The Toxicity of Female Tokenism

An Interview with Kathleen Alcott:

Though Kathleen Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find, is set in the mid-twentieth century, its concerns are eerily current—nearly every character is caught between the stability of convention and the blazing allure of revolution. Alcott depicts several big American events—the moon landing, the carnage of Vietnam, and the Reagan administration’s dismissal of the AIDS crisis—but she renders just as many intimate realities with a sensibility that she has come to define as her own. Her prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal: the private toil of being a single mother or a fatherless son, the bright loneliness of youth, and, perhaps most vividly, the torrid struggle of a single citizen who is “sickened by the masculine bark of her country” as she tries to find a way toward action.

Fay Fern rejects the traditional path her parents had envisioned for her to instead bartend in the Mojave Desert near an Air Force base; Fay’s transition from the doting mistress of a pilot nearly twice her age to a radical antiwar activist serves as the spine of the narrative. Her stoic ex-lover, Vincent, has moved away to become one of the first astronauts in the nascent space program. He’s also unwittingly become a father to Fay’s son, Wright.

This triangulation sets the book’s plot in motion, but what hooks the reader are Alcott’s darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations. A woman’s youth is “the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.” Another character’s relationship with the possibility of suicide is “like some billboard he had to drive by every day … a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere.” The last moments of a sunset are “when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest.”

Alcott’s narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. “Call me when you’re sober,” Fay says to her sister over the phone, who replies, “Call me when you shit out whatever rotten thing it is you ate.” A young man in San Francisco stumbles across his apartment and declares of his hungover state: “I feel like a goddamned aborted murder.” (...)


INTERVIEWER

Recently another novelist asked me if I have a specific emotional state or feeling that compels me to write fiction. I said whatever I said, then the asker told me he thought mine would have been anger. Could you tell me where you imagine your fiction comes from?

ALCOTT

I have written things because people in my life have died and I have written things because I have loved men who hated women and I have written things in answer to a part of me that swims out farther than is safe. This book in particular is a response to a transitional and itinerant chapter of my life, and there are many versions of myself who sat down to write it. You might have to ask me about a particular chapter, or even a sentence, to winnow it.

INTERVIEWER

There are a series of scenes in which Elise, a betrayed wife, icily takes up a regular barstool at the bar where her husband’s lover works. It culminates in a beautifully staged scene—you could make a whole three-act play out of this thread in the novel alone—that’s flush with a terrifying, nearly sexual tension. I am not sure I have much of a question here. I just love these scenes, the final one in particular, and want to know more about the ideas you think they raise. What was on your mind as you worked on them?

ALCOTT

Feminism, and in particular what feminists owe other women. Adrienne Rich gave a great commencement address at Smith in 1979 in which she talked about the toxicity of female tokenism, the great lie of the exceptional woman who travels in male circles. How well that lie sits on the tongue of American capitalism—it’s not other women you need, not equality for all women. It’s the exceptionalism of you, who will, after all, be the only one up against the patriarchal fence as you search for a chink. The idea of that shortcut is augmented by financial and solipsistic investment in the right pseudospiritual practice, in the self as a brand, in the consumerist narcissism. I think female tokenism is something Fay swallowed wholesale, which I certainly did in my late teens and early twenties, taking advantage of situations that I believe now took power from other women. I almost categorically dated older, powerful men, musicians and writers and filmmakers, who I think made my intellectual world bigger but my emotional world smaller, or more contorted, because I always measured my life in contrast to theirs. I would try to conceive of each of those relationships as exceptions, as exceptional as these men made me feel, ignoring the ghostly margin that was the age-appropriate women displaced, materially or emotionally, directly or indirectly, by the freedom this granted those men, who chose the malleability of someone young over the experience-based standards of someone older. At least in a conception of heterosexual womanhood that involves partnership and childrearing, when a much younger woman takes up with an older man, I tend to think, it tells the males in the world that their lives always come with an emergency exit, another shot, and the women of the world that the windows are closing quickly.

by Catherine Lacey, Paris Review |  Read more:

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[ed. See also: Ms Alcott's memoir - Trapdoor (Harper's). Recommended.]