Incidents Involving Mirth by Anna Livia

Incidents Involving Mirth

Anna Livia

In this sometimes amusing but uneven collection, the stories relate brief instances of revelation and ever-present loneliness and alienation in the lives of lesbians searching for a community in a largely unsympathetic world. The paradoxical ‘Angel Alice’ features a London teenager who advises her homosexual pal to ‘cure’ himself and become ‘normal and happy like everyone else,’ and then realizes that she too is gay. In ‘Car Spray,’ about a romance between one self-described ‘radical feminist’ and an Italian lawyer, Livia successfully blends sexual politics and entertaining quips. But ‘Differently Motivated,’ wherein a student of the future engages in a battle of wits with her tutor, is marred by jargon (‘the Ardashi have eight more points of articulation than we do and their ruminant diaphragm resonance is quite a poser to reproduce’). Other stories, like ‘My Name Is Lucia’ and ‘The Promised Land Recedes into a Grey Horizon,’ sink under the weight of sexist stereotypes (‘women are so much more sensitive than men’) and cliches about lesbian sex. This is British Livia’s American debut.

Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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My favorite story in Anna Livia’s collection is the last one, ‘Angel Alice.’ It’s about a ‘cape-coloured queer’ and a fourteen-year-old fag hag who passes as a class drag act. In classic coming-of-age fashion, Angel-Alice discovers her lesbianism by the end of the tale. The moral of the story, however, is not that we are all inevitably gay as Gaylord, alias Sailor, and originally named Xolile, the story’s ‘cape-coloured queer’ asserts. Rather, the moral is … Well, there is none. This is post-modern fiction. You can tell by all the hyphens everything is more than one thing, even, no especially, people. The obsession with naming starts in the very first story, ‘My Name is Lucia. They Call Me Mimi. Why? I don’t Know.’ Artemisia Gentileschi, Agnes Boyd and Flavia Faustina Octavian Lakov write their names out in full to see how many letters they have in common and how many words can be made from them. No, there is no point. These stories are merely incidents: contingent affairs signifying nothing. Yet, there is a lite-motif: lesbians and feminists as real life, as opposed to sci fi aliens. Those who are ‘Differently Motivated’ as its title suggests escape categorization. If you can’t figure out someone’s desires, you can’t figure them out. Thus, they can often escape tough spots and make fools of the establishment. Yes, there are rewards to being gay or coming from another planet. Now, that’s a moral! The stories are fun, outrageous, and wallow in their imaginative source. Some like ‘Saccharin Cyanide’ are spectacular in their ability to terrify in eighteen short pages. Others, like ‘Puree’ simply entertain as they pulverize women’s stereotypical caring ways and overwrite their sentences: ‘I lay down, plugged into a romance, and let my questions about the woman swill like bilgewater in the hull of my brain, a good place to pan for priorities’ (p.107). This is food that no one relishes and yet enjoys in context.Nevertheless, I can’t make up my mind whether her speech consists of bursting balloons, serial concrete blocks, her descriptions of the speech of the two characters in ‘Puree,’ or something yet unnamed. The first sees words as soft, chaotic, but overinflated; the latter as rigid, ordered, but ponderous. Livia tries to combine the two. Most times it flies; sometimes it falls a little flat. At all times, one admires the wit. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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