Once in a while, I vastly overstep my ridiculous position as a blogger about trolls and make an observation that nobody asked of me. This is one of those times.
Recently I fooeyed my way through Julie Otsuka's
The Buddha in the Attic. I try never to quit books, and this one is quite short, so I hung in there without enjoying. It's about the experiences of Japanese mail-order brides in the early 1900s, and while the material itself is fascinating, my issue is with the style of narrative. There are no discernible characters and no sustained plot. The story seeks to account for every woman in every situation, and while the reader's understanding is that much richer and more inclusive, the experience of trying to "follow" anything, as in the usual novel, is frustrating to say the least. Needless to say, who cares what ELLENWatch think's?
The Buddha in the Attic was nominated for a National Book Award and has won three other prizes.
The book, sans personal endorsement, appears on this blog today because I couldn't help but notice a stylistic commonality between Otsuka (in this book), specifically in what annoys me; and the Sunshine Girls. In the novel, as one critic put it, "this chorus of narrators speaks in a poetry that is both spare and passionate."
Chorus of narrators. That's it! Not only in approach, but also in content, Otsuka approximates the Sunshine Girls by creating a voice that is at once many voices. Moreover, their story (the story of an obscure "we") is one about control by men, sexual exploitation, and sporadic but intense foreboding to other women not to follow their path. Otsuka's narrators are more direct about their supplicant status, but part of the genius of Ellen (and, underlying, the Sunshine Girls) is how these voices retain feminine dependence while pretending, intermittently, to be liberated from all those 20th century women's concerns.
Here's Otsuka on the hopeful brides, for example:
Most of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives. We knew how to cook and sew. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours, saying absolutely nothing of substance at all...Most of us had good manners, and were extremely polite, except for when we got mad and cursed like sailors. Most of us spoke like ladies most of the time, with our voices pitched high, and pretended to know much less than we did, and whenever we walked past the deckhands we made sure to take small, mincing steps with our toes turned properly in (6).
And here are the Sunshine Girls, talking no bigger a game in my assessment:
We renew our position that as female professionals that have worked very hard to attain our respective station in life, we should never have to settle for any thing less. Yes, we are unmarried and over the age of 30, and if that makes us undesirable to some, who cares? We are all awaiting our own perfect matches, and hope we find him. There has got to be some guys out there of quality that would appreciate us for what we bring to the table. Although we are lawyers, we are also sweet and feminine, so we bring the best of both worlds to the table...
Otsuka again, on the all-consuming commitment to men who hadn't really been chosen:
But when we woke up we found ourselves lying in bed beside a strange man in a strange land in a hot crowded shed that was filled with the grunts and sighs of others. Sometimes that man reached out for us in his sleep with his thick, gnarled hands and we tried not to pull away. In ten years he will be an old man, we told ourselves. Sometimes he opened his eyes in the early dawn light and saw that we were sad, and he promised us that things would get better. And even though we had said to him only hours before, "I detest you," as he climbed on top of us once more in the darkness, we let ourselves be comforted, for he was all that we had. Sometimes he looked right through us without seeing us at all, and that was always the worst (30).
And one more from S&S Associates, bound over to their partners as Ellen is (if platonically) to MP:
We have struggled all our lives to get professional well paying positions, and even though some of us have been duped by partners who promised us the moon in exchange for our own innocence, we persist in our hopes and dreams that there is a Mr. Right out there for us. Ellen is no different, though probably 3-4 years younger than any of us. We just don't want to see her making the same mistakes we did (although at her firm, there does not appear to be a surplus of testosterone filled partners dragging her into bed in exchange for unkept promises). At worst, you have a guy who acts like her dad, doling out money for her to buy clothes or lose weight. If any of the partners here tried that, we would slap them with a lawsuit so fast, and we would use some of our very own firm's paralegals to help draft the pleadings (because they too have been sexually misled by the same partners as we have).
So we hold out hope for ourselves and Ellen, that each of our own Mr. Right will come. We just don't want every guy with a load in his pants to think they can get a freebie just because our biological clocks are ticking. As Ellen says so well: "FOOEY on that!"
I don't mean to ridicule this perfectly-admirable-but-not-my-cup-of-tea book, nor do I suggest that the Sunshine Girls should be considered for the PEN/Faulkner Award. I just had to share a slice of my rich inner life with the audience (of thousand's!) best in a position to get it. Sunshine Girls, if you've read the book or would consider it for your book club please check in with your comments.
Anon