The bar should be raised for The Thong Also Rises
By Molly Freedenberg 01/05/2006
I love story anthologies, with their promise of variety and entertainment for the short attention span set. They beckon to me the same way half-hour television shows do — and, of course, have the same benefits (the small, easy to swallow morsels, and the knowledge that if this one’s bad, there’s another one right around the corner) and disadvantages (the potential for so many bad ones).
And The Thong Also Rises, the third book in a series of essays about wild women on the road, edited by Jennifer L. Leo, is no exception. Like most story anthologies (and most channel-surfing adventures), this one is inconsistent. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, rarely great but never completely awful, Thong reads more like a collection of writing class assignments than a genuine book of travel essays.
Many of the stories read like first or second drafts, with the author trying out lots of different ways to say the same thing, to tell the same story and, in some cases, to figure out exactly what they want to say. “Naked Nightmare,” for example, starts out talking about the author’s discomfort with the idea of nude beaches. But by the end, we realize (and presumably, she has too) that it’s not nude beaches she minds — it’s seeing newly wed couples at them that bothers her. This is a far more interesting conclusion, and would’ve been served better if the author had left out the meandering first part altogether.
The problem is not, however, in the writing, or even in the subject matter. On the contrary, many of the contributors are experienced and well-respected writers; there are more than a handful of scrumptious sentences and amusing turns of phrase in each essay; and much of the subject matter has the potential to be either exotic or at least universal.
No, the problem with Thong (aside from its annoying title) is in editing: these stories simply needed another comb-through. For example, the concept of Ellen Sussman’s “Naked Nightmare” could have been interesting — why does a woman otherwise comfortable with nude beaches get uncomfortable with the idea of seeing newlyweds at one? — but the story took too long to get to the answer, which itself was anticlimactic. A good editor could have directed a re-write which would have completely fixed this problem.
“An American (Drug-Smuggling) Girl” also just needed an editor to help whittle down the exhaustive list of metaphors and jokes in each section. Though the story, about the writer Laurie Notaro’s trip to Mexico to buy allergy medication, was a good one, and though there were genuinely funny parts, such as describing Allegra as a “one-trick-ponydrug” so tame “you can mix with alcohol and nothing happens,” those parts get lost in long lists of equally funny lines that don’t necessarily go together.
Perhaps if the stories being told were outrageous and unusual, maybe of the getting-lost-in-the-snow-and-eating-your-companions variety, the quality of the writing and the depth of the author’s introspection wouldn’t be necessary to make the anthology compelling. But since many of these stories are fairly common among traveling folk — such as Tamara Sheward’s fear of flying on a rickety Laotian plane in “Pills, Thrills and Green Around the Gills,” – they require either a certain amount of flair to make them page-turners or an emotional depth to make them seem universal.
There were some gems, though. Susan Orlean’s story about a taxidermy convention was expectedly interesting, weird and well-written. Gina Briefs-Elgin’s “Cherub” was a good read, mostly because it was succinct, unexpected and had as its subplot the relationship of the author with her mother. Jennifer Cox’s “Hot Date with a Yogi” — about wearing the wrong outfit to a yoga class and how the resulting self-consciousness ruined the author’s chances with the yogi — was blissfully short, sweet, entertaining and relatable.
Marcy Gordon’s “Gently You Have to Avoid a Frightening Behavior” was a delightful lost-in-translation mishap: the tale of a traveler in Italy having to use her limited language skills — and descriptive sign language attempts — to explain a friend’s trouble with Viagra to an emergency room full of people. And “Riding the Semi-Deluxe” by Megan Lyles was one of the few stories both outrageous enough to stand on its own and also featuring good enough writing that it could’ve been a less interesting tale. (As it is, the story is about the author trying to find a clean bathroom in India, only to find the first one covered in “every color of the shit rainbow,” another infested with spiders and a third featuring both human feces and a shit-eating pig.)
Less enjoyable were stories like Nicole Dreon’s “And Then I Was Eight … Again,” which wasn’t bad, but couldn’t decide if it was about the author’s parents’ frugality during travel or The One Wacky Time They Stayed with Aunt and Uncle Crazypants.
And a disappointing addition was Ayun Halliday’s “Paris, the Third Time Around,” mostly because I expected more from this Halliday, the funny and insightful woman behind the “East Village Inky” zine and the “Mother Superior” column in Bust Magazine. Her essay here, though, felt meandering and meaningless.
I wish that Jen Leo, rather than choosing which stories to include the anthology, had actually edited the writing in the stories. That could have evelated this entertaining-but-forgettable book from a comparison to channel-surfing to (gasp!) maybe even one of those HBO series you turn on the TV to watch. But it’s not there; and it’s too bad it’s not, because these stories had potential.
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