"I'm not setting out to be funny. I'm just writing about people who always end up in awkward situations. It's not a question of keeping up the intensity of the comic level; if the story's not funny, it doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that they're very scared to publish humorous novels, especially humorous novels by women.The problem with humorous fiction is that everybody can understand a serious novel like Madame Bovary, whether they have a sense of humor or not. But if you do have a sense of humor, Howard Stern's book still may not strike you as funny, you know? So you're not only limiting yourself to the fifty percent of readers who have a sense of humor, but to the ten percent of that fifty percent that has your sense of humor."
Tama Janowitz
All comedy has a certain amount of unreality to it, but that amount can vary. There's totally unrealistic comedy, like the Three Stooges, where characters behave in ways that bear little or no connection to the way that we live our daily lives. The Odd Couple, on the other hand, seems like a very plausible scenario of what would happen if a neat freak and a slob were sharing an apartment; once we buy into the initial premise, the characters begin to behave in ways that we would recognize if we or those around us were placed in similar circumstances. In both of these forms, suspension of disbelief, acceptance of the fictional world in which the story is set, is easy, because they are so much like -- or unlike -- the world in which we live.
Things get trickier when the underlying premise, or the characters' behavior, isn't quite naturalistic but still isn't entirely farcical. There's room for success in that middle ground, but it's extremely difficult to achieve, in part because every viewer or reader has a separate threshhold of acceptance for unreality, a point at which attempts at humor stop being funny and become merely ridiculous.
Tama Janowitz's fifth novel, By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee, falls into this uncomfortable territory. Maud Slivenowicz, the nineteen year-old narrator of the novel, lives with her mother and four siblings -- each of whom had a separate father -- in a trailer on the outskirts of a small city in upstate New York. Her normal routine of scheming against her sister to see who can get married to wealth and power first is disrupted by a series of events which inspires her to make a daring proposal to her handsome but vapid eldest brother:
"What if you moved to Los Angeles and became a movie star?" I said."By myself?" Pierce said, but he suddenly looked very peculiar, as if something had dawned in the ooze of his primitive brain for the first time: A Thought. What we were witnessing might not have been dissimilar to viewing the first Neanderthal man to make fire; I was about to mention this, but I was afraid that, having distracted him in this crucial moment, he would never have another Thought again.
"I'll . . . I'll come with you for a short time, to help you get settled," I said. "Pierce, you really are the handsomest man, and it's been a long time since there was somebody around who could talk like Gary Cooper. There are a few other stars of that nature, but let's face it, most movie stars today are short with big noses and weak chins."
"Who's Gary Cooper?" Pierce said.
I'll be honest: my own threshhold for unreality is such that enjoying this novel became increasingly difficult. The dialogue was just stilted enough, the circumstances just contrived enough, to be ranklingly noticeable, but just when I was prepared to accept the book as a satirical farce, somebody would commit some little action that made them seem human, and I would feel obligated to start trying to care about the story again. Yet I was constantly aware that I was reading a book, finding myself unable to become absorbed in the experience of reading, to reach the state where I felt a connection or identification with the characters that made me care what happened to them. There are readers, of course, who will find the book consistently entertaining or amusing, and it's not as if I found myself throwing the book across the room in disgust; I even laughed in a couple of spots. Janowitz's sensibilities are, however, ultimately different than mine, and humor being the subjective field that it is, they may be different than yours as well. There's enough substance in By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee to make further investigation worthwhile, but satisfaction cannot be guaranteed.
Drown One River
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
