When I bought this book, it was, as Steven admits to sometimes doing, mostly because of the cover. Really, who can resist a barely-clad woman in black? Not I. It wasn’t solely because of that, though. Part of it was the quotation from Timothy Findley on the back, and part of it was because there aren’t many Canadian novels (well, far fewer than those of our British and American cousins, anyway) that take the urban experience seriously, and I’m becoming more and more an urban creature since moving to the south. This novel, if nothing else, promised to be intensely urban. I was therefore quite saddened to find that the novel was pretty terrible.
Indigo Blackwell, our protagonist, is a vapid character living a more or less meaningless existence, working a not-very-satisfying job and married to a husband (Sam) who is selfish and mildly manipulative. He’s doing research for his novel, in which a gay man is living a double life, pretending to be straight and living in a sham of a marriage. Sam spends much of his time with a young hustler named Graham at gay bars, and it becomes painfully obvious well before Indigo figures it out, that while Sam isn’t gay, he’s certainly curious, and wants Graham to satisfy that curiosity. Sam is what passes for an intellectual in the book, but mostly he just spouts un-writerly clichés about writing. Indigo’s best female friend is a woman named Nicole. She’s blond, has large breasts, and works an exciting job in some amorphous on-air capacity for a local television station called COOL-TV. She’s fun, exciting, refuses to be in a monogamous relationship, blah blah blah. And then there’s Tim, Indigo’s best friend from childhood, who fits nearly every gay stereotype there is, except he’s straight. I almost get the impression that with Sam, Graham, Jon (whom I’ll get to later), and Indigo’s own same-sex experiences, an editor asked Ward to eliminate the gay best friend, and she just swapped the pronouns and made him straight. (How many straight men have you met who tell their friends they look “fab” and address women as “darling”? Me either.) So here’s the rundown: Indigo spends most of her time having minor skirmishes with Sam and complaining about how unfulfilled she is to Tim and Nicole, who both have problems, but of a much more minor and non-existential nature. She tries to think her way out of the situation, and this is about as deep as it gets:
Maybe she should take up pottery. Or acting. Do stained glass, like her mother. Have a kid or make jewellery; that’d be cool. Something substantial. She could learn to scuba dive, but she’d need a no-shark guarantee. Forge large metal sculptures. Skydive. Do horny things in discreetly public places.
What she does is go back to school to study art and film, and leave her husband when she catches him getting a blow job from Graham in the name of “research”. At a party she meets Peter, the playwright, who introduces her to Jon, the dashing young hetero-flexible artist, and she’s off on her own experimental affair. It’s all very Candace Bushnell.
Until around page 200, when it all takes a swerving left turn (the book is only 300 pages long, so needless to say I was not expecting something that dramatic to happen so late in the book). The book starts to be about drugs and sadomasochism and emotional manipulation. There’s at least one scene that could easily be considered rape, although none of the characters (including Indigo, the victim) seem to consider it as such, and there’s a lot of cocaine being passed around. Jon seems to be a sadist, and at first looks like he’s part of the scene, but more than once he hurts and manipulates and enjoys it because he’s breaking the cardinal rule: there must always be choice for both parties. When somebody says stop, it’s stops, that’s the way it works. That’s how it stays play and doesn’t become genuine Silence of the Lambs stuff. Jon, and more than one of his friends, violates that rule several times, and Indigo is more than once put in very real danger as a result, and Jon seems to get off on it.
As much as I hate to say it, that swerving left turn was exactly what the novel needed. It was too late to save the book as a whole, but not too late to save Indigo as a character. I was ready to dismiss her as dull and clichéd, smart enough to know she was in crisis, but not smart enough to do the necessary introspection to figure out why and what to do, content to simply be another irritating yuppie consumer. But her ordeal changes her, and though she never becomes the kind of character who is deeply introspective, she does come, finally, to control her own life and have a certain measure of understanding about herself and how she fits in her world. I still won’t say I liked the novel, but by the end I liked her.
Fits Like A Rubber Dress was my thirteenth and final selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Alan Furst’s Dark Voyage.
