Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Godspeed

by Lynn Breedlove

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.

Let me admit up front that with the possible exception of a straight white fundamentalist Christian housewife from Idaho, I am probably the worst possible audience for this book. Although I have heard of Tribe 8, the dyke punk band for which Lynn Breedlove used to be the lead singer, the clearly autobiographical Godspeed is set in a world that I never had any prayer of entering. Jim, the hero/ine and narrator, is a not-quite-transgendered butch bike messenger weaving unsteadily and at breakneck speed through the hemi-demi-semimonde of San Francisco. Her consuming drug addictions--mainly speed, although she seems to do just about anything else that comes in her way--eventually make her unemployable and break her up with her girlfriend Ally, a punk poet whose day job is stripping in a glass booth for pay-per-view customers at a joint called the Regal. After moving closer and closer to the bottom, Jim eventually and somewhat inexplicably (given her well-established inability to hang onto money any longer than it takes to find the nearest dealer) gets a job as a roadie for a dyke punk band called Hostile Mucous, which leads to a picaresque cross-country trip during which she has the opportunity to get sort of clean. Eventually she makes it to New York, where as she says, "you don't need speed because New York IS speed," and the novel thrashes its way to the closest thing this kind of literature will ever give you to a conclusion.

But this book really isn't about plot. It's about the experience of entering Jim's world through her first-person narration, which I have to say is engrossing and often very funny and much smarter and more complex than what you got from the Bret Easton Ellis primitivism fad of the 1980s, where it seemed to be a rule that in order to truly convey the emptiness of your money-soaked drug-addled amoral existence you could not use any syntax that was too advanced for a third-grader. My problem with the book is that after about five minutes of being in Jim's world, I want to run away screaming. And this is where the audience thing comes in. There are squares, and then there's me: early in life my thing for self-control, combined with 1980s-era anti-drug education, generated a paranoia about addiction and a fear and loathing of all licit and illicit drugs, to the point where I won't even take pain medication. I therefore have no way of knowing how accurate Breedlove's depiction of speed mania is, though it certainly is convincing. Specifically, it has convinced me that there would be few experiences on this earth that I would enjoy less than a speed trip. I have enough stress in my regular life without shooting up something that's going to make me even MORE wound up and manic. Nor would I enjoy all the things that seem to go with the speed habit, such as chronic poverty, squatting, sharing needles, doing insanely risky and degrading things in pursuit of the next high, and never bathing or brushing one's teeth. I also doubt I would enjoy moshing at a Hostile Mucous concert, though I do love the name and I was laughing with Jim and at myself during the hilarious description of Hostile Mucous playing a disastrous gig at a bar in Florida where, as Jim puts it, "They're not DYKES, they're LESBIANS!"

So, the bottom line is that even when I was 19, I was way too old for this book. However, you cannot go around saying a book sucks just because you didn't like it, and so I do want to say that despite my failure to enjoy Godspeed I do have a certain amount of respect for it. For one thing, despite all the drug slang and the profanities, the book really is well-written, by which I mean that it keeps you engaged, doesn't lapse into cliche, and occasionally prompts actual thought and reflection. Second, Jim as a narrator does have enough self-awareness and enough of a sense of humor to keep me from getting as tired and pissed off at her as I did, say, at Jack Kerouac during my first read of On The Road. And third, underneath the surface story, this book is actually about something, viz. the search for meaning on the road to adulthood. Not perhaps an original subject, but one of the classics; and unlike for instance Jane DeLynn and the Ellis crowd that fore-ran her, Breedlove is a romantic. Jim believes in true love, but she's also romantic in the more literary-historical sense; she sees herself as a countercultural poet roaming the underworld in search of inspiration that will allow her to transcend and transfigure mundane reality, just as Shelley, Byron, and Baudelaire did. (From the range of allusions it doesn't seem that Jim has read any of these people, which is a shame as I'm sure she would love them.) The drug use is part of that, just as it was for the other romantics; and it's because Jim always believes that she might actually find meaning that reading Godspeed is ultimately more rewarding than reading, say, Don Juan in the Village. I must say I find the grandiose claims on the back jacket unbelievably inflated ("the first epic novel of the twenty-first century"? OK, whatever), and when you're done with the book you sort of feel as if you've just been on a rollercoaster ride that has more or less dropped you off where you began. Still, there are a lot of readers out there who are not me for whom I think the Godspeed trip would probably be well worth the price of the ticket.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

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