Love Is A Battlefield

Inside Room 186 of the Wagon Wheel Inn, Elise will be kneeling on the carpet, which is orange like a tangerine. Her hair is greasy and braided, and a name---tattooed in calligraphy on her neck---is visible. She keeps both hands on the shotgun---the muzzle pressed into Jamey's breast. 

He'll be sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, hands on thighs. 

"Don't you love me?" he'll ask, quiet and desperate. 

"Elise. Come on. Don't you love me?" 

We begin here at this intense scene, in June of 1987. How we get here is to go back to the year before, where a crass vagabond girl from a troubled lower-class home meets a yuppie pretty boy, and they both fall headfirst into a seedy spiral of lust, obsession, and love.

Of course this familiar set-up is a tale as old as time. Shakespeare has got to be pissed from the grave realizing that nobody has come up with a better story line for doomed lovers --- or he's smiling smug, realizing how much influence he continues to have after all these centuries. Either way, Jardine Libaire's White Fur is touted as a "modernized Romeo and Juliet", and it doesn't take much to figure out the destination of the star-crossed in these pages.


White Fur more so, to me, is a grungy, metallic tasting Pretty In Pink. You got your Andie (Elise), your affluent appliance named Blaine (Jamey), your Duckie (Elise's gay friend, Robbie), and you've got your obnoxious, jealous Stef...just without all the sexy swagger and assholery that James Spader brought to that character (Jamey's friend Matthew). You also have such characters immersed in stark class distinctions at the heart of its conflict. It's also set in the 1980s, most of it in 1986 to be exact, the exact release year of John Hughes' teen drama. It's as if Libaire got pissed with more than just that hideous pink prom monstrosity Andie sports at the end, and wanted to refashion the narrative her way.

Still, White Fur aims to sully such similarities, as it isn't clean or didactic for constant cable TV repeats, Elise and Jamey's love is illicit, thorny, and raw, a love that has no meet cute by way of computer messaging or chocolate candies, and may make even the most mature shield their eyes from the horror. Even their sex is graphic, and makes you want to reach for the Dial cause its just so in the gutter. Seriously. Andie and Blaine would cover their eyes and convert to a convent with just one look at the type of pretzel twisting Elise and Jamey engage in.

Though Andie in spirit, Elise is also not a misunderstood cool girl in shades of pink who sees a future as a Parsons design student, she's a cornrow wearing, half white-half Puerto-Rican foul-mouth who lacks personal goals and interests, and has Jamey spellbound. Jamey is just as WASP-y, aloof, and discontented as Blaine, but he chokes on his silver spoon as he is the heir to a successful banking fortune, and finds it to be the albatross strangling him. He's looking for a way out, while Elise is looking for a way in. Both are lonely and become consumed with each other, and the more they resist, the more that Jamey's terrible Trump-ian family fights the pair --- the more these losers in love are drawn to each other.

Now, I do applaud Libaire for showing us how convoluted and chaotic lust and love can be, and how both emotions can teeter into obsession and destruction. I appreciate reading messed up love stories, because as I get older as much as I enjoy popping in a gooey rom-com to rid the day's realities, I have trouble engaging in the vapid generalized "chick lit" genre that is filled with workman's writing, silly banter, and how hot some guy and his abs are. White Fur offers the filth and foul that comes with relationships, taking the conventional and spitting at it, but this book was uncomfortable and odious for the wrong reasons.

Elise and Jamey...eh, I never liked them the whole time reading, and barely rooted for them throughout their frenzied romance, but that may be Libaire's intent. We're not supposed to like them, we're supposed to consider them, find the selves we ignore within them. Rediscover how first love/lust makes us into walking contradictions. Rediscover how reckless you were kicking, stumbling, and screaming into adulthood, living in crappy apartments, getting paid in peanuts in dead-end jobs, and being annoyingly stupid and naive while doing it. We're not supposed to get the glistening fairy tale, and for that there was a bristled fondness for these two, even in my eyerolls.

But! here's my major gripe: If you're going to grind grit and modernize the standard that is the Romeo and Juliet formula, do it with some depth and scope. Once we get a feel for the vast differences between Jamey and Elise --- how Jamey is rich, white, and handsome, and Elise is poor, ethnic, and crass (and with some troubling Latin stereotypes thrown in...) --- there isn't much to discover with these characters after that. Aside from the sloppy love making, Libaire takes great pains for pages, paragraphs, and chapters on end to show how Jamey and Elise have nothing in common aside from sex.

Elise should be a Dartmouth lacrosse star whose granddad went to Groton with Bats, and she should be bronzed from the Vineyard, lips opaquely shiny from Chapstick. So happy to meet you, Mr. Hyde! But no! Jamey is pushing forward the real Elise, in couture dress, shins bruised from basketball, cornrows latticing her lean head, feet wedged into slingbacks.

They are opposites and they attract, bring out Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat, got damn. WE GET IT. 

