought out that reaction, be it positive or negative? Just the other day (post up tomorrow) I recognized myself in a story, in a character I hated, and realized the author was letting me see myself through my father's eyes. It was humbling, and painful to recognize what an ass I was at times, but it also brings me closer to understanding that relationship, and that's a lot for a story, written by a total stranger, to do.
I'll try to reply to parts one and two at the same time here, Andrew.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I don't see how you could ever "hijack" space here. I'm just glad people are here talking. It's not hugely important that it be 100% on-topic all the time.
It seems to me--and maybe I've misread your comments here--that you aren't crazy about the story for two reasons. First, because of the way it might have been written specifically to make a point about the cost of bad choices. Secondly, because the language didn't dazzle you like it did me. I can't do much about the second thing, but maybe I can address the first.
I don't think Cline wrote the story from the jump in order to make a point about bad choices. As you know, there are a lot of ways to start a story...a bit of dialogue in your head, an image, a character who seems to emerge fully alive inside your brain. You start trying to write your way into the world that little portal opened for you. At some point, you've got enough of a story where you can step back from it and ask yourself what the story seems to be telling you about our universe. At that point, it's appropriate to start trying to move the pieces of your story around according to the themes you think you see emerging. I think that's what Cline did. When she said she wanted to say something about the cost of choices, I think she meant she was writing the story and at some point she realized that's what the story needed to be about.
Of course, even if she meant that she wrote it from word one meaning to tell a moral tale about the cost of choices, I'm not opposed to that. It used to be a perfectly acceptable way to write. If you can have character-driven stories or plot-driven stories, why not theme-driven ones? It's theme I mostly read literature for, after all. I want to know what the story has to say about the world. I don't think that's what Cline did, but I wouldn't hate the story if she had.
I thought this story was a really smart take on the whole "it's cool to make mistakes when you're young" idea. In fact, I think this story would have been good for your young mother--it seems to debunk the whole notion that anything is okay if it can make a good story. That ending was just perfect. Every reader just got done yelling at Alice not to get in the car, and in the end, it's the pervert who gets to say what everyone wants to say to her: "You're only making it worse!"
Thanks, both of you.
ReplyDeleteLet me just throw out one more thought: I keep looking at the ending, and keep wondering. Is there a possibility that in fact it is NOT a happy ending, that in fact she is just doing wish-fulfillment about telling Oona about it on Saturday, that the guy "went to press the unlock button" but didn't. I don't know. I am seeing some ambiguity.
I suppose that's possible. I think it's enough, maybe, that she's realizing the path she's on and the ends it might lead to without actually coming to those ends. But the possibility that the ending we all feared is actually hidden inside of another ending is interesting.
DeleteI agree, Andrew, it reads as Alice's intent, her imagining what she will do, not as narration as I'd first thought. I'm embarrassed that I mentally threw this story in the trash can and didn't read it closely enough to pick that up. That adds a great deal of threat. Now the only reassurance is that the guy is reaching for the unlock button, but at the same time, he delivers the rapey-est line ever: "Relax, you're only making it worse."
DeleteI'm more convinced than ever that this is a story about sexual exploitation. Alice accepts as normal that her store wants photos of her rather than a resume, and her manager gives her tight clothes to wear. That leads her to accept the male customers hanging out in the store as normal, and even Pantyguys as normal. The normalization of exploitation makes her feel almost silly for not wanting to get into the car, where we leave her, perhaps to be safe, perhaps not. But if she is safe, will she accept this as the new normal?
I've updated my blog post with a shout-out to you, Andrew, for picking up on this.