Weetzie Bat's Back, and This Time She's Bland

Of all the small unfairnesses of life, the sharpest one is this:  the better you are, the more is expected of you.  Being possessed of a certain obedient diligence greatly valued by teachers and other animal trainers, I cut myself a lot on this one in school.  I remember one teacher and one paper in particular, and a minus tacked on to an A grade.  This was a mandatory English class at a community college, the kind of class you weren't allowed to test out of or around.  You can imagine how dreary.  I kept myself awake by writing papers that were just barely and only technically within the guidelines set, and tried to choose topics that would annoy my teacher, a sardonic man who had the nerve to want to teach me to write better instead of admiring how well I wrote already.  The minus in question was to keep me on my toes.  I left out a key adjective, and he called me on it.  It wouldn't lower my average any, but it still made me scream.  He smiled and shrugged, completely unruffled by my indignation.  If I wanted to be a writer, I'd better learn how to handle criticism now.

I did end up liking him, and I've learned since that I learn best kicking and screaming.  But at the time, I hated the fact that my reward for being his brightest student was to be given less slack and more red ink than anyone else in class.

Well, as a lot of far ickier teachers have observed, a lot of things in life aren't fair.  So it should come as no surprise that I'm coming down extra hard on a writer whose work has made me happy in the past.  And since she's a best seller with a cult following, I know she'll be weeping and gnashing her teeth that the woman who bought two whole (paperback) copies of previous books is frowning disapprovingly over a library copy of the latest novel.  (With all the book talk going on over here, you'd think somebody would send me a review copy of something now and then.  You'd think wrong.  They're too busy sending me ads for computers I can't understand and drugs that only work on body parts I'm not equipped with.)

Two weeks before I went in for surgery, I saw a copy of Francesca Lia Block's Necklace of Kisses on the new book rack at our newly opened library and squealed loudly enough to earn a stern look from the librarian and an embarrassed groan from my eight-year-old son.  (Tragic as it is that it isn't all about him, I do insist on having a certain amount of browsing time for just plain me when we go to the library together, and when he gets snippy, which is pretty much every time it's my turn to take a look around, I sweetly point out that if someone hadn't insisted on being homeschooled, I'd be able to do all manner of boring errands all by myself, and I was pretty sure that the public school not two blocks from us would be open for mid-year enrollment if we hurried over now since this whole letting Mommy have three seconds to enjoy herself at the library thing was clearly not okay.)  I quieted myself down and picked up the book, which mentioned Weetzie Bat on the cover and please book deity let that mean that it was actually about her because I could really use some --

-- okay, the reason I'm hesitating over using the phrase "light reading" is that it's generally used as a euphemism for trash, rather than what it should be, which is simply the opposite of heavy reading.  Heavy reading is the kind of book you proudly brandish on the bus so that perfect strangers will know how cultured and amazing you are.  Either the title or the author or both are known even to those who never read anything weightier than last month's People magazine.  While I'm not for a moment against reading books worth reading, heavy reading does tend to have, as George Carlin put it so wonderfully in an entirely different context, a favoritism toward the dead.  Not just that the authors themselves have usually left this plane, but there tend to be lots of corpses within the writing as well -- if not actual dead bodies, at least the grim remains of hope or happiness or that one true love that will never be found again.  All very well and good, but every now and then one is in the mood for something well-written and lovely.  With a happy ending, no less.  Immediately prior to surgery, I thought it was time to take a break from Thomas Hardy; and the next author on my list, Henry James, wasn't exactly known as Mr. Chipper even to his friends.  I was ready for something light and bright and sparkling.  Of course there's always Austen, thank heaven fasting, but the last time I read her it was scaring even me how often I could close my eyes in the middle of a page and not notice any real difference in word flow.  I'm no natural memorizer.  If I'm feeding Austen's characters their lines, it's time to cut down to a more reasonable ration of her work.  Say, no more than two or three of her books a month.

As I was saying.  Feeling the need for something not heavy but still worthwhile, I hoped that this new novel was about the character Weetzie Bat, because I have an inordinate fondness for two earlier novels she figures prominently in:  Weetzie Bat (duh) and Witch Baby. 

