Tender Age

By Yosha Bourgea

ADOLESCENCE is hell, as any teenager will tell you. It is the least forgiving time of life, combining as it does a heightened self-awareness with the presence of forces beyond our control. The natural order of things shifts, becomes unnatural and unpredictable, and warps us in ways we can’t possibly be ready for. However supportive our families may be, the metamorphosis is always a fearsome test of our being.

Out of this dark soil comes Cruddy (Simon & Schuster; $23), a shocking, grimly funny novel that tests its readers all the way from the disturbing dust jacket to the haunting final page.

The author, Lynda Barry, is best known for “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” a nationally syndicated comic strip that runs in many an alternative newspaper. Fans of the strip already know that Barry is a master at evoking teen angst in all its awkward splendor, but even they will be taken aback by the intensity of her illustrated novel.

Cruddy, set in 1971, is the story of Roberta Rohbeson, a 16-year-old girl who lives “on a cruddy street in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town.” After a bad acid trip that ends at the police station and leaves her grounded for a year, Roberta begins to write an account of what happened five years before on a blood-soaked road trip with her father.

Interwoven with this tale, which unfolds in a series of flashbacks, is the story of the older Roberta’s drug-modified adventures with a loose-knit group of misfits: Vicky, a fast-talking liar; her handsome brother, The Stick; and The Turtle and The Great Wesley, two eccentric escapees from the Barbara V. Herrman Home for Adolescent Rest.

In the pre-PC world of the early ’70s, there is no hint of “Just Say No” propaganda. The primary concern of these kids is getting high, as often as possible and by any means available. Considering their dysfunctional home lives, that’s hardly surprising. The adults of Cruddy are hideous creatures who heap emotional and physical abuse on their children. In an environment devoid of compassion, substance abuse is the least of sins.

Spurred on by a strange drug called Creeper, Roberta tells her friends about the journey she took with her father in search of three suitcases stuffed with inheritance money. Roberta’s father is a terrifying person, an ex-Navy meat-cutter and a violent alcoholic. He disguises his daughter as a mentally retarded boy named Clyde.

The unlikely pair leaves behind a trail of dead bodies and burned buildings as they cross the country in pursuit of the inheritance. Throughout the ordeal, Roberta struggles to maintain her sanity. Though she is subjected to death threats, brutal beatings, and the sexual predations of older men, she is never a victim.

What keeps the novel compulsively readable is Barry’s gift for idiom, her perfect ear for the language of white trash. Roberta/Clyde, the protean narrator, is a fearless observer of her world: “There are rotten porches and slamming doors and constant yelling inside the houses and constant yelling outside the houses,” she says of her neighborhood, “and two doors down there are two little fish-faced girls who just stand in the mud and do contests of who can scream the loudest.”

The subject matter of Cruddy is challenging, and in less capable hands it could have been an overwrought mess. Barry doesn’t pull her punches, but the ferocity of her narrative is never sensationalistic. Each of the 55 short chapters is a left hook driven by purpose. The cumulative effect is draining, but also exhilarating.

Cruddy is a book you have to keep putting down–and then, immediately, pick back up again.

From the September 16-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Bright Ideas

Local exposure: Susie Bright speaks Sept. 23 at Copperfield’s in Sebastopol.

Susie Bright’s new book brings sex out of the closet

By Patrick Sullivan

“YOU JUST HAVE nothing left to hide, do you?” a shell-shocked stage manager once exclaimed to Susie Bright after the provocative author finished reading to a stunned nightclub audience an erotic account of a wet dream she’d had about Dan Quayle. The malapropism-spouting former vice president had apparently aroused enough genuine desire in Bright to make her fantasy a shocking experience for the crowd. She even knocked over her microphone in the throes of her passionate performance.

But recounting right-wing wet dreams in public is only the beginning for Bright. The Quayle experience, one of many anecdotes that she relates in her new book, Full Exposure (HarperSanFrancisco; $22), is a personal application of the prescription for candor that the sexpert-at-large wants to write for us all. Bright (whose previous books include The Sexual State of the Union) is willing to take her own medicine, and she thinks it’s time the rest of America opened its bulging closets and let long-hidden truths about sex get a nice suntan.

