Something Red

Note the Soviet poster cover art as if this would compensate for the political superficiality contained within

This is going to be one of those book/movie reviews that piss people off because it is based only on a partial examination of the piece of garbage in question. So, if you don’t like “unfair” critiques, don’t read any further. Are you still here? Okay now, go on with you.

I first learned of the novel Something Red in the generally very shrewd Bookforum, the print magazine whose website is host to the links aggregated Monday through Friday by Alfredo Perez. His Political Theory Daily Review was incorporated into Bookforum a couple of years ago and is must reading.

The “red” in the title is a reference to the Goldstein family, whose lives have been touched to one degree or another by radical politics. Sigmund, the grandfather, was in the CP. His son Dennis is an erstwhile 60s radical and now middle-aged bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture with a wife named Sharon who is a fancy dinner caterer, a teenage bulimic daughter named Vanessa and a son Ben who is heavy into drugs, sports and sex. Eventually, Ben becomes some kind of activist after entering Brandeis University. Despite the title, the book is hardly interested in their beliefs, Indeed, from everything I’ve been able to glean about this stupid novel, the real subject is food not politics, as this quote from the Bookforum review would indicate:

They’d been lying in bed watching President Carter talk about the energy crisis, and she’d opened her night-table drawer, taken out an emery board, and begun to saw at her nails. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America, Carter had said, and Sharon had turned to her husband. “Let’s have a family dinner for Ben.”

As I thumbed through the book yesterday at Barnes and Noble, I found references to food and eating on what seemed to be every other page. The New York Times, which seems to love novels or memoirs that mine the left for comic possibilities (When Skateboards will be Free, the most recent instance), fell all over itself praising Something Red yesterday:

Throughout the novel, food is an almost constant preoccupation. While Dennis’s mother is famous for her terrible meringue cookies, Sharon is an artist in the kitchen. Vanessa, at once the most heartrending and exasperating character, secretly gorges on her mother’s crab cakes and blintzes, sometimes directly from the freezer. This domestic obsession with food turns out to be as dangerous as the grain embargo at Dennis’s office. During one elegant catering job, Sharon forces Vanessa to fill in as a waitress; looking out a window while she’s preparing a flaming dessert, Sharon spots the girl crouching in the bushes, gorging on hunks of lamb and potatoes, and is so distracted she sets herself on fire. As they rush to the hospital, Vanessa’s greatest anxiety is not about her mother but about where she’ll be able to empty her stomach.

When not writing about food, either being eaten or puked back up, Gilmore’s main interest appears to be providing some kind of nostalgia trip in the spirit of Ang Lee’s recent and atrocious movie “Taking Woodstock” or the 1983 “Big Chill”, the most egregious example of 1960s exploitation. The NY Times notes:

“Something Red” is a delectable time capsule, with plenty of references to events and products, especially odoriferous ones, that plant us squarely in the moment. Love’s Baby Soft makes an appearance, as well as K-Tel records and Gunne Sax shirts.

Not the kind of thing I want to plunk $25 down for, especially after reading this in the Bookforum review:

But missing from these meticulous political portraits is any trait that comes across as quirky or even passionate. Gilmore depicts political activism without the anger, utopian visions with no hint of the peculiarities of an Abbie Hoffman or, for that matter, a Jimmy Carter. For stretches of the book, this blinkered outlook is best summed up in Vanessa’s sulky prophecy of how an upcoming parents-weekend visit to Brandeis will unfold: “It’ll just be me and bitter Dad and burnt Mom heading up to my hippie brother’s dorm to be a family. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?”

We learn this family’s every thought, every detail they see, every fold of their flesh. But not one of these people conjures a piercing observation or holds on to an emotion for long. Vanessa, abandoned by her brother, can wake up naked on a strange campus in broad daylight after having experienced “unmitigated fear” that she had sex with his friend while tripping; within a few hours, she’s canoodling with that friend and thinking her brother looks sweet leaning on his girlfriend’s shoulder. One wishes Gilmore had made at least one character a true skinhead or a rabid feminist.

Here’s Jennifer Gilmore explaining why she decided to write such a novel:

She was inspired apparently by the example of all the “radicals”, from draft card burners to people who go to Grateful Dead concerts. I guess I’ll have to wait a long time for someone like Jennifer Gilmore to write about a real red, like me. I doubt that the New York Times will give as much space to the comic book memoir I worked on with Harvey Pekar (or even mention it at all), but I’ll bet it will be more accurate and a lot more fun to read, especially with all the great artwork.