Weetzie herself is not necessarily my favorite person in the books, or in the world.  There's nothing wrong with her; we just have nothing in common, and everything she is is nothing I can ever be.  In high school, I was the bookworm social nobody who wasn't oblivious enough to the outside world not to notice that it was entirely oblivious to her.  My idea of really dressing up was (and is) putting on a new pair of jeans.  Having since learned that there are certain advantages, especially for a writer, to the invisibility that goes along with not being beautiful, I have yet to learn how to wholeheartedly enjoy that state.  So how am I supposed to feel about a girl so gorgeous that even the gay men can't resist her, and so gorgeously dressed that she sets fashions rather than following them?

Ambivalent at best, that's how.  But I love the Weetzie universe.  Not because it's in Los Angeles and so am I.  Because it's not quite in Los Angeles.  It's Los Angeles as it ought to be, or you wish it could be, or it could be if this were a world where wishes come true.  They do, in Weetzie's L.A.  Just now and then, and there's always a price.  In fact, the wishes Weetzie is granted in her first book might be seen as only slightly lighter-hearted than those given to the finders of the monkey's paw.  (You remember "The Monkey's Paw," don't you?  That story we all had to read in high school about the withered paw you could make wishes on that would really come true, but only three to a customer and always with a horrible twist?  Sure you do.) 

I think that's why I don't mind the magic of the books, even when it's a bit spun-sugary -- because it's as obedient to a certain law of give-and-take, no-light-without-its-darkness, as our universe is to its laws of physics.  Weetzie Bat's story of love and happily ever after has its shadows along with its happy ending, and was promptly followed by Witch Baby, with whose moody main character I felt far more kinship -- a brooding, watchful little girl whose purple eyes missed nothing and who felt overshadowed by her more conventionally beautiful sister. 

So I was happy to see that Necklace was another Weetzie Bat adventure.  I took it home and started reading it in a proper setting:  a bubble bath right at the beginning of the evening, with a box of chocolates close at hand and no interruptions in sight.

I shut it ten minutes later and reached for my emergency backup book.  (Yes, I always have an emergency back-up book in the tub.  And in the car, and at the bank.  I intend to have one in my grave.  You never know when your main read is going to give out.  I marvel at the optimism and simple faith of people who have only one book with them at any given time.  Unless it's something they've already read, how can they be sure it won't turn on them?  And if it is something they've already read, mightn't they have a sudden craving for something new and different?  Sentiments like this go far toward explaining why I once routinely went about with a minimum of four books in my backpack, though I'd left school years before, and only cut down when I started in on that motherhood thing and found someone else's alleged needs encroaching on my purse space.) 

Look, I can deal with disappointment, even in a book.  I'm a big girl now, really I am.  If the book had been just plain not as good as the two I've mentioned and adore, all right.  It happens.  I had mentally prepared myself for that.  As I had for the possibility that this book might be just as good as the other two and I might not like it anyway.  That happens, too.  Block wrote a book called Cherokee Bat about Witch Baby's sister, and it just didn't do much for me and that's no one's fault but my own.  I just didn't like Cherokee (the character) as much as I did Witch Baby.  No biggie.

But I hadn't really prepared myself for the chance that Necklace might be a real stinker.  Not just not as good, but actively bad.

Some people will say that there's no such thing as a good book or a bad book, because it's all a matter of opinion and one person's bomb is another person's life-changing epiphany.  Some people will say anything.  The fact is, Necklace is bad.  I can say that because I can say why, because I made myself go back and check it out again and forced myself to finish it this time, if only to warn the world how bad it was the way I wish someone had warned me.  It's bad because it does what every bad sequel to a good movie does.  It looks at the original work, picks out the elements that made people laugh or cry or gasp, and throws them onto the page (and then the screen) without any sense of timing or context.

In Witch Baby and Weetzie Bat, Block frequently uses lists, in paragraph form, in order to set her scenes.  She just goes on and on, noun after noun after noun making up one great crazy-quilt of a sentence, but never reaching a point that the reader drifts off, jumps ahead impatiently, or begs for release.  Here, for instance, is the very beginning of Weetzie Bat, where Weetzie is despising her fellow L.A. high school students for not understanding the true amazingness of living in their city:

They didn't care that Marilyn's prints were practically in their backyard at Graumann's; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer's market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor's; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter's, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.