That attitude, of course, raises one obvious question. In a time when the airwaves are saturated with Viagra jokes and stories about fellatio in the Oval Office, are there any musty erotic secrets left to air out? What makes a sexual liberationist like Bright different from, say, Howard Stern?

To her credit, that’s an issue the author comes to grips with in Full Exposure, which purports to be her most personal book to date. Today’s entertainers and advertisers, Bright admits, throw titillation around like colored beads at Mardi Gras. But she argues that there’s something missing from this erotic imagery: “It’s not designed to promote self-enlightenment or human connection, it’s made to get you to do something else–buy something, yearn to buy something–which leaves you erotically nowhere. . . .

Titillation is the American standard: first offer a peek, then slap the hand that seeks to touch.”

In Full Exposure, Bright employs her usual conversational writing style, packed with offhand quips and casual irony. That breezy tone, combined with the book’s brevity, masks the serious goal of this 163-page volume. Bright has long defended freedom of sexual expression against all comers, from the puritanical right to the sexaphobic left. This old rogues’ gallery is given a dutiful slap on the wrist in Full Exposure, but the main villain this time out is the commodification of sex.

That might sound strange coming from a woman who began her career selling vibrators and has gone on to edit well-marketed collections of erotica, but Bright is fully aware of the ambiguities surrounding current attitudes. She’s delighted that people today feel free to write, read, and talk about sex. She’s less happy that they do it all in the language of a Madison Avenue marketing profile–what she calls the ethos of “My sexual preference is my lifestyle is my politics is my record label.”

As always, she makes her point with humor: “If Calvin Klein wants to get behind the Kinky Krusade, if Nike wants to court erotic chic in athletic advertisements, who am I to wax nostalgic over the days when we whispered to ourselves like fugitives?” she writes. “[But] we’re still dealing with sex like it was an eight-crayon box.”

SPEAKING OF MARKETING, there seems to be more than a little bit of it going on with Full Exposure itself. Someone somewhere decided to spin the book, which is subtitled “Opening up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression,” as a kind of self-help title, and maybe it is, albeit in a highly political, in-your-face kind of way. What John Gray book, after all, offers a 16-point list that includes such items as “Decloak right in the middle of fucking”?

And that may be the most heartening thing about Susie Bright. Rigid categories of all kinds–whether from the world of advertising or book publishing–come to grief at the hands of her sharp wit and irrepressible individualism. In a world that seems more standardized by the minute, it’s nice to be able to count on someone for a rational dose of old-fashioned chaos.

Susie Bright appears Thursday, Sept. 23, at 7 p.m. at Copperfield’s Books, 138 N. Main St., Sebastopol. 823-2618.

From the September 16-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Buried Treasure

Notes from the underground: Mystery meets geology in Sarah Andrews’ new book.

Sarah Andrews turns up old bones, new controversies

By David Templeton

“STOP,” SAYS Sarah Andrews. “Wait. I’m being too dramatic. Forget everything I’ve just said.” Matter of factly, Andrews waves a hand through the air, sweeping away the last five minutes of conversation.

The multitalented geologist, author, and educator–she teaches the “Dinosaur Class” at Sonoma State University–has been discussing her latest book, Bonehunter (St. Martin’s Press; $24.95). It’s the fifth novel in a unique and increasingly popular mystery series featuring forensic geologist Em Hansen, a scientist-turned-sleuth whose knowledge of the earth often gives her the edge over all those run-of-the-mill detective types. The Hansen series began with Tensely, followed by A Fall in Denver, Mother Nature, and Only Flesh and Bones.

In Bonehunter, Hansen undergoes a kind of crisis of faith when she finds herself accused of murdering an esteemed Salt Lake City paleontologist. The resulting desert-hopping whodunit–which coincides with a tense local battle between evolutionists and creationists–forces Hansen into dangerous terrain, both ideological and literal, as she begins to fall for a Mormon police officer and ends up fighting for her life in the secret dinosaur bone-fields of New Mexico. Bonehunter makes you think, while remaining a grade A mystery, a kick-in-the pants page-turner.

