Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:
Crybaby Butch
by Judith Frank
Review byThe
Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will
contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian
book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my
own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for
them.
Crybaby Butch is one of the first novels I've read in a while that really sucked me in. This is all the
more surprising when you
consider that the plot, when summarized, is going to sound really boring. The main character, Anna, is
an English PhD. who has just
been dumped by her long-term lover and been kicked in the teeth by
the academic job market. Not having landed an academic job, Anna is hanging
around
The main business of the novel, as I see it, is to get the reader to explore
the question of what these two characters do and don't have in common with each
other, contrasting Anna's despairing attempts to pull herself and her life
together with the turbulence that learning to read is creating for Chris in her
world. Both are dealing with much of the same pain and many of the same
obstacles. Chris and Anna are both still grieving the fathers they loved and
lost; both are underemployed and financially strapped; while Chris finds
herself paralyzed at the thought of having to write a resume, Anna can't seem
to face writing the extra chapter that her readers have asked for so that her
book will get published and eventually get her an academic job; and both appear
to have questionable taste in women. Despite all this, differences in age,
class, experience, and personality thwart most of Anna's attempts to connect
with Chris; and it doesn't help that Anna's desire to help Chris take control
of her life is complicated by her own need to have her own butch identity
reaffirmed by bonding with a 'real' butch from the bad old
days. While Anna and Chris circle each other warily, the book also introduces
us to the lives of Anna's other students, Anna's love life, Chris's
increasingly troubled relationship with her partner of twenty years, and a
surprising amount of information about how to teach reading and writing to
adult learners.
I have no idea whether that summary is at all tempting to anyone who has never
had to grapple with the whole butch/femme identity
question; so let me just tell you straight up all the reasons I liked this
book.
Reason #1: Unlike most stories about teaching, this one is actually convincing,
and yet still compelling. Anna's students are not exceptionally talented; there
is no unrecognized genius among them waiting to be born; they do not miraculously
jump from functional illiteracy to performing Hamlet; and it is made increasingly clear as the novel progresses
that these students are daily facing crises and dangers that education alone
will not help them with. A fair amount of the book is spent in Anna's
classroom, following the progress of a particular class as it either works or
doesn't. I had always assumed that the reason so many films about teachers are
so head-bleedingly awful is that actual teaching, to those not participating in
it at the time, is about as exciting to watch as paint drying. Crybaby Butch actually makes the
day-to-day mechanics of trying to run a classroom engrossing, and not just for people
who do it for a living. The book group was nearly unanimous in their enthusiasm
for this aspect of the novel, and I think this is mainly due to three things.
One, Frank does a very good job of conveying to the (presumably literate)
reader what it's like to be functionally illiterate. Some of this comes through
descriptions of Chris's life outside the classroom, but a lot of it comes
through the students' perspectives in the classroom. Two, Frank uses Anna's perspective
to give the readers the theory behind the concrete tasks being done in the
classroom, and to get them to share her intense concern about whether the
exercises that she thought were a great idea back in her apartment are going to
work in real life. This all has to do with the third reason, which leads into
Reason #2: Frank is in serious violation of some of the cardinal rules about
point-of-view, and God bless her for it.
The novel begins with a second-person monologue from Anna's perspective about
her own questionable butch identity, which thanks to the pronoun
sleight-of-hand becomes the reader's questionable butch identity. Then it
shifts to third person limited, and you think, OK, that was just a stylistic flourish
to get the first page of the query sample past the agent, now we're settling
down to normalcy. Then, once Anna gets into the classroom, you discover that actually,
that third person POV is not going to be stable at all. During the classroom
scenes, the perspective jumps all over the room from moment to moment--from
Anna to Chris to Vanessa to Cheryl to Robert to Brandy and back again. While I
have no doubt that an army of agents and editors kept sending this book back to
Frank and demanding that she pick a head and stay in it until the scene is over,
it is my contention that this head-hopping is the main reason that the
classroom scenes work. It allows you to get a 360 degree view of the learning
experience, showing you at almost the same moment Anna's ideas about what she's
trying to teach them and the students' very different experiences of the lesson
she's running; and although Anna is privileged as the main character, the
students' reactions reveal the mistakes and misunderstandings that her assumptions
produce, and shows them piling up moment by moment. There are occasional
interruptions of second person, including a section in which Chris tells
"you," the reader, how it was that "you" never learned to
read. While some of the book groupers found this distracting, to me it was part
of the book's depiction of teaching, and of community and connection in
general. The head-hopping shows why success in the classroom depends on being
able to see yourself through your students' eyes--a skill which you must keep
trying to learn, but which you will never actually be able to master. The
second person sections perform the seductions, the complexities, and the
dangers of identification-
Reason #3: There is no
There is a certain amount of melodrama at the end, which makes me like the end
less than the rest of it; but it's not precisely the kind of melodrama that the
Dreamworks team would have come up with, and that prevents it from ruining the
entire experience. There is some progress made by both of the main characters,
and some progress made by most of the students in Anna's class. And that's
really about all you can hope for in any teaching situation: some progress made.
The book lets you see why having made some
progress after months of underpaid daily slogging is uniquely rewarding while
also uniquely frustrating, and that's what I mean when I say that this is one
of the few stories about teaching that gets it. There is still a lot unresolved
and a lot of questions unanswered; but to me that's a necessary part of this
kind of story.
There are, of course, some bad things. In general, I would say that the book,
while not misogynistic, is kind of down on femmes. Although there are some
sympathetic and attractive femme characters, Chris's partner Kathleen is the closest
thing the novel has to a villain, and she and Anna seem to share a kind of
noirish attitude toward the femmes they are drawn to: women are trouble, but
you can't stay away from them. Occasionally, Frank slips off the tightrope and
succumbs to the temptation of coddling her surrogate character (who's obviously
Anna). Having met my share of graduate students and their hangers-on, I could
have done with less of the "Anna-hangs-
less interested in them than in Chris.
Still, this is a smart, self-questioning, and compelling treatment of material
that has been mandhandled by many, from the real drama of teaching to the
limitations of lesbian community and the complexity of butch identification. I would
say it's one of the best recent novels we've done, and would recommend it to
anyone who likes lesbians, teaching, reading, or some combination of the three.
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