That sentence has everything:  color, flavor, and enough semi-colons to make a fan of Melville or Shirley Jackson swoon.  It's wonderful.  It's perfectly paced.  It's fun. 

And here is the shorter beginning of Witch Baby:

In the room full of musical instruments, watercolor paints, candles, sparkles, beads, books, basketballs, roses, incense, surfboards, china pixie heads, lanky toy lizards and a rubber chicken, Witch Baby was curling her toes, tapping her drumsticks and pulling on the snarl balls in her hair.

I don't know about you, but I love that room.  I want to go live in that room.  Right now.  Never mind that it would be a bitch to dust.  It's beautiful. 

How did Block go from that kind of writing to this scene of Weetzie Bat, leaving home some twenty years after she met and moved in with the love of her life, My Secret Agent Lover Man?  (Yes, that's his real name.  It has to do with the wish she made that came true in that first book.  Except in this book apparently Block got tired of typing all those words, so now he's just Max, the name he went by when he left Weetzie, briefly, in the first book of their adventures.)  Weetzie is packing, and here's what she decides to bring with her.  Bear in mind that this is all in italics in the book.  God only knows why.  And he's not telling me.

a lime green, pink, and orange kimono-print string bikini she has made herself
two fresh, unopened packs of men's extra-small white tank tops from the surplus store
new-fallen-snowy-white Levi's 501 jeans
men's black silk gabardine trousers from the Salvation Army, tailored to fit
a pair of orange suede old-school trainers with white stripes
orange-leather, silver-studded slides
some bikini underwear and bras in black, white, pink, lime green, and orange
a pink-and-green Pucci tunic from her best friend Dirk's Grandma Fifi

When did Block get so hammer-handed with the nouns?  This isn't a scene-setter.  This is a brag list.  Look, Weetzie's forty and boy, does she know how to dress!  And she's kept her figure, too!

That's another thing.  Knowing exactly what age Weetzie is.  Such details were left satisfyingly vague in the earlier works.  When Witch Baby skates off to find her birth mother (and herself) in her own book, we really don't know how old she is.  She's old enough to fall in love with a boy.  She's young enough to bite Weetzie's fingers when Weetzie tries to feed her vegetables.  Maybe about eight, or ten.  And how old was Weetzie herself when she decided to have a baby?  Twenty-five?  Seventeen?  I enjoyed wondering. 

No such fun in this book.  Weetzie is forty.  She's opened a shop.  She's having a relationship crisis.  She's going to go live in a hotel for a while and figure things out.  Blah, blah, blah.

Not that there's anything wrong with that plot.  It's just that it's so spelled out.  Well, everything in this book is.  Block has lost all ability to show rather than tell.  Weetzie's life has lost its magic and so she has to go find some magic and look!  The hotel she's staying at is magic!  Lots and lots of magical characters everywhere!  Hey, there's another one! 

The magic in the previous books was subtle and specific and though one never quite learned what its rules and limits were, the reader felt sure that they were there and were being obeyed.  There was one flat-out literally magical incident per book, offering itself to the title character and leading her into the next important stage in her life, though giving no assistance once she reached it.  Whatever happened then was entirely up to her, and was brought about through her own actions.  The only other magic was the less literal kind that we find and recognize in ordinary life -- love and friendship and the strange beauty of this nowhere city in which we live.

That was another thing missing in this title.  You'd never know it was set in Los Angeles.  The other books are rich in telling details.  Not always cute or pretty ones.  The wealth of those who manage to make it in the industry is contrasted with the expressionless despair of those whose only success, if you want to call it that, has been in finding a place in which the weather is mild enough to allow for year-round outdoor homelessness.  The ubiquitous sunshine falls on grungy streets, and cigarette-choked gutters lead directly to the sea.  Block celebrated even the least lovely details of "a city called Shangri-L.A. or Hell-A or just Los Angeles" before.  Where is her city now?  I can't find it.

Maybe it got crowded out by all the stupid effing magic at this hotel. 

