Peter Selgin

In the dressing room of the “Lipstick Lounge,” the Lady Javana “straighten[s] her wig” and “dab[s] lipstick from her teeth.” Lady Javana, we’re informed, is neither a man nor a woman, nor “a boy in a dress” nor “a female impersonator” (“what female wears glitter on her eyelids, pink beehives and six-inch heels?”—Quite a few do, as a matter of fact, but never mind).

No, in her own overdetermined estimation, Lady Javana is a queen. I’ve italicized the word since the author goes to such great lengths to emphasize it.

Which points to what I feel is wrong with this opening. Rather than present us with a character, instead the bulk of this first page is taken up with a series of terms and metaphors by which Javana either identifies his/her self, or that he/she refutes. What starts out promisingly as an evocative, concrete scene (“She had to plaster down those eyebrows with the glue stick, beat her face with the powder, chisel new features . . . with foundation and blush”) in which the particular (drag queen putting on makeup) stands for the general, breaks down into an exercise in denotation, such that, by the end of the page, what we’ve read feels more like a jacket blurb than a scene.

It’s a shame, since the writing is strong:

Lady Javana—who spent most of her days as Joseph Ryan Gainer, library assistant—hated the tired metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly, but could not dispute its relevance. Because the holometabolism of the butterfly was a complex transition. It was sticky, confusing and savage.

As prose this can’t be faulted, but the issue here isn’t so much whether or not the metaphor of the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly aptly conveys the experience of a drag queen. The metaphor may or may not be apt; but the harping on it here conveys a self-consciousness that would seem to apply more to the author’s fascination with his subject than to the character in question. Though hatched from its “self-mutilating” chrysalis, this butterfly never takes flight: like a lepidopterist’s specimen, it’s been pinned to the page and pasted with labels.

Butterflies don’t go around self-consciously inventorying their butterfly-ness. Nor do readers of fiction especially want labels, and if they do want them they prefer their own. Nor do readers want judgments imposed by the author on a character or by characters on themselves. What readers want is experience evoked concretely through action, dialogue, or through a character’s internal responses to particular events, challenges and situations—illuminated, perhaps, by a sympathetic or worldly narrator, and possibly by the character’s own reflections, but not sewn up and boiled down into shrunken headed judgments and epithets.

Here, the only behavior exhibited aside from the application of lipstick and eye-glitter is the character’s self-conscious pursuit of a label for him/herself. Even accepting that this pursuit is real—that is, belonging to the character and not to an author overly fixated on the presumed novelty of his subject—still, it’s hard to imagine such self-conscious soul-searching taking place, as suggested here, on a regular basis for any duration. Surely this queen doesn’t spend his/her days (or nights) mulling over what to call himself? If so, one wants to say to him/her, “Get over it, already.” Perhaps folded somewhere into the meat of the story such reflections wouldn’t be so out-of-place. But as an opening gambit they misfire.

What’s sacrificed here for the sake of a story about someone “being a queen,” is a better story about a man—a librarian—who just happens to be one.

A woman fresh out of a mixed-bag relationship is harassed by the specter of her ex-lover as she goes about her routine chores.

This opening scene finds Dana taking the long way to her supermarket to avoid the school where Jerry teaches, and where he’s known to remain long after the last bell on behalf of his students, “correcting papers, offering extra help, and throwing baskets in the gym.” One gets the feeling that Jerry’s solicitous nature did not extend to his relationship with Dana—a suspicion confirmed later at the Stop & Shop deli counter, where Jerry’s ghost berates her for buying mashed potatoes to go with her rotisserie chicken.

The technique employed here is interior monologue, also sometimes referred to as stream-of-consciousness after the term coined by psychologist William James. But while the stream-of-consciousness technique tends to encompass narratives as a whole (such that descriptions, setting, dialogue, and actions are all conveyed, as it were, by the flowing stream), interior monologue functions as a distinct device within a traditional narrative—as in the given scene, where Dana’s thoughts enhance the narrative, but don’t subsume it.

Compare with this passage from the most famous stream-of-conscious narrative of them all:

… Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a loo her face a mass of wrinkles with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress …

With this sort of stream-of-consciousness, the author relinquishes—or appears to relinquish— control of the narrative to the mind of his protagonist. In fact that “loss of control” is entirely and cunningly contrived to give the appearance of spontaneity and randomness, much as the drips and spatters on a Jackson Pollack appear to be random and spontaneous (they aren’t).

With interior monologue the author never quite lets go of the reins. In the given example the narrator (as distinct from the protagonist) remains behind the wheel, as it were, telling us, between forays into his character’s thoughts, how, having choked back the bile inspired by a vision of Jerry shooting hoop with his charges, Dana “took a left and another left, heading toward the Stop and Shop.” The narrator goes on to explain that in shopping Dana “is all business, plucking apples, bananas, strawberries, and raspberries—expensive, but she deserved them.” Note how with that “but she deserved it” we are dunked, however briefly, into the protagonist’s subjective stream, back into her interior monologue. That she plucks apples and strawberries is an objective fact; that she deserves them is purely her subjective opinion, a taste of interior monologue.

This subtle mixture of objective authorial narration and a character’s subjective perspective goes by its own names. Called close third person by some and free indirect style by others, it lets narrators move seamlessly between objective reporting (“Dana wheeled her cart over to the deli counter”) and a character’s thoughts (“Oh, mashed potatoes.”), to where at times one can barely distinguish the two (“she planned to enjoy these mashed potatoes”).

The virtue of this technique (aside from dispensing with all the “she thought”s and “it struck her that”s), is that it flavors the whole narrative with a character’s feelings—as a sliced onion, left next to the butter in the refrigerator, flavors the butter with onion. Yet unlike the aggressive stream-of-consciousness technique, it gives authors full control over the degree of objectivity.

In this opening the free direct style is well-employed, though one might quibble that if Dana’s brain is indeed “working overtime” to avoid picturing Jerry in his classroom, that hard work hasn’t paid off well, as we are treated to the very images she’s intent on avoiding. Better perhaps to have her inadvertently drive by the school, having neglected to take an alternative route, and thus the image of Jerry gyrating on the basketball court with his charges will be both better motivated and inadvertent.

It seems to me, too, that if indeed Dana is haunted by Jerry, better use might be made of his specter, who ought to be right there in the driver’s seat beside her, telling her to change lanes and use the turning signal and that she almost cut that curb. The supermarket scene likewise feels stingy. Why not have Jerry’s take on more than mashed potatoes? Why not see him micro-managing Dana’s shopping list? Though he may not be there physically, Jerry is a character in this scene—or should be. Under the influence of Jerry’s ghost she might hesitate to drop that quart of mashed potatoes into her cart—and then defy him. Surely that beats telling us that this is what Dana would not have done in the past.

However skillfully or seamlessly rendered, a character’s inner thoughts are no substitute for actions.