So I just finished two slender novels released only a year apart, which read like they come from completely different eras. They\u2019re both tales of the romantic longings and disappointments of a risk-loving chick, a child of divorce not yet old enough to drink legally; they\u2019re both gabby, slangy tales about a material girl who wants something more than just another cute outfit but doesn\u2019t know why. One of them is better than I expected and the other is a bit worse, but also a bit weirder, than I remembered.<\/p>\n
Jay McInerney\u2019s Story of My Life<\/em> was published in 1988, and Francesca Lia Block\u2019s Weetzie Bat<\/em> in 1989. (I know, right?? Block seems like such a desperately \u201990s writer\u2013although also, as you\u2019ll see, very contemporary in some ways I disliked.) McInerney\u2019s antiheroine Alison Poole is an acting-school cokehead who pays the rent by pretending she needs abortion money. God, I loved her. I mean, I hated her at first, I felt like her narrative voice was all \u201980s cliches (and there are some of those), but at a certain point I realized that she\u2019s one of those luckless, careening disasters who has a code<\/em>, a personal code of honor, and it\u2019s an absurd code but so poignant in its blatant inadequacy. Alison\u2019s code is honesty, which is hilarious since she surrounds herself constantly with liars and users. She expresses her sincere love for these creeps with all the self-awareness of a literal cocker spaniel. Alison loves everybody, even men!\u2013after all, they\u2019re \u201cthe only other sex we\u2019ve got.\u201d So I adored her and saw in her hints of that humility which is impossible to distinguish from damaged self-loathing.<\/p>\n Ninety percent of the movies and novels of the \u201970s \u2013 \u201990s are about beautiful catastrophic people getting taught a good hard lesson. There\u2019s a generational masochism there, a repetitive reenactment of our discovery that everything we want really hurts people, and I am HERE FOR IT, people. I\u2019ll always read that and I\u2019ll always relate to it. The Secret History<\/em> is imo the best of these tales, just because the characters are explicitly seeking sublimity rather than simply pleasure; but all pleasure-seeking is ecstasy-seeking, I think, doesn\u2019t Chesterton say that the man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God, etc etc. (What is the whore seeking, I know I know, but that GKC line was genuinely crucial to my conversion, so I gotta respect.) Anyway the pop culture of the \u201970s \u2013 \u201990s is just pleasure-seekers discovering morality, over and over again like cats with gravity, I\u2019m all about it.<\/p>\n Story<\/em> is a morality tale and so Alison\u2019s seeming shallowness (she isn\u2019t THAT shallow!) comes pre-judged. Weetzie Bat<\/em> seems like it\u2019s supposed to be deep, and keeps heading into deep waters\u2026 but then plowing right back out at top speed. Block\u2019s narrative voice is always sugar-shocky, glitter and feathers. Weetzie<\/em> feels ultra-\u201990s, maybe because of the weird collision of childhood and adulthood all the characters seem trapped in. Weetzie infantilizes herself, she\u2019s twee avant la lettre<\/em>, and before I yowl and hiss more about what I disliked here, I\u2019ll say that what everyone picks up on in this book is its joy. Weetzie loves Los Angeles, \u201cShangri-L.A.,\u201d and her book is a love letter to a despised city<\/a>, a genre I always love and respect. Weetzie is buoyant and she loves generously even when it\u2019s tough. A lot of readers found her a breath of fresh air amid the era\u2019s reflexive cynicism.<\/p>\n And yet. As soon as I finished rereading Weetzie<\/em> I went online to read a bit about contemporary responses to\/nostalgia for the book, and a recurring theme is that even those who love Block\u2019s work find it somehow hollow. Frankie Thomas suggests<\/a> this hollowness is due to the recurring romanticized anorexia (and what she perceives as a suppressed bisexuality, though judging solely by Weetzie<\/em> I don\u2019t know, that\u2019s a book desperately centered on men\u2013even Weetzie is more a costume than a person and there are no women friends or mentors). But it\u2019s not only that. Weetzie Bat<\/em> opens with an aria about everything there is to love about Los Angeles\u2026 and it\u2019s a consumer catalog, a list of things you can eat and celebrity memorabilia. This is a book animated by delight, but a startling proportion of the things that delight Weetzie are things. She\u2019ll always tell you everybody\u2019s clothes and what they ate (where do these people get their money?), everyone\u2019s always shopping and people of color are basically fashion accessories. LA poolside materialism can be endearing in a certain silly way, but Weetzie Bat<\/em> endows it with a mystical power, as if all these consumer choices really mean something<\/em> about who the heroine is.<\/p>\n And then the book swerves bizarrely, in its most genuinely countercultural move, into a paean to domestic happiness. Weetzie and her gay BFF Dirk settle down with their cutesy mates. Weetzie wants a baby but her man My Secret Agent Lover Man (this is his name, I hate this) does not because of overpopulation and nuclear war (oh how times change!), so Weetzie secretly has a threesome with Dirk and his boyfriend and gets her baby. There are various breakups and some cheating, and another child gets literally left on their doorstep, and Weetzie takes the kid in. She insists that it\u2019s always better to love, even in the age of AIDS, even in the face of global catastrophe; always better to love and have babies. Block is totally blunt about how Weetzie wants a baby and that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n