Sometimes, an image can perfectly illustrate a narrative while leaving itself open to ambiguities. Think Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, or Jay Gatsby’s green light. In Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom, the protagonist, Betty Block (née Bird), lives in the shadow of her formidable artist mother, Violet Flowers, whose famous work, The Creation of Violet, is based on an exact replica of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which has been altered to depict herself, minus the God figure.
Perhaps a necessary and inevitable correction? After all, Eve and her female descendants are given short shrift in Michelangelo’s work, and you could say the same for much of the artistic tradition of which he is an exemplar. Wasn’t it about time to shake things up? As a confidante of Betty observes, “I think it’s more subversive because it’s obvious.” And: “At least your mom doesn’t pander.”
Betty is an inheritor of her mother’s second-wave feminism, and more than many of her peers, she is conscious of that fact. She declares, “Wasn’t our generation of women not just the first born after Title IX, after Roe, but also the first to learn about the G-spot by third grade?”
All to the good. But consciousness of this history, and of the necessity to respect her mother’s achievement and continue rewriting the creation story, is no simple affair and, at times, can feel like a burden. The novel takes the form of a confession: it’s a book-long rant and interrogation by Betty with a barmaid, Lizzie, who is no stranger to critical theory. (She’s also a grad student writing on Cindy Sherman and Chantal Akerman.) Betty’s third-wave feminism, which is imbued with a sense of mission, also includes a plea:
For this is not a song of fathers! This is not a song of uncles or granduncles or grandfathers! This is absolutely in no way not even a little bit close to a song of husbands!
Sing not of men then, and sing not of arms. No long labors by land or by sea. Please. Help me find a new beginning.
As a young woman, Betty is busy with the messiness of growing up, and earlier narratives still animate her world. She spends happy hours with her grandmother (a “Friedanian figment”) watching old movies and role models who are decidedly different from her mother’s avatar, women like Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in How to Marry a Millionaire. She enjoys the experience, but she also feels “complicit in that messy game of make-believe or dress-up […] Didn’t Violet Flowers raise me for something better?”
She can see through the silliness (and perniciousness) of Hollywood, but the uncomfortable truth is that Betty also cares about lipstick and hair highlights, and she is susceptible to falling foolishly in love. Lizzie asks her, and Betty regularly asks herself, the following question: “Can you please explain why you’re being such a fucking girl?”
Betty is torn. It wouldn’t be accurate to call Lonesome Ballroom a coming-of-age novel—it’s more a coming-of-ages, as the reader follows her through college, jobs, relationships and competing with her best friend. All the while, the alternative Sistine Chapel of The Creation of Violet hovers above her head.
She tries to respect this image, and not lose sight of its truth. But the trouble is, when you spend your time looking up, you’re liable to bump into things around you, or even trip and fall on your face.
That’s what’s enjoyable about Lonesome Ballroom. Although Betty is an intelligent and hyper-articulate narrator, with full insights about film, fashion and late twentieth century aesthetics—in the prosaic sense, she’s often the smartest person in the room—McDonnell is not afraid to let her heroine screw up as she careens through life.
So much of politically aware fiction is afraid of putting a foot wrong, of being off-message. Margaret Atwood’s unabashed didacticism casts a long shadow. Art gets sacrificed to the message. There’s a palpable reticence that all too often feels like self-censorship.
McDonnell knows better. Her feminist sensibility informs the novel throughout, but she does not hold back or try to make nice. Lonesome Ballroom is less interested in didacticism than in getting its heroine’s experience down on the page, fearlessly. Betty asks herself:
Could I find a way to take back the language, make all the old bad words new? (Good luck with that, bitch!) I did, I still do—do it exceptionally well—do it like a professional—but what of this sad fact: the old meanings keep playing, too?
There’s the rub, and it’s a big one. You can defang the old language with irony, but it will only take you so far if the world around you doesn’t get it—if your employer, your colleagues, your lovers, for God’s sake, are speaking with the old lexicon. You’re a foreigner in what they still believe is their country.
So it tracks that, despite Betty’s resolve to make her story about something other than men, Lonesome Ballroom contains memorable depictions of guys. These are often hilarious, especially a character called Guy Grecko. He’s a famously masculinist film director/auteur, a weird cross of Tarantino and Rohmer, whose movies foreground violence and dead animals. He’s also Betty’s ex-boyfriend from college, who she knew back in the day when he was a hyper-sensitive dweeb. Now, according to Lizzie the Barmaid, he gives “tough guy” interviews to arty magazines about his creative process:
He wants his films to “bludgeon” his audience. That’s why he has to write his screenplays so fast, to get that “urgent brutality” in. So he writes them standing up at the workbench in his garage, except that he doesn’t say “write,” it’s “punch out another screenplay” or “bitch-slap a concept until it begs him to stop.”
Film figures largely into the novel, not only in terms of story, as the narrator weighs the genre’s representations of women, but also as style. At one juncture, this is how Betty sees the story of her generation:
Running into the future—we are the future!—as if that we included me, and I was late, or it wasn’t too late, or something? As if the violins might cue a mythmaking voiceover (“X, 199—”), roll the film on some decisive scene, the heroine razing the city so that she might raise another.
Transitions are presented as jump cuts; there are frequent references to perspectives, close-ups and zooms. The book features photographic stills, and ends with a “Credits” section that includes stunts, best boys and executive producers. Conceptually speaking, McDonnell and her publisher, Rescue Press, possess a fine sense of a book as something more than a passive medium. It’s an interesting object in its own right.
Along with its formal pyrotechnics and self-aware politics, the novel is also a story of friendship. A character referred to as E plays an important role in Betty’s life, and the depiction of friendship here isn’t cloying or sentimental. You can compete with your best friend, betray her or be betrayed by her, or be sucked into games of status while pretending to be indifferent to status. “I was the best at caring the least!” (This scorn of status has its own cachet—or, well, status.) E becomes a successful gallerist, according to Betty, because “her refusal to admit her ambition and expertise outright was the very means by which she achieved them.”
Lonesome Ballroom is a rich novel, a probing account of what it was like to be a young woman and aspiring intellectual in the late nineties and early aughts. Its mix of humor and high seriousness make it an engaging—and often surprising—performance.