Okay, sorry.  But going from one genie in the lamp in one scene in each of the previous books to a new magic character on pretty much every page of this one is like going from the delicate enchantment of The Tempest to a sort of Disneyland from Hell, where you can't open your car door without whacking yet another new enchanted character.  There's no rhyme or reason, only an occasional bout of ham-handed symbolism.  Here's a woman who turned bright blue when her boyfriend left her.  There's a maid who's invisible.  Block must have been up all night thinking of that one.  As for the rest, there are some decent ideas, but they're packed in so tightly and rushed by so swiftly, as if Block has a quota to meet, that the reader never gets a chance to enjoy the view.  Like being on a tour bus at night, and at twice the usual speed.  What's the point?

The dialogue is just as mediocre.  I don't mind if conversations in books don't sound like anything anyone would ever really say.  I don't remember the critic who said (without losing a touch of admiration for the book in question) that no human born ever spoke the way the characters in Jane Eyre do, but she made an excellent point.  And it's still an excellent book (just to indulge in understatement for a moment).  I'd go ahead and say that the dialogue was probably the weakest spot in the earlier Weetzie books, but it didn't seem to matter.  The stories were too engaging, and the talk never lasted long anyway since everyone was too busy doing to waste much time chatting. 

But nobody does much of anything in Necklace except talk, and it's painful.  Block is like one of those biographers who have learned so much about their subjects that they're unwilling to deprive their readers of a single detail.  We have to hear every word of every conversation Weetzie ever has with anyone.  I hit the screaming point (and the book hit the bathroom floor) during Weetzie's first conversation with the room service operator.  "I'm sorry, miss.  [What did she miss?  Oh, you mean Miss.  Did I mention there are a lot of typos in this book, too?  No?  Well, I'm sure I will.]  We only have the Afternoon Snack menu available now.  Until four-thirty, when we have the Pre-Supper menu available.  Then we have the Early Supper menu.  At six-thirty we have the Dinner Proper menu."  Tired yet?  He's not even halfway done explaining all her options to her, and that's just one chunk of one long stretch of dialogue including such shining gems as "Do you think you might have one piece of fruit lying around?"  I love food as much as anyone, and reading about food is one of the rare pleasures of life so far as I'm concerned; but I simply could not get it up for celebrating the fact that in the middle of the afternoon Weetzie was, against all odds and her particular menu options, able to procure fresh kiwi. 

Unfortunately, the endless hmmm-what-should-I-eat-now conversations are preferable to the alleged humor in the non-food conversations.  The room service guy stops by to chat with Weetzie at one point, and wishes he could stay longer.  "I'd like to talk to you more," he says.  "Sure," Weetzie answers.  "I get off in an hour," he continues.  Which leads to the following inexcusable sitcom garbage: "For a minute, she just looked at him.  Her face felt hot.  Then she realized he wasn't talking about getting off that way."

Please.

There's a lot of "that way" going on at this hotel, since it seems to be a requirement there, whether one is applying for work or just a room for the night, and whether one is a boy or a girl or both, to have the hots for Weetzie.  The sex is so unsexy that one imagines at first that that might be the point.  Maybe Weetzie is supposed to learn that life without nookie could be a lot worse.  I was ready for the convent myself after the first gem or two in that necklace of kisses. 

I'd thought from the delicate glances at and then away from sex in the previous books that Block understood how unappealing a hard (sorry) direct stare at that particular activity is, at least so far as reading or writing is concerned.  There is a decent amount of sex in Weetzie Bat, but you just catch a glance at the edges of it and it's all, in my opinion, pretty hot exactly by virtue of being so elusive.  Weetzie and Dirk do a bit of tramping around before they settle down to true love, and I enjoyed the glimpses I caught of it.  Weetzie and Dirk and his true love Duck decide to make a baby together, and you don't see so much as the first kiss of it and I still got hot under the collar from the delicate dancing around Block did.  And there's no sex at all in Witch Baby, just the gentle eroticism of a girl falling in love with a boy when they're much too young to do anything about it (and maybe even too young to know what they'd do about it if they could), and it's perfect. 

I'd say that Block lost her light touch in this arena when she set about writing Necklace, but it seems more as if she deliberately threw it away.  She sounds as if she's afraid of not seeming with-it enough if she doesn't slam her readers with a barrage of tongues and erections and all sorts of other things that are far better left to the imagination or experience than relentlessly described.  The fact that there is, technically, no consummation in the entire book doesn't make the constant lewdness any easier to take. 