Now, as I said, I wouldn’t waste money on this piece of garbage novel but I did take the trouble to read an excerpt from chapter one on the publisher’s website. Her questionable prose is followed by my comments in italics.

As Sharon made her way around the kitchen, she pictured each one piling paper-thin sheets of prosciutto (well, not her father, whose newly kosher regime she refused to acknowledge) on melon wedges, and spreading runny Brie on the baguette she’d baked yesterday. Imagining her family eating in the yard bordered by the lit tiki lights pleased her. More, she had to admit, than actually sitting there with them.

Ms. Gilmore should have written a book about cooking, her true métier it would seem.

Sharon hadn’t been able to focus on the speech [Carter about the American malaise], perhaps because her son’s impending departure had caused alarm, or was it a symptom of the general malaise of the country that the president was speaking about? Apathy was not like her; once Sharon had been a woman who had cared about politics deeply. Too deeply, perhaps, and this had led her to flee conservative Los Angeles, her parents’ Los Angeles, the one with her father’s balding B-movie cronies chewing cigars on the back deck and discussing the HUAC hearings. I don’t give one goddamn who goes down, they’d said. Communists? Just ask me. They’d spit names up at the sky, toward the fuzzy line of the San Gabriels. That Los Angeles. Sharon had come east to George Washington University, even though Helen said no one smart went to GW, ever, and at the end of her junior year Sharon had found herself sitting at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting planning the Freedom Riders’ trip from Washington to New Orleans, to register voters and fight Jim Crow in each city along the way.

I think the idea that this caterer ever found herself working with SNCC is about as plausible as me catering a fancy dinner for Donald Trump.

It was 1979; only a decade and a half previously, Sharon had been pregnant with Vanessa when Louise had come to D.C. to march for jobs and freedom. As they’d entered the Mall, she handed Sharon a fistful of marbles. So horses will slip and fall and the pigs will be crushed, Louise hissed. Things could get violent, she’d said. Dennis had looked askance as he held Ben high, so he could see just how many people were standing against inequality, and Sharon remembered fingering the marbles, the feel of them pinging against one another along her hips when she moved. They’d given her a sense of reckless power, but she did not let them fall. Sharon was no revolutionary, she knew that now, but she had tried and she had cared profoundly, and she had been so furious at her father that she had fled for the East Coast, but in the end she had not defied him. Yet, she had thought that glorious day, it was not every girl who could say she carried marbles.

This paragraph epitomizes Jennifer Gilmore’s grasp of what it meant to be a “radical”: carrying marbles to a demonstration that was about as mainstream as you can get, given its sponsorship by the AFL-CIO. I assume her research on K-Tel records was more exacting.

I will conclude with an exchange between Sigmund, the grandfather who was in the CP and his son Dennis, a Department of Agriculture bureaucrat. I could write better dialog on this after drinking a bottle of cheap wine, and I might some day.

“The spell of revolution is powerful.” Sigmund wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Right, Tatiana?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it is in this family, isn’t it?” she said.

Sharon nodded and Dennis bent his head and resumed eating.

“Hmmm,” Dennis said. “You didn’t seem to think that during Vietnam.”

“That’s simply not true,” Sigmund said. “You know I was as against the war as you were. Our methods of protest were different, absolutely. But what I’m saying here has nothing to do with Vietnam. Nothing at all. Clearly you don’t understand.”

Dennis nodded. “Well, to my generation, Vietnam defined us. But while we were rioting in the streets, your friends were inside, writing about it. It is a lot more relevant than the Bolsheviks, that’s for sure.”

“Every movement can be traced back to the Bolsheviks,” Sigmund said. “You cannot turn your back on history.”

“Well, I think I have a better understanding of Vietnam. And let me tell you something. You can’t turn away from the future either, Dad. It’s going to happen again. Because we’re giving the Soviets their Vietnam now, aren’t we? This is what will happen if—or I should say when—there’s an invasion in Afghanistan. The country will be ripped to bits. And it will never end! You know we’ve authorized funding for arming the mujahideen there, don’t you?”

“Of course this doesn’t surprise me.” Sigmund scratched his throat. “Because they are anti-communists. It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“Well, it’s true,” Dennis said. “And I’m telling you, it will be just the same as Vietnam.”

“Dennis,” Sigmund said, leaning toward his son, “why is it always this way? We are on the same side.”