Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Rotary Spokes

by Fiona Cooper

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.

As I may have mentioned, we joined this lesbian book group a while ago in an effort to find some lesbian space. It's been mixed--we enjoy going in and seeing people, but the books have been very uneven in quality, and we don't always have time to finish them. The book we liked best (Carol Anshaw's Seven Moves, I highly recommend it) was supposed to be discussed during a week where there was a blizzard and the group was canceled. This week is the last meeting of this semester, and we are doing Rotary Spokes.

Now, this book like all of them was recommended by another member who presumably likes it. So in order not to look like an asshole, I can't go in there and say what I *really* think of it. So I'm going to unload my actual review here, in the hopes that I can be a little more constructive when it comes to the actual meeting. Hope you enjoy.

I can't help it. I know I shouldn't, but I take it personally. This book is an affront to me and to everyone else who is trying to get a novel published. Because if this is in print, and I never am, well, there is no justice in the world. Lest you think I say this out of an overly high assessment of my own talents, I hasten to add that I believe that virtually anyone who has *ever* attempted to write fiction--or indeed prose of any kind--would feel the same way upon reading this novel.

Insofar as the book has a plot, it revolves around the meanderings of its title character, a six foot four blonde biker dyke named Rotary Spokes. (She's a motorcycle mechanic, see.) Rotary Spokes has spent all her life (well, actually she hasn't, you just think she has until the author decides to throw in some backstory for her about 2/3 of the way through the novel) in the desert town of Normal, fixing machines and looking on in scorn at the lives of the heterosexual women around her and their no-good husbands. When one of the husbands mail-orders a porno mag and the women all gather round to read it and talk about how gross it is, Rotary experiences an epiphany. She writes away for a magazine called *Dyke's Delight* (under the misapprehension that it's really *Byke's Delight*) and learns all about lesbians, whereupon she decides she needs to get out of Normal, where there are no other lesbians, and go find her people. She travels to Middlesville, the nearest midwestern metropolis, where she sleeps with a woman for the first time, and has some adventures. She comes back to Normal and has some adventures. Then she goes back to Middlesville to have some adventures. Then she meets the love of her life at a meeting of the Magdalena Janus Ladies' Way Society, which you think is supposed to be a parody of new age goddess-type paganism but turns out to be a Mary Kay convention. The love of Rotary Spokes's life gives her her address on a piece of paper and goes back to the mountain hermitage in which she paints meaningful pictures. Rotary loses the address--but it's all right, because in an unbelievably pretentious letter with no return address which is supposed to be cryptically poetic the love of her life has mentioned going to a place called Hyperburg (right before the part where she says "A rose is a rose is a rose. Love, Jess. P.S. Do you read Gertrude Stein?"), so Rotary sells up and moves to Hyperburg, where she spends a couple years hanging out in a coed leather bar before a chance meeting at Jeannie's Chilli Beanie finally brings them together. The end.

I mean, I understand what this book is trying to do. It's a picaresque advenutre novel/social satire which follows many of the basic rules of a genre that includes many fine novels, from Voltaire's Candide to Mark Twain's Huck Finn to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. These ingredients are:

  • a goodhearted but completely innocent and naive protagonist
  • this protagonist's journey from his/her pastoral home into a complex and corrupt urban environment
  • many encounters with people hell bent on exploiting this protagonist's naivete
  • a lot of material in which sophisticated people explain how something about the world works to the naive protagonist, who then says, "But that's stupid/crazy/mean! Why would people do something that stupid/crazy/mean?" and the reader says, "Ah, yes, through the eyes of this protagonist I now see how stupid/crazy/mean my world truly is."
  • the end of the protagonist's quest

    As those of you who've made it through Another Country know, it's not the genre I have a problem with. But this is certainly a very unfortunate example of it. I will pass over some of the minor irritations, such as the fact that all the characters speak in a broad Western dialect and frequently say things like, "Sheeeeee-it, Rot'ry, how you thank you gonna seduce your dream girl if'n you don' git all that grayus outta your hair?" Or the fact that the writer seems to go out of her way to invent minor characters, spit out their bizarre life stories in single blocks of text, and then never return to them again, ever. Or the fact that lesbian desire is personified as a feline entity called The Hug, who purrs and growls and rattles her cage and so on whenever Rotary encounters a hot babe. Or the fact that none of the characters attain even two dimensions, let alone three. After all, from this genre you can't necessarily expect in-depth characterization. But it is not unreasonable to expect a) humor and b) a plot. And this book delivers neither.

