EllenPall.com - BACK EAST Reviews

From the Los Angeles Times, Friday September 30, 1983
by ELAINE KENDALL

Brave New World of Brittle People

This matter-of-fact first novel could make you glad you're over 30; the more, the better. Deceptively conventional in character, plot, style and setting, "Back East" is nevertheless proof positive that the moral revolution is over and the insurgents have won. The battlegrounds are tranquil, the royalists routed, the treaties signed and the warriors demobilized. Life is back to normal. The only problem is that normal isn't strawberries and cream, but salt mines and gulags.

Melanie Armour is 29, a songwriter weary of Los Angeles and eager to get back to New York where the real people are, the excitement, the pace, the energy. She's been here for 12 years, arriving to major in music at UCLA , dropping out when a class assignment became a fluke hit. She's outlasted a series of doomed relationships with rock musicians, living on her inheritance during the bleaker periods, recently stagnating in a smoggy haze of procrastination, boredom and redundancy.

As calmly as if she were mentioning a crumpled fender, a rent increase or any humdrum crisis of contemporary life, she tells us "some of her friends died and she gave up drugs for the most part." The operative words are "some" and "the most part," because in Melanie's post-revolutionary world, quite a few people die in their 20s of overdoses, leaving the survivors to react by cutting down, leaving town or following suit. Melanie has made her choice. She's not only smart, but generous, warm-hearted and well-bred, by no means a Hollywood waif.

Not a coincidence

In addition to the inheritance from the family paper company, there's a comfortable old farmhouse in Maine, a fond if self-centered brother, a frail, difficult widowed mother, an academic brother-in-law, and a reticent 12-year-old niece, all of whom Melanie loves and has missed. Her sister, Iris, died at 29, a tragic old-fashioned death in an automobile accident. The fact that Melanie is just Iris' age now is not a coincidence.

On her first day in New York, after dutifully checking in with her music publisher, Melanie locks eyes with a marvelously handsome young man in the elevator. She goes back to her barren sublet, works on a new song, and as she's leaving to join her brother for dinner, there's the vision fromt he elevator waiting in her entryway. He had followed her home because he wants to know her.

Lucian Curry is as guileless as a puppy. Blushingly, he tells Melanie he's 17, an unemployed actor. He has exquisite manners, flawless features and a disposition as bland and sweet as vanilla mousse. Easily, like a boy from an earlier decade mentioning his college plans, Lucian confides he's been kept by a 40-year-old movie producer, information Melanie absorbs with no noticeable perturbation. Neither the discrepancy in their ages nor his sexual orientation makes much more difference to her than the color of his eyes or his choice in shirts.

The information is simply noted in passing, small realistic details defining a character, the novelist's stock-in-trade. Melanie is already in love with him, neither because of nor in sprite of factors that would have given more pre-revolutionary heroines at least a moment's pause. No more. A modern woman is adaptable and non-judgmental.

When Lucian quarrels with his lover, he moves in with Melanie, an idyll marred only by his occasional forays to gay bars. When Melanie comes home unexpectedly to find Lucian there with a conquest--the state obviously set for a drug-enhanced seduction--she seems disconcerted for a moment. The man shakes hands and leaves quietly; Lucian describes his life style in the ordinary conversational tone one might use to explain an enthusiasm for jogging or artichokes. Though Melanie permits herself a comment indicating the brave new world isn't always fun, her pique doesn't last long. "To me," she says, disagreeing with Lucian for the first time, "sex does have something to do with the rest of life." "When you're gay, it's just different," Lucian explains, and when Melanie wakes up the next morning, she finds he had covered her bed with flowers. Lucian has shopped for breakfast too, but at that point Melanie is obliged to take over. "How do you make fried eggs?" he asks. "You fry them. ‘Fry?' As though I'd said amortize, or manumit." In their need to learn so many other survival skills, people no longer have much chance to practice the basics.

Hip, Brittle Tone

The hip, brittle tone shifts quickly into another key as the story darkens. We're taken to the farmhouse in Maine, where a depressed and edgy Melanie resumes a sexual liaison with a town boy who has grown up to be a drug dealer, a trade he adopted the way others drift into selling aluminum siding, nothing permanent, just a job. The only thing bothering Melanie is that her old friend Benjy is so inept he probably won't live long enough to change occupations.

The family relationships are more complex and tangled than she had remembered from her wistful vantage point 3,000 miles away in Tinsel Town. An enormous amount of emotional anguish is abruptly condensed into a rapidly shrinking space, concentrating and sharpening a message that at first seemed merely a flippant gloss on contemporary life. By the end of this spare, compact book, Melanie has outgrown her fragile shell, exposing the valiant adult inside. She earns our respect by bringing off an unlikely but encouraging counterrevolution; a separate and original peace entirely her own.

From Woman's Wear Daily, November 4-11, 1983

Best of the Best:

In this assured first novel, a young California songwriter returns to New York, spends some time in the city, then heads for Maine where her stiff, correct mother lives. The events of the plot are less remarkable than novelist Ellen Pall's tone--ironic, bittersweet, sometimes lyrical. The voice is ingratiating enough that one can't wait to hear it again.