“My point in writing the book, besides writing a great story, is to open up a discussion of beliefs,” is what Andrews had originally been saying about Bonehunter. “I wrote it as a plea for openness, a plea for kindness, for understanding.”

And this is where she stopped.

“OK, that’s not why I wrote it,” the 48-year-old Graton author confesses, “though I hope it does do those things. The truth is, I wrote it because I was fed up.”

Fed up?

“Fed up,” Andrews repeats, laughing. “As a geologist, I’ve been confronted so many times by people who make these enormous assumptions about me, about what I’m trying to do as a scientist, about what I believe. Assumptions like ‘all scientists are atheists’ or ‘all scientists are trying to disprove the existence of God.’

“I’ve had it with being called an atheist, just because I happen to be a scientist. It’s not true! Being an atheist does not necessarily follow from being a scientist.

“I mean,” she adds, “Albert Einstein used the word God in every other sentence, right?”

It’s true. It’s also true that this happens to be a remarkably good time to unveil a novel that dares grapple with such issues. The Kansas Board of Education’s recent decision to remove the teaching of evolution from the state’s mandatory science curriculum has once more brought the simmering battle between science and religion to a fast boil.

“Yeah, what luck,” Andrews says of Bonehunter’s fortuitous arrival in the middle of this high-profile debate. “Though I admit I set out to write a more commercial book this time, who could have guessed that the timing would be so perfect?”

Descended from a long line of Quakers–“I am Sarah, daughter of Richard, son of Joseph Charles, son of Joseph Charles, son of James, son of James, son of Ezekiel, son of William,” she recites–Andrews was raised with a sense of spirituality but none of the harsh intellectual restraints of a strict religious upbringing.

Without apology, she tells of her family’s intuitive knack for sensing when another family member is about to die, an ability Andrews has experienced firsthand. Such metaphysical flirtations were abandoned, though, when she became a student of geology, tossing the spiritual world aside for a life of hard facts and provable equations.

After graduation, Andrews worked for the U.S. Geographical Survey, then spent several years in the “Oil Patch,” working for various petroleum companies until the price of oil dropped through the floor and she was laid off.

Shortly thereafter, Andrews began to write.

THINKING she’d turn her experiences as a geologist into a memoir, she took a class on autobiographical writing. However, the baffled instructor offered Andrews the following critique:

“You write like the best of the hard-boiled detectives,” she said, “but I must admit I find the voice a bit jarring.”

“It was the best unintentional advice I’d ever received,” Andrews says with a laugh, adding that her teacher’s words inspired her to transform her geological exploits into a mystery novel. Thus was Em Hansen born. With the release of her first novel, Tensely, it was clear that Andrews was on to something: a unique perspective, a one-of-a-kind main character, and the ability to create a good potboiler while actually writing some magnificent, lilting prose.

“In mysteries, traditionally, the story is everything and the writing is secondary,” she acknowledges. “Putting a lot of well-crafted prose into a mystery novel feels a bit like peeing in a dark suit. Who’s going to notice?”

All during this time, Andrews was struggling with the hard separation between provable phenomena and the mysterious events of her youth.

“I was indoctrinated by the stark scientific outlook of the world,” she explains, “but then I was bombarded with daily events that were, for lack of a better word, metaphysical in nature. At one point I finally told my rational mind, ‘OK, I think I’m going to allow myself to consider this stuff now.'”

She’s cagey about confessing too much, however, or being too specific about where her explorations have taken her, referring to her spiritual beliefs as “basic Quaker geologist mysticism.” When asked about her spiritual practices, she simply says, “Writing is my practice.”

She tells of the time she had coffee with Yale paleontologist Edward Lewis, the man who discovered Rama pithecus–which Andrews calls “the early, early man guy,” a manlike fossil once considered to be humankind’s earliest evolutionary ancestor–and having Lewis confess, “I think most geologists are closet pantheists. We see spirits in everything.”

Andrews likes that.

“I find the world deeply inspiring,” she says. “I can’t believe that everything I observe, as a geologist, is not divine.”

Smiling, she adds, “But I leave it to you to guess what I mean by divine.”

From the September 16-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.