Libaire just doesn't give her characters any growth beyond the obvious, and no, I do not count Jamey ditching college after he only had one semester to go, and his family name and fortune as 'growth'. That was to move the story along in the slogging middle, and to make Jamey into some rebel hero against the class system, which he is not. Most of the time I'm waiting for one of them to mature, move on, for Elise to get a damn backbone and realize that her attraction to Jamey was doing her more harm than good. Her and Jamey both are broken people, this I get, but, romance is about taking those broken pieces and fusing them together for even just a pinch of better. It seemed the both of them were taking out all their built-in childhood abuses on each other, and cutting each other with their broken pieces. That's not love, that's not lust, that's straight up war.

White Fur also suffers from being over-written. Throughout its icky voyeurism, liken to the discontented winter prose of Bret Easton-Ellis and Jay McInerney, it's broken in choppy observational bits, and crammed with purple, violet, neon lavender prose that sometimes is astute and colorful, other times sloppy and weird. As a wordy girl, I do not mind overindulging on prose, and Liabrie does have an interesting raw voice, and an attention to detail that captivated me at first, but mid-way in the writing became as exhausting and unnecessary as the relationship itself.

Dig if you will some of these nonsensical lines:

"The New York Times is on doorsteps, a sack of ideas and facts, the city’s brains and tongues gutted by masterful hands, arranged into sausage." 

"Her eyes are incredulous and her mouth is resigned; the two features creating one meaning, the way Chinese characters are built."

"The cobblestones shine, horse phantoms clop over them. And how do you know this turd is human shit? The deli bag that wipes someone’s ass is crumpled next to it, and a cloud of wounded pride hangs dense as flies". 

"But then, after an hour of sitting there and letting this news run through her, she also started to feel--up there on this crest of the earth, its tall dead wildflowers tangled with Kleenex and gum wrappers and plastic straws and bird shit---and felt free."

And this string of grimy word pearls happens when the two engage in a random foursome:

Jamey is starting to operate in a trance, biting his lip. He's a mystical vision of an orangutan in a nature show. He actually has the thought: I'm a monkey, and that's okay. He's got a dumb look on his face and that's okay. For a minute, an hour later, right before he comes again, with two tongues licking him like kittens, he understands everything.

Aside from settings in East Coast college townships and provincial French countrysides, 1980s New York City vibrates ultra violent through most of the prose, becoming a character of its own. Though Jamey works at Sotheby's for a summer, the prose doesn't spend time on the shiny corporate Times Square Tra-La-La Land it is now, and that's refreshing, but this book doesn't collide the grime and glamour of 1980s NYC in a way that makes it palpable.

In White Fur the metropolis becomes a Viewfinder series of images: here's an offbeat city character, here's a cocaine-laced dinner party, here's a car honking, here's the sun setting, here is a jaunt to a Prince concert, here is a park tunnel where someone was no doubt raped, here are bums on stoops, here's a dog peeing and crapping ---- all these entities are explored with finesse and ~deep~ thought. But truly, a dog is just taking a crap on the sidewalk, you can't make that "poetic", but damn it if Libaire doesn't try to make fecal matter an artful semantic. Elise and Jamey just go nowhere and get lost in this sea of people, places, words, and hidden meanings, remaining startlingly one-dimensional throughout.

The last few chapters of the book truly swirl down the toilet of bizarre, devolving into a frustrating finale that leaves the reader with really nothing. After finishing, all I could say out loud was: WTF? and muster apology for Buck, their abandoned dog, and the baby these two brainless dolts will bring into the world.

*pops 'Pretty In Pink' in the DVD player* 

////

from the margins

• Rating: *
• 305 pages
• Published May 30th 2017 by Hogarth Press 

in the key of...

Pat Benatar - "Love Is A Battlefield" - "But if we get much closer I could lose control / And if your heart surrenders / You'll need me to hold / We are young / Heartache to heartache we stand"


Def Leppard - "Love Bites" - "It's bringing me to my knees (love lives, love dies) / It's no surprise (Love begs, love pleads) / It's what I need"


Animotion - "Obsession" - "You are an obsession / I cannot sleep I am your possession / Unopened at your feet / There's no balance / No equality / Be still / I will not accept defeat"


Possibly the easiest key to be in with this book... Everybody was so damn frantic, coked-up energized, and dramatic in the '80s, and in turn, it birthed some amazing anthems towards such states of being. The only thing I give this book for is that is allowed me to deep dive into my '80s music collection, and re-discover these classics about love, lust, and epic guitar squeals.

• What The Hair?: Speaking as an Black woman, cornrows, braids and twists are nothing new, but my '80s culture obsession has always viewed the popular cornrowed style of the time as 'micro-braids', the kind sported by 1980s artists like Patrice Rushen and Jane Child, not the ones described to Elise that seemed more the styles seen today. Excuse my nit-pick, but I just felt for the era her character's coif would resemble a more floppy banged Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, or the Melrose character in Netflix's GLOW. I just had a hard time really picturing a half-white, half-Puerto Rican chick rocking cornrows while living near Yale's campus in the mid-'80s. '80s scholars (if you exist) and hair gurus correct me on this if I'm wrong.