The Beautiful Grotesque

One of the challenges of experimental literature is that readers must accept learning to find their interpretive place of departure in narratives that often take their time presenting numerous or fractured possibilities, instructing, as Anne Carson has said, the reader how to read them. Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act creates just such suspense. What I’m not sure it creates, at least for this reader, is a sense of the satisfying payoff or cumulative experience of absorbing a single source that can yield such awe or wonder (like the awe or wonder one can experience with a concentrated reading of Carson’s NOX [2010])—unless the reader can look past or beyond the fact that this book seems marketed as a cohesive piece of long work and choose instead to view this book as a loosely linked collection of thematically related flash without named characters, though it is not marketed as such.

Carter’s prose sparkles, presents images, and presents experience. I do not see it as one narrative, however—and I think this was off-putting to me as a reader reading a book separated into three parts and numerous subsections when I continuously attempted to hold all the narratives in memory storage as I continued reading, in the hopes that the author would eventually piece all the incongruous passages together in a finale of interwoven lines—yet finally realized, in the end, that she would not. What I found myself feeling after reading this book was that I continue to embrace the belief that even experimental prose must have some kind of form or bond or structure that performs its readerly instruction—and when it does not, my final and interpretive enjoyment of the text as a whole, my end view of that text, is at peril.

That said, Glamorous Freak has many elements deserving of admiration. I read it twice. The prose is tight and imagistic. The symbolic passages are artful. It is a beautiful book object visually, like Anne Carson’s NOX is a beautiful book object visually, both possessing features that necessitate consideration of more than just the standard narrative. It is creatively designed, unique, and aesthetically pleasing, woven throughout with both black and white and color illustrative photography of a woman one might assume to be the author, and multi-colored pages artfully tinted to correspond to the front-labeled sections. It is fashioned to entice with not just words but the experienced fusion of image and text.

Many times, for Carter and Jaded Ibis Press, this strategy works. As one reads the book, one discovers there are numerous narratives of other, of isolation, of pain at being female, of residing in a house that often has one inhabitant obsessed by her own glamour and emotionally removed to the point of solitary imaginings, solipsism, and a fracture with reality. Images match these moods well. In terms of prose, there is playful language meant for modernity and that which is seemingly repurposed from myths or fairy tales. In many passages, there is a great, though subtle, thematic embrace of the author’s desire to translate the growth from girl child to woman in terms of eroticism—a leaving of the neverland of the modeled child’s concrete home for the beaches and forests of her more sensuous escapes, imagined or otherwise.

All of these elements, I greatly appreciated.

As glamour does not exist in a vacuum, there are men to be desired here too, most often those inaccessible or slightly androgenized. This would explain, I suppose, the supposition that the person who admires them is a glamorous freak, or a freak for glamour, or a woman who wants her lovers a little off-kilter.

The book opens, in fact, with six short sections that seem to be a woman fan’s worship fantasy for a rock ’n roll idol like Prince in many ways, who wears “incredibly daring high heels and gold epaulets.” This narrative...