Globe and Mail
A Globe Best Book of 2006
Mother, daughter and deep, still water
CYNTHIA MACDONALD
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Globe and Mail
Cease to Blush
By Billie Livingston
Random House Canada,
465 pages, $34.95
'Women without principles," the Marquis de Sade wrote, "are never more dangerous than at the age when they have ceased to blush." Is this misogynist garbage or just a naughty boy's tease? A woman's answer may depend on which side of 40 she happens to live. Since Vancouver writer Billie Livingston is neither over nor under it, she's perfectly placed to hold both ideas at once; she understands modern feminism, but also the rebellion against it that's currently raging. Provocative but wildly fun, her second novel ably depicts the frustratingly circular route womankind has taken over the last 50 years, from a world where Barbara Billingsley vacuumed in pearls to one where Jessica Simpson vacuums in panties.
As the book opens, Vivian Callwood is at her mother's funeral. The dying process was pretty much grief-free: "I thought I should be the sort of daughter who puts her lips to her mother's forehead, infuses her with love and light. But I was a dark troll, terrible from every pore." Bleached-blonde Viv works as a film extra, often guesting as the dead babe in the shower, the strangled hooker. She's fiercely smart, but has spent an entire life at loggerheads with her dour feminist mom (hence the slutty outfits, the go-nowhere career).
It's a rift that only begins to heal after the older woman's death, when Vivian discovers a basement trunk full of evidence that her mother's youth was most glamorously misspent -- as a nightclub singer, a beatnik stripper, a Judy Exner-style gun moll for mobsters and politicians. Immediately, Junior decides to drive stateside so she can piece together Senior's story.
Yes, the "secret basement trunk" is pretty tall corn, but it works. There is a childlike infectiousness to Livingston's prose. She is mad to relate and burning with detail; her Vivian is a kind of Nancy Drew in butt-floss underwear. Livingston can sure let the line out slowly when she needs to, though. One suspenseful scene, where the heroine meets a boozy pair of travelling evangelists on the road, unfurls especially well.
The narrative really starts to fizz when Vivian hits California and makes contact with Annie, her mother's old best friend, and someone in a position to explain the trunk's more startling artifacts: an eight-by-ten from Frank Sinatra,
jewellery that might be from Bobby Kennedy. These two then enter the story, as do JFK, Marilyn, Louis Prima, Johnny Rosselli and Frank's Rat Pack cohorts. There are great portraits of Dean Martin (depicted here as a paranoid, milk-swilling TV addict) and of Peter Lawford (an Austin Powersy creep waving his highball and yelling, "Drink up and be somebody, baby!"). Not enough Sammy, alas, though how could there be?
But back to Vivian, who comes to realize that while her mother -- whose name was Josie, or Celia, or Audrey, depending -- had a swingin' time, she was also utterly trapped. In Vivian's present-tense reconstruction, J/C/A spends hours holed up in hotel rooms eating baked Alaska, while her famous boyfriends count cards and plot assassinations. When she objects, they call her "a fireball," and when she really objects . . . well, read the book and find out. She's the chick, living in a candy-pink sixties cocoon, a dumbed-down beneficiary of murder and theft. No wonder she ends up throwing herself into sugarless feminism -- a feminism, as the book points out, that's hardly a perfect refuge.
Vivian, whose father is a long-vanished cipher, has grown up resenting her mother's oppressively communal friends with their "Billie Jean King mullets" and humourless, reductive attitudes, and her own segues -- into cyberporn, utility-grade modelling and sleazy guys -- seem therefore forgivable, too. She has tried to read her mother's Dworkin and Greer, really she has, but "it's difficult to read with your eyes rolled so far back in your head."
Livingston's jabs are not cheaply satirical; they are serious. She effectively makes the case that second-wave feminism had great targets but an imperfect aim. Along with its tremendous advances (the book doesn't deny them) came the inevitable, if sickening, backlash. The following examples may not be mentioned, but they swim into the brainpan anyway: The Swan, "rainbow parties," Girls Gone Wild.
Forty-five years ago, Philip Roth pronounced the social novel dead. In a sense, Dr. Phil was right, since novels may never again have the power to affect mining or meat-packing plants in the way that those of Emile Zola or Upton Sinclair did. But Cease to Blush is proof that issue fiction is still being written, and very well, too. Billie Livingstone
Like the best of its type, this story should get people thinking, talking and, at length, arriving at solutions. It captures a feminine moment, the way Doris Lessing, Marilyn French and Erica Jong were able to. It's a book that ought to be put in a time capsule and dug up 100 years from now by women who, with any luck, will have finally figured things out. A great read, in short, and you won't be able to put it down. Even if you're vacuuming.
Cynthia Macdonald is a dangerously unprincipled Toronto writer.
