Find an event
Leaving (to) Las Vegas
A new novel shows a woman on the run.
The road trip gets off to a rough start for Catherine. She’s fleeing west from Nebraska, having stolen a suitcase full of money from her estranged husband. She hits a heavy snowstorm and has to stop somewhere in Wyoming. There she meets a father and son who, after kindly talking her ear off in a bar, kindly hint they’d like to sexually assault her.
It’s a warning shot of the opening chapter of Jami Attenberg’s The Melting Season, a signal that Catherine—who has spent her life in her small Nebraskan hometown—has little idea what awaits her. Eventually, in the grand tradition of American runaway stories, she makes her way to Las Vegas. Geographically, it’s not the farthest point, but culturally it might as well be Mars.
Attenberg tells the real-time story line of Catherine’s immersion in Vegas—and fast if curious friendship with Valka, a Botoxed breast-cancer survivor who, like Catherine, is trying to forget the past. But she also dives deep into Catherine’s past, to her marriage with Thomas, her diminutive husband with a Napoleon complex powerful enough to force a textbook rewrite. Also stranded at home is her younger sister Jenny, pregnant and unsure of the parentage, and their mother, an alcoholic, near-psychotic figure first sketched surrounded by empty cans of beer and maliciously enjoying Catherine’s status among the missing.
The collision of Catherine’s Nebraska self with Las Vegas’s glittery sheen provides the thematic backbone for the book, but it’s the friendship between the two women that dramatizes it best.
“I’m pretty obsessed with what is fake and what is real in this culture of ours,” says Attenberg, a full-time writer living in Brooklyn, though she was born in the Chicago suburbs. “On the surface, the middle of Nebraska is about as authentic a place as you can get in America. And Las Vegas appears to be completely inauthentic. I’d add that in the end both places are wholly American. It’s possible that balance of the fake and real is a part of the fabric of America now.”
Authenticity is a slippery concept, and Attenberg does well not to privilege it over the so-called inauthentic. Valka has breast implants, wears wigs and seems to have internalized Vegas’s shimmery persona. But Catherine has her own affectations, as well. She narrates the book in contractionless prose, which at first reads a little tone deaf. But when Catherine and Jenny talk, the older sister admonishes the younger for saying things like “Ain’t none of them want it,” and it’s clear Catherine is grasping at some sort of elevated diction as a means to elevate herself.
“[Authenticity] is definitely not an argument of value for me, or at least it wasn’t by the end,” she says. “And I admit it’s possible I was trying to sort that out by writing this book.”
Maybe the character who struggles most with his true sense of self is Thomas, though outwardly a loving husband, Catherine’s high-school sweetheart and a guy who seems hell-bent on being a Man, he’s also strangely warped by his conception of manhood. To put it in the clearest demonstrative terms: He has a penile implant. In fact, the penile implant almost became the center of the book. Attenberg—whose debut novel, The Kept Man, earned praise for its emotional acuity—had written an (in her words) “extreme and weird” novel called The Prick, which put the surgery front and center, so to speak.
Though Attenberg admitted that the first draft of The Melting Series was a lot stranger—The Prick included “futuristic plastic surgery” and a group-masturbation-happy cult—she says she’s happy with the way The Melting Season could hit on similar themes in a more recognizable way (“I rewrote the book to save the penile implant,” she jokes). It’s a rich novel, one that begins as a road-trip yarn but then contains enough twists to form a complicated emotional journey.
Attenberg reads Tuesday 2 at Borders.
