Books |
Trouble
Kate Christensen
By
Published: Jun 24, 2009
Category:
Fiction
Her fourth novel won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award, just in case you are, on the basis of Trouble, not inclined to take Kate Christensen seriously.
What would tamper your enthusiasm for “Trouble”?
Well, this novel will surely strike some of you as Chick Lit.
The characters — one a shrink, one a professor, and one a troubled, fading rock star — are the kind of “best friends” usually found only in women’s fiction. And the plot — the shrink ends her marriage and heads off to Mexico City for a reunion with the rock star — seems as forced as the plot of a high-grade romance novel.
But that award and Christensen’s reputation argue against Chick Lit. In fact, she’s the current favorite of Brooklyn’s gaggle of female writers. And maybe of female readers too, for Christiansen’s big idea in these 300 easy-on-the-eye pages is that women can want sex just as urgently as men — and, dammit, they can go out and get it too,
The novel begins at a party. Josie, the psychiatrist, meets a man who writes pop operas. She knows who he is because she knows all about a recent lover of his. What she doesn’t want to reveal: how she knows that woman. Because, you see, Josie was her shrink.
Josie is attracted to this man, so this is a cool and dramatic conflict. What’s cooler: She has a bigger conflict. Talking to this man, she realizes that her 10-year marriage is over.
Josie is the narrator of the book, and she’s brisk — she makes the case against her dull, diminished husband in a paragraph. But she’s not caught up in negativity tonight. The opera writer has inspired her:
I had a sudden urge to suck his cock.
She doesn’t. But then this pretty but prim shrink goes to a bar, meets a guy, pounds back a few more glasses of wine and ends up at his apartment. And there…
When the room began to spin slowly, and then faster, I crawled down his body and unzipped his jeans, took his cock into my mouth, and sucked and licked and stroked it until he came all over my hand. Then I sat up, rapt with sudden cold horror, and said, “I have to go.”
The female Henry Miller? No, that is Tsippi Keller, in Jackpot, the story of a drab woman who goes on vacation and says yes to every offer that comes her way. Here, the sex is less the half the story. The other half — which also, I imagine, has great appeal to some female readers — is about women and friendship. As Christensen explains in an interview:
In a way, female friendship is the purest of bonds — both people are there because, ultimately, they choose to be together, with every lunch, every walk together, every conversation, it’s a reinforcement of that choice. Over the years, a friendship becomes ingrained, but a friend isn’t someone I feel I can ever take for granted.
I wanted to write about this somehow — raise some questions about female friends who’ve known each other through the decades and have stayed close despite divergences in their lives. I find these friendships deeply moving and inspiring.
I also find long-term friends moving, in part because — like a lot of men, I bet — I don’t seem to have any. So if I’m ambivalent about this book, the reason may be as simple as the fact that I’m not a woman. What sometimes reads like an extended Twitter feed — “I ordered”, “we ate,” “I took a shower” — may be deep sharing, just not in a language I speak. Is the story about friendship being tested really exciting, or is it a bit… mechanical? The trip to Mexico: is it fascinating or a travel article gone long? And I don’t recall it being that easily to shed a spouse.
These quibbles disappear on page 268, And 269. And, now that I think of it, on 270 and 271 as well. That Mexican lover will, I suspect, become a favorite fantasy object of unhappily married women all across America. And if they’re sufficiently unhappy in sexless marriages, all hell could break loose.
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To buy the Kindle edition of "Trouble", click here.