Maybe Block has spent too much time writing and not enough time reading.  I can't think of another explanation for her not understanding the simple fact that sex per se is not necessarily erotic.  Maybe when you're a teenager, the merest mention of the subject is enough to automatically put you in the mood; but we're not all teenagers, and this book does seem to be aimed at grownups. 

Bad enough that Block doesn't seem to realize this time around what's erotic; she doesn't even always get what's physically possible.  And no, I'm not objecting to the ever-present unenchanting magickness of it all.  I mean things like this:  Weetzie meets a woman named Shelley and finds out she's actually a mermaid who's been forced to have plastic surgery in order to look human.  It's a bit of a jolt, by the way, to realize that Shelley isn't happy where (and with whom) she is, because the first-impression dialogue comes across as if she's very worldly-wise and sexually sophisticated.  When she meets Weetzie in the hotel swimming pool, she asks Weetzie what her husband or boyfriend does, since he must make a lot of money to allow Weetzie to stay in such a place.  When Weetzie replies that she's at the hotel on her own dime, Shelley responds, "Oh, honey, we've got to get him in line.  A man has to take care of his possessions."  Then, when her own man Sal, a gray-haired guy, wanders up, she says, "Honey, this is Weetzie.  Isn't that a cute name?"  She adds, "She's an independent woman," "as if she were talking about a life-threatening disease."

Now, does this sound like a mythical creature pining for home, kidnapped, imprisoned, and longing for nothing more than to swim away and see her mer-mama again; or does it sound like a match made in Hollywood?  We never learn why it is up to Weetzie to rescue her and bring her back to the ocean, since we see Shelley out and about by herself while Sal is still asleep in the early morning, so presumably she could just leave if she put her mer-mind to it.  And we never learn why the Tom-and-Huck elaborate scheme Weetzie concocts is necessary.  Couldn't Shelley just call a cab and get herself to the beach? 

But back to the how-is-this-possible sex.  After Shelley tells Weetzie that she's a mermaid, Weetzie replies that she believes her.  Shelley says, "It might help if you kiss me," and then "smiled again and dabbed her lips with the tip of her tongue."  First of all, you lost me with that sequence of events.  Help with what?  We haven't learned that Shelley's sad to be ashore -- nothing she's said or done lends itself to that conclusion.  Even if that's what she's talking about, why would kissing a woman she's just met help?  And second -- ewww.  Dabbed her lips with her tongue?  I tried that line out on my husband and then I tried to suit action to words, as they say, and I was able to manage some dabbing but it looked more like I was checking for stray cookie crumbs.  Didn't do a thing for either of us.  So the blonde ex-mermaid with the big bazoombas (real ones, she assures Weetzie) does this and the straight girl says okay?  I'm not buying it.

Shelley isn't the only one at the hotel coming on to Weetzie, as I mentioned.  The aforementioned room-service clerk, Pan, makes it clear that he'd be happy to warm up her lonely bed for the duration of her stay.  His moves are just as ridiculously repulsive as Shelley's.  In the course of a conversation in which he and Weetzie compare the movies and television shows they enjoy, he mentions that he loves "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."  Which I applaud, being an admirer myself.  Then he gives a really icky why. "I figure if a show makes me laugh, cry, or come, I have to give it credit.  If it does all three..."  Later, when he makes his first direct pass at Weetzie (all those come-hither glances and prolonged conversations before could have just been something in his eye and an overdeveloped sense of customer service, respectively), we get to hear those three little verbs again.  "I want to make you laugh, cry, and come," he growls at her. 

Is there anyone in the known or unknown universe who likes to hear -- how can I put this delicately -- that last verb used to describe anything other than a perfectly G-rated motion from there to here?  And is there any woman who really wants to hear from a man that one-third of what he'd like to do to her in the course of the evening is reduce her to tears? 

