The Price of
Paradise
A review of
Monte Carlo Days
& Nights
by Susan Tepper
Rain Mountain Press,
74 pp.
Susan Tepper’s
Monte Carlo Days & Nights is a triumph of the breezy
uncanny – a slim volume thick with resonances.
At the surface
level she narrates, in a series of discrete chronological scenes, the
quotidian progress of an affair between a powerful music executive
and a flight attendant who has taken a week off to tryst with him in
“paradise.” And indeed the book may be read entirely on that
level. That said, from the opening image – where parrots printed on
the hotel corridor’s wallpaper are accompanied by a soundtrack of
bird chirps – we are cued to a strangeness, an out-of-the-body
quality, that pervades the story. We may suspect the romance took
place in the ‘70s, though one occasionally finds notes of more
recent “globalization.” From the sureness of the telling –
delivered in the female protagonist’s first person voice – one
feels certain the relationship is over, though the how and why of its
dissolution are not revealed. Nor are clues given as to the time
elapsed since the events related, or the current circumstances of the
narrator.
We should get
married, he says, but I will never marry. But if I were to marry,
you’d be the one.
These sentences,
repeated twice, once in the middle of the text, and again at the very
end, are clearly written, yet subtly leave open the question of who
the “I” and “you” refer to. Particularly since the dialogue,
sans quotation marks, is folded into the running text.
Likewise, one can
only conjecture about the narrator’s motive for writing this slice
of her biography, since there seems no urgent need on her part for
catharsis, nor does the telling feel impelled by nostalgia for a
different, or younger, or better time. All of which leaves the reader
with a puzzle. Every piece fits, but despite a wealth of particular
details, no depth of field emerges. Man and Woman, who, throughout
the text remain unnamed, engage in a great deal of sex, purportedly
passionate. But their couplings are not described. Absent almost
completely is a sense of touch, with one vivid exception which I’ll
discuss below. This means that we come to “know” the
characters without connecting sensations or other referents.
I want to make
clear that this is a strategy pursued with discipline and
consistency, and so efficaciously that what does emerge from beneath
the stylistic mask, and without so much as a hint of didacticism, is
a struggle for power between two vastly unequal contenders. Man is
cast as a wealthy gear-turner in Joni Mitchell’s “star maker
machinery.” Woman works in a seemingly glamorous, but physically
taxing and psychologically punishing job, for a barely-living wage.
In order to be admitted into Man’s world, she must present as
tasteful, sleek and attuned to the occasion. To pull off being such a
class chameleon requires poise, circumspection, and mad skills as a
bargain shopper. This book, without ever tipping its hand, narrates
Woman’s collusion with and resistance to Man’s domination, but
leaves open her personal motive for playing this game and her stake
in its continuance.
Though referred to
as a powerful figure in the music industry, Man is given
traditionally effeminate qualities, for example, he eats lightly,
mostly salads, forcing Woman to do the same despite her lumberjack’s
appetite. Man is also subject to fits of pique when his whims are
stymied in any way. He doesn’t drink alcohol, rather, at poolside,
many small bottles of Perrier. His physical description consists of
two attributes that run counter his yin personality: a long
beard – which he occasionally strokes – and an impressive
erection.
What we know of
Woman comes through his generic appreciation of her body parts. He
praises her legs, her ass, her breasts. Not, however her face. And
Woman never describes herself, apart from a reference to contrasting
tanned and pallid flesh. At this and at all other levels, the
narrative is tightly controlled, nothing brims over into outright
drama.
The closest we get to open conflict is when the couple ventures out
on a shopping expedition to San Remo. There, they are accosted by a
trio of thugs who threaten them with robbery and hurl anti-Semitic
jibes at Man, who freezes, leaving Woman to drive them away.
Gripping his
arm, we continue down the sidewalk. A few minutes go by before he
speaks. That was really something, he says. What you did. It was very
brave. He seems shaken by the incident.
Well I’m used
to crazy people, I say. The planes are full of crazy people. You have
no idea.
We walk on, I
continue gripping his arm. I look straight ahead. I’m afraid to
look at him. I don’t want to see fear.
She is
afraid to see his fear. Are we witnessing a relationship
between two individuals, or an enacted polarization within a single
self? The power struggle between this dyad culminates in the scene
immediately following when Woman expresses her wish to visit the
actual beach rather than the hotel pool. Man accedes, seizing the
opportunity to exert leverage by dressing her for the occasion. Woman
pushes back:
Hold it, please.
I would like to pick out my own bikini.
I want you in a
white one.
Not white! White
goes see-through when it gets wet.
You’ll be
naked anyway, he says.
That again! I
feel myself starting to tighten. I sit at the foot of the bed. Treat
me like a whore, I say.
Later, at the sea,
“the sun is directly overhead. Everything… looks Technicolor.”
Indeed all seems brightly lit in this world. But little is seen that
can be reliably confirmed, no more than is revealed on Camus’s
fatal beach. Indeed in Monte Carlo… nobody dies, or is
injured, except at the level of sensibility, as in the scene where
several young women strip at the pool, driving a cohort of fat old
men to a display of primate masculinity and scandalizing their wives.
While not enacted directly against the body, aggression and a kind of
compulsive, archetypally-driven madness underpin the telling. “Two
of the wives get out of their chaises and approach the naked girls.
Demanding they cover up. The French girls just arch their backs,
laughing.”
Partly because it
gestures toward but refuses to concretize itself in physical
sensation, the language of this book implants itself in the mind,
there to work on all the more powerfully on the imagination – to
draw us into a paradise of no resolution. One could attempt, at
scholarly length, to analyze how the author accomplishes this
literary feat. Suffice it that once read, this tale, in all its
paradox, becomes impossible to dislodge from one’s internal
landscape.
Reviewer bio:
Eric Darton’s
books include the novel Free City and the bestselling social
history Divided We Stand: A Biography of the World Trade Center.
More of his work can be accessed at bookoftheworldcourant.net and
ericdarton.net. He is co-editor of The Wall, wittypartition.org,
an online triannual review of world literature.
