Doing Dishes

Just about every one of these novelists, poetesses, and essayists is some kind of prizewinner: One has a Pulitzer, one is a recipient of the Prix France Bleu Gironde; there are a couple of National Book Award finalists; some have bestsellers under their belts; some are professors of creative writing. Two, Joyce Maynard and Erica Jong, are as famous for one infamous piece of writing each as for any of the other 20-odd books of poetry and prose they have collectively produced. The confidence of these women in the capacity of their self-exposure to fascinate others has been rewarded with favorable notices for this collection in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

“Enter at your own risk,” Ms. Sussman warns in her introduction. “There’s dangerous territory ahead. The ground shifts beneath you. The currents carry you away. There’s the harsh smell of wildfire, the hiss of a snake, the bubbling cauldron, the wild winds of the mistral.”

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

What constitutes Badness for these women? Making appearances here are an alcoholic or two, a drug addict, a couple of bulimics, an unfaithful wife, several sluts, a liar, and a cheat. One author gets her kicks, such as they are, from hearing about the exploits of others. Rounding out the group is a penis assessor. All this suggests a decent gossipfest to come, at the very least.

There’s certainly plenty of salaciousness. Ms. Sussman’s own “Consider the Slut,” a numeration of the boys who explored her body when she was 14–to her apparently eternal delight–ends with a peroration on “Making Out” that is as breathlessly steamy as a romance novel. The New York Times‘s Daphne Merkin, in “Penises I Have Known,” delivers a little homily on the male copulatory organ down through history (and literature) before cataloguing her own felicitous encounters with several of them in the flesh.

The poet/novelist Kim Addonizio, stoned on weed and drunk on Scotch and champagne, trolls a writers’ conference for a bed partner. When she stumbles on one at the hotel bar, he turns out to be not one of the “overmedicated professors released from their small-town colleges for a few days of .  .  . drinking, schmoozing, and airing of professional resentments,” but rather a refrigerator repairman who can’t believe his luck. It’s off to her room for a night of .  .  . something–she’s so wasted that, next morning, she can’t remember what–while her roommate (and now ex-friend) suffers in the next bed.

In “I Am Badder than Omarosa,” Michelle Richmond, teacher, novelist, and publisher of the online literary quarterly Fiction Attic, writes,

That bit made me laugh out loud. So did the description by the novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings, in “Author Questionnaire,” of a trip to the playground with her daughter: “She went to the sand pit to play with another baby around her age. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, which was intentional, I assumed. It was one of those organic San Francisco babies dressed to look like a migrant worker or a lesbian.”

Sad to say, those two passages are just about the only funny ones in the book.

For Bad Girls, with all its promise of disclosure and illumination–and naughty diversion–is really a pretty dreary time. Reading it is like paying a visit to the confessional with members of the New York Times‘s “Modern Love” club: a tedious plod through territory that has been charted extensively–and stultifyingly–already.

There are no surprises here, and no mistrals. Just a lot of women shooting the breeze about the things women so often discuss when they get together: cruel lovers, rotten husbands, difficult children, crappy bosses, bad parents. It lurches from cockiness, so to speak–Ms. Merkin’s Adventures in Penisland–to complaint–“Now that women supposedly can be heard,” gripes Erica Jong in “My Dirty Secret,” “we are still constrained by stereotypes of femininity .  .  . ghettoized in chick lit, romance, or mystery fiction”–to downright bleak misery.

In “Executrix,” the short-story writer Pam Houston recounts without inflection the abuse her father visited on her when she was a child: “He broke my femur when I was four years old. .  .  . He forced himself on me sexually for so many years I am not entirely certain when it began and when it ended.”

In the same flat voice she describes her peculiar forgiveness:

It’s an ugly story, and one can see why it’s delivered in the practiced monotone of the therapized woman who has exorcised her demons. But why deliver it at all? Must every piece of writing by a woman be a form of therapy? Must Joyce Maynard relive in print, yet again, her horrible treatment at the hands of J.D. Salinger, and the vicious reception her memoir of her time with him received? Apparently so–and we along with her. At least her “A Good Girl Goes Bad” usefully reminds us that she was an 18-year-old virgin who, thanks to bulimia, looked like a prepubescent 12-year-old when the pedophilic 53-year-old Salinger seduced her.

I have no illusions. I’m not asking the daughters of the sexual revolution to conceive characters like Anna Karenina or Gwendolyn Harleth or that ur-Bad Girl, Becky Sharp. But as long as they continue to insist upon treating their every runny nose, hot flash, rejection, beating, and orgasm as food for thought, and upon using the written word as so much Kleenex for the drying of their tears, I’ll stick with Tolstoy and Eliot–and oh, by the way, the wonderful P.D. James, Ms. Jong’s derision notwithstanding.

Rachel Abrams is managing editor of Policy Review.