Paper cuts

Woman’s World has a plot ripped from the
pages of a magazine. Literally.

by JULIET WATERS

Recently a cyber friend of mine started a game of literary mash-up. Examples: Green Eggs and Hamlet: “Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head?” Or The Little Prince by Machiavelli: “The whimsy of human nature is embodied in many delightful and intriguing characters, all of whom are executed.” I had a lot of entries but I’m particularly proud of Middlemarch of the Penguins: “An idealistic young woman marries a cold man, with feathers.

Over in the U.K., however, Graham Rawle has taken the idea of the literary mash-up to a whole new level. Over five years, he assembled 40,000 individual fragments of text cut from women’s magazines from the early 1960s. But Woman’s World: A Novel is something more than an entertaining curiosity. The critical praise ranged from “brilliant” (The Guardian) to “a work of genius” (The Times of London).

Recently released in Canada, if you’re looking for a thriller that reads as though it were ripped from the pages of a magazine, this is it. Literally.

As an artifact, Woman’s World is amazing: a graphic novel without the graphics. Rawle does sneak in a few inch-high pencil drawings that were typical of the time, but beyond that, it’s a performance in font. Still, I was skeptical of how well it would read. The question is whether or not one can maintain a connection to a character or a story that is so obviously constructed.

I certainly felt more than a little distance from Norma, who likes things to be “just so” in her home and wants what she claims every woman wants, a home with “the brilliant shine on new furniture, in five lovely wipe-clean deep gloss colours that invitingly wink the warmest of welcomes.” But within the next few pages, the book begins to shift from Harlequin to Hitchcock, and before I knew it, there was a “giddy knot in my stomach and my heart was skipping madly to the beat of Jack Constanzo’s Cha Cha Bongo.”

The tone of the novel is a bizzarro cocktail of British women’s magazine journalism. One minute, it’s coasting along with the kind of high-pitched melodrama that will thrill fans of vintage Douglas Sirk, or Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven. Norma, our heroine, seems at first to have a fairly good relationship with her housekeeper Mary. “She’s like some marvellous Tommy in the trenches—keeping everyone’s pecker up.”

But things soon turn Joan Crawford as we discover that Norma is housebound. Seems her brother, Roy, buys all her clothes and Mary talks to her more like a mother than housekeeper. A mother who is more disgusted than impressed by her daughter’s feminine wiles. Norma, who has constructed quite the detailed sense of femininity, yearns to see her “winsome charm reflected in the eyes of a real flesh-and-blood admirer.” So she sets off one day to get a job.

The interview does not go well. The laundry service she applies to does not see how a woman of her considerable style would make the perfect delivery truck driver. “I stood dumbfounded, momentarily glued to the L I N O L E U M F L O O R I NG. Not qualified? RED RAGE rose within me like mercury in a toffee thermometer and I knew I had to leave before I reached the boiling point for fudge.”

Norma’s story is hilarious, but oddly poignant. Our assumptions about her begin to peel away, like the collage from which she’s created. Soon her true identity comes under scrutiny as Roy develops a love interest who wants to meet his sister, and the family secrets are threatened by a nefarious photographer named Mr. Hands.

It’s funny, creepy and weird. But there’s a philosophical edge to this work of literature. Seeing thought laid out in front of us, so meticulously, it’s hard not to start questioning the mash-up of voices and ideas that’s currently going on in our own heads.

WOMAN’S WORLD BY GRAHAM
RAWLE, COUNTERPOINT, PB,
448 PP., $19.50