Savagery Pays Off

THE TRANSFORMATION of one May Alto from dedicated mother, wife and all-round good citizen into ex-wife, extortionist and anti-heroine is the making of Bette Pesetsky's first novel. A wackily revisionist look at the state of the American Dream and the war of the sexes, Author From A Savage People tells its story with more than a modicum of wit, humor, and self-irony rather than self-pity. What is more, Pesetsky has enough nerve not to replace the little questions confronting the little man with the far trendier Big Answers.

As the story opens, things do not look bright for May Alto. Harry, a second husband with the boyish charm and mental age of a 14-year-old, has just left her for "...this girl." Subsisting on codeine and Seconal, she is nursing an arm slashed in a mugging for $12 and a cheap tape recorder. She is the sole supporter of three children going through various phases of adolescent trauma. A ghostwriter, May writes books to order, bringing glory to a slew of semi-literate literary celebrities in return for modest cash rewards. To keep herself entertained, she intertwines the stories of late family members--Aunt Giselle, Sonya, Uncle Trasker--with the made-to-order material. Bored, poor, overworked--what's a girl to do? Friends have suggestions:

"I'd like to make an introduction," she said. "You'll like him. My former brother-in-law." "He's been divorced two years," Huldie said..."He's not fresh from anyone...Do you understand the significance of that?" and

"I prescribe a job," Grace said. "Don't I always tell you that? A nice get-up-in-the-morning-and-get-dressed-and-go-out job."

When she learns that a client is to receive a Nobel Prize for Eine Leerstelle, a book she composed years ago, May decides to make crime--blackmail, to be specific--pay some of the emotional as well as financial dividends she has never received for the work done. More than anything, Quayle, the Nobel Prize winner, stands for too many things. May can no longer stomach. The epitome of tweedy, trendy pseudo-intellectual sleaze, Quayle would be the last to write Eine Leerstelle; it is doubtful whether he could read it--yet he is the perfect success, giving the audience a Celebrity.

"The creation of this work," he might say, "was accomplished in my small study. There in the presence of the artifacts of my life--various pieces of stone, various edges of brass, the Mobius strip of my intellect. The lighting was dim, the room was a cave my mind was the world." (p. 45)

On being confronted he is, at first, incredulous, then condescending, furious, and scared out of his wits. Parts of the book are as good as signed by the real author--riddled with stories of May's mother (half Yente, half Bakunin, she would cook stews and make bombs for the local anarchists in the crowded Brooklyn apartment): of her Aunt Giselle, in life a dried-up monument to all the revolutions that never happened, in May's stories a ravishing temptress; of Trasker, a "sort-of-uncle."

THESE ARE the "savage people" to whose heritage May finally gives in. As she becomes more and more obsessed with getting the better of Quayle, May comes to eschew the profit motive for the visceral thrill of sheer, pure, glorious revenge. She studies him, even goes to a lecture. Appalled at the near-manic, hushed crowd anticipating his appearance on stage:

What was the matter with Quayle? The addition of music was not appropriate. It definitely showed no understanding of Eine Leerstelle, a lack of taste. It ruined my mood. Ba, ba, bop, Ba, ba, bop. The sound was quadrophonic. It got louder, picked up a jazz beat. Oh Quayle, for shame! (p. 159).

By the end, while May has not scored a clean-cut victory for herself or for the other "little men" and, especially, little women, she has at least thrown a wrench into the workings of the Quayle machine; wrought a bit of anarchy worthy of Sonya's designs. Perhaps that is the best she could hope to do. In May Alto's world--one in which decency, even mere intelligence mark the losers and people like Quayle win the laurels--anarchy becomes a reasonable response. We cannot know whether a real alternative exists; whether Alto actually ever might have succeeded on her own. As it is, that seems about as probable as Sonya's revolutions.

THE MAIN STRENGTH of Pesetsky's novel lies in the character of the narrator-protagonist herself. Never whining, rarely dogmatic, she makes everything in her quirky tale seem perfectly probable, so internalized is the logic. At times, however, the feminist themes do turn reductonist. During one of Harry's visits home, the teenage daughter is wondering whether to take carpentry or ballet as a school elective. Her mother is all for woodwork as opposed to Harry, who advocates that "any girl with swell legs should take ballet." One is left with the lingering suspicion that May could only have married Harry to provide the book with an unsavory male presence and the kids with an unsuitable role model. Aside from Quayle, the story contains only meetings with abridgeable--and abridged--men, in contrast to the subtlety with which some of the women are sketched. (While this does not constitute a major flaw within the novel, the reader still wonders whether some of one's best friends could be men.)

A smash, the last scene features a Quayle-turned-manic-killer on one side of May's door "...with his muzzle-loading revolvers, knives, lengths of cord, gas chambers, doppelgangers, poison-bearing pins" versus a group of friends sitting on a couch, smiling encouragingly, waving brightly-coloured plastic baseball bats." It is here that Pesetsky's wisdom lies; rather than offer epigram, dogma, or role model, she generally keeps her characters' lives firmly within the Barnum & Bailey's that is their natural sphere.