Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello

Review by Jeff Bursey — Published on March 7, 2011
Tags: experimental fiction

REVIEWED:
Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello. Emergency Press. 204pp. $15.00.

Published in Issue 23

Gina Frangello’s collection of ten short stories, featuring lowdown behavior, familial bonds, skewed friendships, excess, violence, self-pity, and extravagant lying, conjures up the world, in Thomas Pynchon’s phrase, of a whole sick crew. Here they are chiefly comprised of women and gay men whose lives, in their particulars, share several contact points, making them seem like members of a large family who would always ruin Thanksgiving. That the locale or originating birthplace is often somewhere in Illinois, at times Chicago, grounds the book in a place, though there are few descriptions of scenery or landmarks. Looking out a window would mean looking outwards, and that’s not a tendency much entertained by the characters in Slut Lullabies. Frangello presents a wasted (as in drugged, and not used to its potential) society that the author herself isn’t part of, as witnessed by her literary success.

None of Frangello’s characters could even dream of achieving something like the author’s success. Jenna, in “Saving Crystal,” mingles fantasy with pragmatics when she tells her gullible English teacher, Mr. Logan, that she wants to find a mature man who would find her attractive. Unable to pierce his caution, she blurts out: “‘I think about you all the time. About what it would be like to kiss a man who knows about things, who reads books the way you do.’” When simply reading is an attribute beyond the reach of other high school students, then we’re being told how the educational system is failing today’s youth. And it’s never good when your peers meet your lowest expectations.

Generally, characters don’t have very large dreams. They’re usually aiming for survival, when they’re not aiming, as Blaine accuses Jayne in “Stalking God,” to off themselves: “‘Ain’t you heard, baby? Thanatos can kill you.’” The female narrator of “Waves” suffered a back injury and the prescription drugs designed to alleviate her pain have removed much of her ability to feel, with the side-effect that most of the love she had for her patient husband, who “observes me like his numbers . . . a bad run of luck cannot make him give up his project,” has slowly disappeared. Her heroin-using friend Van “got the chance to embrace a different kind of world, but here he still is . . ., in this shithole apartment with another woman who wants to be ruined.” Realizations like that pop out when the characters exchange their pathetic hopes for what looks like a more realistic view of life. Much of the time the unreliable narrators are tone deaf to whoever isn’t them, reading people the wrong way, sending drugs coursing through their systems, or going slightly mad.

“The Marie Antoinette School of Economics,” a title wittier than its contents, contains children who slowly grow fatter as they watch their father, Sloane, make scenes and hit their mother, Victoria, as he descends into the black pit of Huntington’s Disease. When Victoria hears his diagnosis from their doctor, her response is a classic mixture of disbelief, anger, shame, and worry:

Victoria sits staring down at her Pierre Deux bag. She says, “I adopted a son who turned out to be mildly retarded. I can’t possibly have a husband with a terminal disease, too.” Dr. Fairley says, “Ned is a good boy, Victoria.” Victoria says, “He eats like a rabid horse. Sloane hasn’t made any money in a year, and now you tell me I’ll be supporting Ned alone for the rest of my life. Don’t tell me what a good boy he is!” Dr. Fairley clears his throat, the way doctors do, the way her father’s doctor did. “The girls,” he says. “You’ll have to have them tested. Ned’s OK because it’s hereditary, but Violet and Tamara will need to be tested.” Victoria stares at her purse, crying softly, until Dr. Fairley begins to rustle some papers around on his desk. Then she looks up, says, “You son of a bitch,” and leaves.

When reading that passage the first time I dwelled on “retarded,” thinking how old-fashioned an insult it seems, and that it has a savory taste here, calling to mind an older time. Similarly, the brand of purse suddenly changes state, from a designer product once considered desirable to an out-of-style bag that offers no solace to an older woman who has just been dealt a hard blow.

In other places Frangello comes up with sharp aphorisms that spring from a set of observations. One instance can be found in “Attila the There,” her most affecting story, which is set in Amsterdam. Sixteen-year-old Camden is having difficulties fitting into the new country and new life his lesbian mother, Ginny, has thrust them into. He has many chances to compare the manners and customs of this temporary home, a country you are led to feel would be good for him, with Chicago’s:

Grandparents and small children had set up folding chairs. Camden watched, amazed: most of the spectators watching spectacular floats drift by weren’t gay. They were all ages, many with families. In Chicago, whenever Ginny had dragged Camden to the Gay Pride parade as a child, protestors used him against her—corrupting the children, blah blah blah. In the United States, kids were like sofas covered in plastic: to be admired but never broken in.

That same crackle is found in the almost perfunctory blackmail and counter-blackmail of “Saving Crystal”; in “What You See,” about a set of women and their men, and the impressions they each have of the other; and in “Trilby in Brasil,” which nicely counters two different women against each other. The narrator of that last story, having learned not to be so mousy from her new female friend, takes a stand against her boyfriend and his severe agoraphobia:

Leaving Bobby is easier than I thought it would be. The moment he says he will accompany me to my boss’s birthday party, the words are out. They are, “I’d rather be shot in the foot than bring you to a party. If you wet your pants in front of people I work with, I’d have to move to a foreign country. You know we really have to break up; I just can’t do this anymore.”

Without codependence most love songs would not be written, and Slut Lullabies wouldn’t exist if the female characters weren’t devised to embrace beds of nails or stand for the rough end of a tongue or the lash of a belt. Some stories, unfortunately, don’t achieve all that they might. The title story, the first in the collection, is an unconvincing jumble, and perhaps its main function is to announce themes worked out at greater length in the rest of the book: confused sexual desire and sexuality, jealousy between female friends, rape or its ever-present threat (“that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street”), and the love and shame one can feel for an ill loved one.

Frangello has two main ways of treating her creations: offering them the balm of an epiphany on the last page, or rendering their lives and ways in such a way that the reader is left with a taste in the mouth like biting into aluminum foil. It’s a matter of taste that I prefer the latter. The resolutions can come too often or too patly, as in “How to Marry a WASP” (where a snarky, secretive gay man ends up with a lover and family who are better than he deserves), “Secret Tomas” and “Stalking God.” These stories, as well as “Waves”—where oblivion is a stop on the way to death—are over-determined. This or that woman starts off in one poor mood or lousy position and sinks lower, sometimes in her own estimation and often in the eyes of others, only for an unexpected rise at the end that isn’t worked for by the character but brought in by the author. One could imagine a worse future for Jayne in “Stalking God” that might be more dramatically effective, but an authorial decision has been made here that feels like a misstep. Frangello is more removed from the characters in “What You See” and “Trilby in Brasil,” and the distance gives her the opportunity to be sharp and mean. When the terrific ruthlessness behind “Trilby in Brasil” gets put aside because a sweeter, so to speak, ending is imagined for another story, the contrast is jarring.

The locale of “Attila the There” requires Frangello to work harder as she thinks through how characters from (and in) a different country, with its own customs, might behave. Its lyricism is also entirely remote from the other stories. If, in the future, Gina Frangello isn’t so willing to sacrifice a little niceness for something more acidic, despite her evident talent for that, then the kindness present in the main character, naturally born out of shame and regret, might be a field worth exploring. Slut Lullabies is often well-done, and effective, and leads me to look forward to her next book.

Canadian writer Jeff Bursey has written reviews and articles for journals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel, was published in October 2010 by Enfield & Wizenty.

Published in Issue 23

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