    As far as the humor goes, well, this is an unfortunate case of an author thinking she's funny when she's not. As regards the plot...oh. My. GOD.

    It's a long book, and there are so many subplots that it would be impossible to summarize them all. So let's just take one strand, which is the "religious bigotry is bad" thread. The book begins with an prologue which describes at great length the anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-sex latherings of a televangelist named Thomas Pateman. You might expect from this prologue that Pateman will show up later in the book.

    He doesn't. Ever.

    Who does show up is the religious bigot Abner J. Hodges, his lovely wife, and their nympho druggie daughter Carolee. Carolee develops a huge crush on Rotary. Rotary refuses to sleep with her, but Carolee stows away in the car of Rotary's "guardian angel" (an older dyke who ahs taken Rotary under her wing) and comes back to Normal, whereupon her parents call out the bloodhounds (one of the few actually funny things in the book is the telegram that the guardian angel's best buddy sends them about this: "PARENTS WANT SCALPS, ASSES, BLOOD."). Meanwhile, Rotary's friends in Normal suddenly turn on her. She can't figure out why. We can't either, because although they have suddenly decided to become extremely religious there is no explanation offered for their conversion. Carolee does explain to Rotary, who has apparently spent her entire life at the bottom of a missile silo where there is plenty of country and western and R&B music piped in but no other form of culture or information about the universe is available, that some people are homophobic, especially rabid Christians, and that homophobic people think dykes molest children, even though most child molesters are straight men, and that her erstwhile friends are probably worried about that, even though Rotary has been repeatedly declining Carolee's advances because she's only seventeen. Well isn't that ironic! I guess it just goes to show.

    Carolee goes home, tells her parents she's a dyke, and is immediately committed to a mental institution. Rotary flies back to Middlesville to the rescue--only her guardian angel tells her she can't really rescue her, that's highly impractical. So Rotary just visits her at the hospital while she has some more adventures.

    Eventually a compassionate dyke nurse helps Carolee escape. Rotary then remembers about how she was going to help Carolee, so she takes her to Mexico, but is apprehended (and beaten up) by the authorities. Rotary, her guardian angel, and the guardian angel's lover, whose name is the Phoenix of Texas (she came to Normal to organize a rodeo that was supposed to improve the local economy, but we've forgotten all about the rodeo now, and so has the author) put together an elaborate ruse in order to trick the parents into revealing where they've sent Carolee. It is at this point that I'm thinking, OK, so this is the plot then, the rest of the book will be about breaking Carolee out. Well, I guess that's something.

    Only they don't go over to England (where Carolee is) and break her out. One of Rotary's friends makes a vague promise to have some friend of hers look Carolee up and take care of her, and Rotary wanders off to Hyperburg to have some adventures. Eventually Rotary gets a bunch of letters, delivered by the guardian angel's best friend, in which all the characters whose plot lines have been abandoned explain what finally happened to each of them. Luckily, Carolee was able to escape from her treatment facility in England and is happily cruising the dyke scene in London in the company of a civil servant named Marje. Whew! What a relief!

    When you consider that this thread--the closest thing this book has to a "plot"--is interrupted by the introduction of about 500 other threads involving everything from a guy who is obsessed with finding the long-dead Patsy Cline to a woman whose father tried to turn her into an invertebrate because he thought evolving endoskeletons was our great mistake as a species, none of which are followed through, you can get some sense of my frustration. For instance, a busload of hippies has a breakdown in Normal at one point; the hippie leader's children are aged 9 and 11 on page 23 and aged 7 and 9 on page 25. Rotary fixes the bus, sleeps with one hippie chick, and throws her out on her ass when she tries to get her into a menage with her hippie boyfriend (oh, that's another thing: both the identifiable bisexual women in this book are shallow, drug-addicted airheads who toy with Rotary's sincere affections and then dump her for men). After that, it is unclear whether or how the hippies leave Normal, although we assume they have because we never hear from them again. After all, the author is done with them, so why should we care? Closure is for the weak.

    Anyway, I guess what pisses me off is the sloppiness of it. How can you write a novel and not care about whether it has a plot? How can you *publish* a novel and not care about whether it has a plot? And since the plot is really all there *is* to thsi kind of novel, what is anyone supposed to get out of reading this pile of sludge? Maybe you could enjoy the smut...if there were any, which there isn't, since none of the sex is ever described except in terms of the movements of this Hug creature. Ah well. I'm done now.

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