 Reviews of three new books about body image, alcoholism, and southern botany. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $23) PUT A CORK IN IT Susan Cheever's message is valid one: Even privileged, intelligent people can be drunks. But reading her memoir of her alcoholic adulthood is enough to drive anyone to consume mass quantities of any mercifully mind-altering beverage. She learned her nasty habit from her family, most notably her hard-drinking, closet-bisexual dad, John (one of those revered, suburban white-guy authors that The New Yorker was so in love with). She drank because everyone else in her world drank, and listening to her story is much like sitting at a bar next to a very boring, chatty stranger. She drops names like empty Bud Light cans. She describes in excruciating detail the mansions, apartments and French villas in which she was forced to live. Poor dear, she even had to go to Brown because she couldn't get into Harvard. Her relationship tales are completely dry and incoherent. At the end of her nearly interminable story, she packs in a few pages of God talk, supposedly to inspire others. Perhaps when she'd completed AA's fifth step--"Admitted to God, to myself and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs"--she thought, gee, maybe I can publish this and get some money for it. This isn't the first time Cheever has cashed in on her famous name and worked out her past problems on the written page: Her memoir of her father, Home Before Dark, was a bestseller. Recently it seemed the memoir craze was finally fading out, but people are still foisting their banal tales on innocent, unsuspecting readers. Please, somebody stop them! Susan Wickstrom The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Random House, 284 pages, $25) STEALING BEAUTY Subtitled "A True Story of Beauty and Obsession," Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief cries out for a shot at bestsellerdom alongside one of her publisher's other true stories, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. After all, Orlean's book contains a highly atmospheric portrait of the South, an engaging account of an age-old obsession and a profile of an oddball whose encounter with the law suggested the book's eminently hype-able title. Orlean, who wrote for WW before following her muse east, has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. The Orchid Thief amply demonstrates how fabulous a writer she's become along the way. Here she is, for example, in Florida's Fakahatchee Strand, home to numerous species of the Orchidaceae family: "Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through about as easily as you could walk through a car wash. The sinkholes are filled with as much as seven feet of standing water, and around them the air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty. Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep ahold of them; if it fails it will settle for your shoes." Such seemingly effortless writing camouflages a serious journalist. Witness Orlean's account of orchid hunting from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, in which superb research coupled with a fine eye for detail brings to life an exotic clime, suffusing it with impossible longing and obsessive behavior. The thief himself, however, is no match for such a backdrop. The more you read about John Laroche, the more flat and flaky he appears. To her credit, Orlean refuses to use her writerly skills to dress up a character whose potential to drive a book like this far outstrips his actual existence. Ultimately, the orchid thief proves so insubstantial--not elusive--that he makes off with the heart of an otherwise worthy and engaging effort. Richard MeekerAdios, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity Edited by Ophira Edut ( Seal Press, 236 pages, $14.95) GOODBYE, DOLLY The tired obsession with body image drenches the pages of women's magazines, and the feminist response has become almost as monotonous. Although some of the 28 young women contributors to Adios, Barbie take on oft-addressed (and now clichéd) topics--the effect of Barbie dolls on a budding self-image, the horrors of anorexia, the tortured teen years--the book presents some very fresh ideas about the intersections of body image with race, class and ethnicity. Many of the contributors take these terms off the academic pegs on which they too often hang and, with frank (although often uneven) language, discuss ways their experiences have taught them to understand their bodies in a cultural context. This is useful for the late '90s, a time when both the consciousness-raising group and the local riot-grrrl chapter seem to have lost their places. What this book lacks in sustained analysis it makes up for in the honesty
of its first-person narratives about topics as diverse as food allergies,
virginity, changing a "Jewish" nose and getting tattoos. Many essays
force the reader to consider the interaction between messages about
body image that women get from their families and close communities
vs. those they see in the world at large. How does a light-skinned Hispanic
woman "prove" her ethnicity to the outside world? How does a woman from
a black working-class family who values bodies with "meat on the bones"
confront the Barbie ideal? How does a woman who chooses not to have
sex think about her body and her sexuality? The diverse answers to these
questions make up an interesting and useful contemporary feminism, one
that must have many voices, and many bodies, to make any sense at all.
Sarah Dougher - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
