'A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That':
Foolish Choices
by Lisa Zeidner
Lisa Glatt’s appealingly dark first novel is another entry
in what looks to be an increasingly popular genre, the novel in
stories. Seven of the 11 chapters in ''A Girl Becomes a Comma Like
That'' serve up slices from the life of Rachel Spark, a discombobulated
California poet whose mother is dying of cancer. The remaining chapters
dip into the psyches of three other women who are adamantly peripheral
to Rachel's first-person narrative.
Glatt's unmoored women, mostly single, share a penchant for having
sex with men they don't know. You couldn't call it casual sex; it's
far too tense and desperate for that. As a cure for grief or loneliness,
these anonymous encounters aren't much of a prescription, but Glatt
doesn't moralize about what might lead people to try to drown out
their sorrows, or at least distract themselves. Instead, she creates
sympathy for these confused, vulnerable women.
''I was over 30 years old, living with my mother because she was
sick and because I was poor,'' Rachel reports. Her divorced mother,
Elizabeth, faces her diagnosis with cheery fortitude. She dates
a fellow cancer patient and even manages to be upbeat about botched
breast reconstruction surgery that requires the therapeutic use
of bloodsucking leeches (''fat and full—the size of a big
man's thumb'') to keep her body from rejecting the new tissue.
In contrast, Rachel, a part-time creative-writing instructor, is
dour and directionless, self-pitying and lost. She has no contact
with her father, who's remarried and living in New Jersey. Nor does
she expect to hear from Rex, the latest in her series of pickup
lovers. By the time Rachel knows she's pregnant, Rex is back with
his girlfriend on a farm in England. ''Farms are dirty,'' Rachel's
mother observes. ''You don't want to be on a farm, honey.''
Fine—but what does Rachel want? Mostly, she just wants her
mother to live, and their time together feels like a kind of suspended
animation. Rachel doesn't need any more distractions, so a man who's
in town for only a couple of days seems just about perfect.
She muses on her history of quickies in the novel's title chapter,
the book's strongest and richest. As far back as her first sexual
escapade, at the age of 13: ''I was worried even then about being
unlovely, unloved. . . . Within minutes of my first kiss I was stripped
like a squid and knew he didn't care whether I was Carol from third
period or Christine from sixth or bad Brittany who didn't even go
to school anymore, and something inside me hardened, turned into
a chunk of cement. A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong
boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before
the real thing.''
Rachel doesn't tell her mother that she needs an abortion. Instead,
she confides in her drinking buddy, Angela Burrows, who gets her
own bad-girl chapter in which she leaves a bar with a cigar-smoking
stranger. Attempting to blot out memories of a man who deserted
her, she succeeds only in transferring this longing to the next
fellow: ''Even though she barely liked the nameless stranger, she
carried the phone around the house for weeks and prayed for the
damn thing to ring.''
At the abortion clinic, Rachel is embarrassed when one of her students,
Ella, is assigned to be her caseworker. And Ella herself gets a
chapter to brood about the fact that her brand-new husband has already
strayed—if kissing her co-worker counts as being unfaithful.
Ella's most exasperating repeat customer, 16-year-old Georgia Carter,
is given two chapters, in which she reveals a promiscuous sexual
history very much like Rachel's.
Because of the novel's patchwork construction, it's not always
easy to keep these characters straight, particularly since they
don't interact all that much. They pass like ships in the night—once
literally in a ship in the night, when Ella and her husband take
a ride down a canal in a gondola steered by Daniel, another student
of Rachel's, who just happens to have a serious case of puppy love
for his professor.
Glatt makes a case that this style of elliptical storytelling is
appropriate for her material. Like one-night stands, her chapters
don't necessarily lead anywhere. Still, the novel in stories has
some disadvantages. By not connecting the dots, Glatt can't fully
explore the connections among all these characters.
In the academic world, it's a given that a Ph.D. thesis isn't a
book. After young scholars graduate, they're expected to revise
their work for publication, creating a more comprehensive overview
and digging deeper. Fiction writers who stitch together books from
the short stories they've produced for creative-writing workshops
are under similar pressure, and since it's much harder to publish
story collections than novels, a new genre is born. This isn't to
say stories can't be meaningfully linked (Andre Dubus was one celebrated
early practitioner), but the novel in stories can be an awkward
hybrid, lacking a novel's narrative drive and a story's dense self-enclosure.
The central narrative here—about Rachel's vigil with her
dying mother—is the most authentic, substantial and engaging.
''You'll always need a mom, it's in your nature,'' Elizabeth tells
Rachel. ''Most girls have had enough mothering at 15, but not you.''
By the end, Rachel manages to arrive at a tenuous autonomy: maybe
not a whole paragraph yet, but definitely a lot more than a comma.
Lisa Zeidner is the author of four novels, most recently ''Layover.''
She is a professor of English at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.
