SUICIDE BLONDE AT 25

      “WAS IT the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” So begins Darcey Steinke’s “sensational” second novel, Suicide Blonde. I put the words “sensational” in quotation marks because a host of similar adjectives (“shocking,” “daring,” “scandalous,” and so on) greeted the novel at its publication in 1992. This may have given the book a well-deserved public velocity, but insofar as such adjectives also reflect the prudishness and insularity of many reviewers and readers, it also ran—and to some extent still runs—the risk of occluding some of the novel’s truest achievements, all of which are on display, in miniature, in its unforgettable opening sentence.

      The swirl of bourbon, blonde hair dye, and vaginal lips is audacious, sure, but it’s also funny, and evidences a fairly rare and delightful phenomenon I might call feminist camp. Feminist camp—which can be practiced by persons of any gender (see John Waters, who regularly identifies as a radical feminist)—doesn’t waste time exhibiting its feminist credentials. It simply moves with invention and forcefulness into a new field, one which both belongs to a canon of outlaw writers (Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Alexander Trocchi, William S. Burroughs, etc.), while also creating new ground to stand on (Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick, Virginie Despentes, and more). Suicide Blonde belongs to both of these traditions, as well as to other notable subsets, including noir, queer lit of the 80s and 90s (Michelle Tea, Leslie Feinberg, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles), classic twentieth-century fiction featuring itinerant, urbane women experimenting with dissolution and desire (Jean Rhys, Iris Owens, Renata Adler, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith), maybe even erotica (Steinke remains one of the few writers I know whose writing about sex manages to be both literary and hot).

      As Suicide Blonde’s opening question makes clear, its home base is the consciousness of a questing female, for whom the words “abjection” or “debasement” are someone else’s, insistences of a culture stubbornly deaf to the mess of female journeying in extremis. Indeed, what some reviewers mistook as an attempt to shock (“So self-consciously seeking ‘that exquisite kick of perversity,’ this callow fiction comes off as something along the lines of a much more sincere American Psycho. All the more pathetic,” wrote some stooge at Kirkus), I hear as an uncommonly confident, entertaining over-the-topness, especially re: bodies, as in: “Pig’s head dropped lower. She gagged and a long line of glittering burgundy ribboned down the stairwell.”

      Turning wine vomit into glittering burgundy ribbon is just one of the alchemical transformations regularly performed by Steinke’s prose. This alchemy isn’t a sign that Steinke is on the run from materiality, however—despite (or because of ?) Steinke’s Christian background, vomit remains vomit. Instead she’s after the glittering, the way the sublunary world flickers with possibility, divinity, multivalence, from the inside out. The novel’s tone shares this commitment to flicker, or suspension: it feels melodramatic and restrained, mordant and good-hearted, suffused with high-order irony and casual sincerity. Likewise, the novel reads like an allegory set in any dystopic, late twentieth century city (opaquely emblematic character names such as Bell and Pig further this impression), while also offering a portrait of a very particular time and place—the San Francisco of the early 90s, of the Lusty Lady, of parties at which one might meet “a feminist trying to destroy the myth of the aesthetic canon, musicians who insisted house music was the blues of the nineties and a performance artist who covered himself with animal blood and said narrative was dead.”

      Like all of Steinke’s novels, Suicide Blonde has been lauded for its “gorgeous prose,” and justly so. I’d like to pause here, however, and disrupt the critical tendency to act as if “gorgeous prose” were a kind of decorative accent on a novel which could survive without this value-added. Certain novels may be palatable, or even compelling, in spite of their unremarkable or unlovely sentences. But those cannot be great novels. Despite the hopes of mediocre sentence writers everywhere, novels cannot be separated from the prose which comprises them. So if I reiterate here that Steinke’s prose is gorgeous, I don’t do so to turn an A into an A+. I mean to underscore that she is writing in a tradition of novel writing that doesn’t depend on tricks of narrative momentum or emotional set-ups to make us endure uninteresting prose. Rather, Steinke’s sentences reliably deliver concision, beauty,