Rhine Maidens by Carolyn See (review)

274 Western American Literature Taken for itself without any grinding of literary axes, The Ghosts of Elkhorn mixes fantasy and human reality with wit, charm and style in a presentation that refreshingly ignores the search for the Holy Grail of “The Western Novel.” C. L. RAWLINS, Cora, Wyoming Rhine Maidens. By Carolyn See. (New York: Coward, McCann and Geohagen, 1981. 272 pages, $13.95.) The title Rhine Maidens seems far-fetched for a novel set mostly in Southern California, where (it must be said) most of the rivers flow in ugly concrete channels. Since the sexually betrayed guardians of the Rheingold in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle were the ultimate female victims, it is easy to understand how they could tempt the imagination of a modem writer writing about women’s oppression — but Carolyn See has not done for the Rhine Maidens what Sylvia Plath did for the Lorelei. Still, Carolyn See is a sly literary comedienne and one of the better writers chronicling contemporary lifestyles in Southern California. Her char­ acters are never merely the denizens of Tinsel Town or Lotus Land or the Big Avocado; nor do they have a particularly apocalyptic sense of reality. Her avid admiration for Joan Didion begs for a comparison of her own work to that author’s, but See’s literary sensibility is too down to earth and lacking in moral ambition to be a convincing case of hardboiled existentialism. If See’s work lacks the grand sweep of Didion’s, it nonetheless shares with it and Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman an obsessive interest in the intersecting neuroses of narcissistic mothers and their daughters. Rhine Maidens is about such a relationship between sixty-three-year-old Grace Jackson and her adult daughter Garnet. The portrait of Grace is the best thing in the book. This oddly affecting woman is a violent and selfish survivor from the Catholic working class, and See does not ennoble her misery. The crackle of raw energy in Grace’s forthright voice, which snaps from hatefulness to devastation or rhapsody, makes her one of the least condescended-to older women in recent fiction. Grace endures a lifetime of disappointment by clinging to and reweaving the myth of her “glamorous” youth. But her romance with the past is not enough to combat the megrims of her present life as a widow in the bleak central California oil town of Coalinga. Her dark side comes out when she lapses into an angry and nostalgic monologue addressed to her friend Pearl, who is now dead, that vainly struggles to keep the starstruck saga of their youth alive. Grace’s daughter Garnet is a daffy, self-doubting clunk of a woman who struck out on her own but wound up settling for a marriage of convenience Reviews 275 with a dislikable television producer. They live with their two children in posh Brentwood Park. See walks a thin line but generally restrains herself from a hackneyed exploitation of their trendy nouveau Hollywood lifestyle. Garnet has always been the butt of her frustrated mother’s limitless hostility. When Grace can’t take it a minute longer up among the oil rockers of Coalinga, Garnet drives up the freeway to rescue her mother with justifiable trepidation. Garnet, who is as middlebrow and ga-ga as some of Carolyn See’s regular book reviews in the Los Angeles Times, tells her side of the story in a gushy diary she keeps for a self-improvement class. She has a jokey, not-quite-with-it quality that she has obviously developed to evade her tyrannical mother — it makes her flaky bait for every “human potential” huckster who comes down the pike. Yet when her husband deserts her, she gathers her chicks around her, cuts her losses, and survives. Her permanent daze allows her to cope, but at the price of deep feeling. The ambiguities of Garnet’s character reflect a core of pathos — part derailed Cinderella fantasy and part the Silent Generation’s demoralization — that always threatens to swamp See’s novels. Garnet and her unfaithful husband have a pie-throwing scene in a swank restaurant that harkens back to the old Hollywood crazy comedies...