And is Block now addicted to being disgusting just for the sake of it, or what?  One of the characters Weetzie meets is a woman named Lacey, who's apparently half-spider on her mother's side.  (Don't ask me how her parents worked that one out.)  She weaves silvery fabric from her own body to make the stunning apparel carried at her self-named boutique.  Since everyone in this book seems to tell her absolutely everything about themselves, Weetzie is shown exactly how spider-woman does this.  Lacey "lifted up her shirt so her slim abdomen was exposed.  A tiny pair of arms and hands protruded there.  Lacey began to move all four hands about...A milky liquid seemed to be coming out of her, sticking to her fingers in long threads that she wove together."  When Weetzie asks how she does this, Lacey replies, "Just like any woman.  We weave our stories out of our bodies."  Not a bad analogy, actually.  The problem is, it's completely overwhelmed by the repulsive details that came just before.

The physically disgusting stuff is bad enough.  The pop-psych words of wisdom are enough to help the most desperate dieter stay on her regimen.  And again, what's so disappointing is not one more lame book crowding the shelves of bookstores and libraries; it's that this one should have been able to be good, given that the author really had it in her at one point.  When Weetzie kept hooking up with men who were nothing but bad news in her first book, she lamented to her friend Dirk, "I just want My Secret Agent Lover Man," and he and we knew what she meant.  Lonely himself, he replied, "Love is a dangerous angel."  Sure, nobody ever talked like that -- but this little exchange leaves you wishing that they did.

Some of the lines from Necklace, on the other hand, would prompt me to empty my son's college account to pay whomever and whatever necessary to ensure that such lines never aired themselves in real life, at least anywhere that I'd have to hear them.  Like the thoughts that pass through Witch Baby's head after a visit to Weetzie, her stepmom.  "Weetzie was sad sometimes, but she knew how to enjoy life.  She saw the colors in things.  Somewhere deep inside, no matter how confused she was, Weetzie loved Weetzie."

What year is this?  Are we still talking about loving ourselves?  If we are, could we stop now, please?

If this is the kind of dreck Witch Baby's head is full of now, she's ignoring her teachers.  An old friend of the family gave W.B. some advice about love a book or two back.  She spoke from her own experience of finding the man who made her feel whole:

"When I met Valentine I wasn't afraid anymore.  I knew that my soul would always have a reflection and an echo and that even if we were apart -- and we were for a while in the beginning -- I finally knew what my soul looked and sounded like."

Unsentimental old crank that I am, I nevertheless find that rather beautiful.  As I do Weetzie's relation to Witch Baby, later in the same book, about what her own father, Charlie Bat, had told her about being the black sheep of the family:

"He said that black sheeps express everyone else's anger and pain.  It's not that they have all the anger and pain -- they're just the only ones who let it out.  Then the other people don't have to.  But you face things, Witch Baby.  And you help us face things.  We can learn from you."

Everyone who ever grew up feeling like a Cassandra in her own living room has to feel a ferocious affinity to that speaker.  There's nothing precious and self-loving in what Weetzie tells Witch Baby -- in fact, she goes on to admit that she knows she's made it hard for Witch Baby to be the truthteller she was born to be.  "I can't stand when someone I love is sad, so I try to take it away without just letting it be.  I get so caught up in being good and sweet and taking care of everyone that sometimes I don't admit when people are really in pain."  Again -- simple, beautiful, direct, and not a hint of cutesy.

I want that Weetzie back -- the one who wore engineer boots and pink sunglasses and felt shattered when she was twelve years old and saw the man of her dreams sitting across from her on the bus, but he didn't so much as glance at her or recognize her as his soul mate "even though she had known then that someday they must have babies and bring each other roses and write songs together and be rock stars."  I want the Witch Baby who papered her room's walls with sad, scary stories she clipped from the newspaper, and who never appeared in any of her family's photographs because she was the one who took them, and who cut off her sister's hair in a rage and then shaved her own head and in these acts of anger made them both more beautiful.  I want, in other words, a story -- one I can really crawl into and never quite leave -- not a thinly disguised pop-psych self-help you've-still-got-it-sister empowerment lecture. 

If you happen to be poking around at the library or the bookstore and you happen to see something that might help me get over this latest depressing foray into twenty-first century fiction, would you let me know?  I'm not looking for much.  Just a little real magic.

In the meantime, looks like I'll be paying Jane Austen another prolonged visit.

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