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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In two books by Strawberry Saroyan and Meghan Daum, the young media chick protagonists get chewed up and spit out by New York.
Jul 17, 2003 | Meghan Daum seems aware that by now the last thing people want to read about is what it's like to be single in New York, or at least, the New York life we find in single-gal books. Just 37 pages into Daum's first novel, "The Quality of Life Report," her 29-year-old protagonist, the morning-show reporter Lucinda Trout, flees Manhattan. It's goodbye to Jimmy Choo'd women, East Village romance and a torturously confining apartment. We readers, who briefly despaired we'd be stuck in the narcissistic netherworld of bad first dates, soulless jobs and sob stories about Manhattan studios, can breathe anew.
We're off with brave Lucinda to Prairie City, Neb., where Botox and $20 power yoga classes may exist, but have not yet become self-mocking clichés. (Personally, I hope to never write the words "Botox," "East Village," "single" and "apartment" ever again.) If we've become collectively, deliciously drunk on "Sex and the City," then Daum's novel feels like the first steady hour in the afternoon, after we shake off our hangover.
The very act of leaving New York, it turns out, is as inspiring as striving to get there. Daum, lest we forget, did it herself. Her wonderful collection of essays, "My Misspent Youth," included a well-known New Yorker piece of the same title in which she detailed how her supposedly bare, writerly lifestyle spiraled into financial ruin. Daum had no choice but to leave; financially she had to seek cheaper pastures. Yet something else in the essay signaled that it wasn't just money that nudged her over the George Washington Bridge and all the way to Nebraska. (After all, New Jersey's right there, with more manageable rents and a handy PATH train that trundles you right back into the West Village.) No, Daum, one senses, was also a bit tired of New York, and maybe, since New Yorkers see the city in themselves and themselves in the city, a bit tired of herself.
When I first read her essay, I'd just moved to Manhattan and was horrified that she was scrapping what sounded like the perfect life for one in Nebraska, of all places. Now, after four years of working in the city and ever more daydreams of moving somewhere far, far away, I read "My Misspent Youth" and "The Quality of Life Report" and it all makes beautiful sense. The thrilling experience of being young in New York can also send you to depths of misery previously unimagined. Is it being young or is it New York? Is it feeling inadequate and small among so many successful people and tall buildings? Who knows, but at times, leaving the city behind seems the only solution.
When Lucinda makes it to Prairie City, "The Quality of Life Report" opens up like the plains of the Midwest -- in short, it quickly gets better. The novel is smart and funny, and it's one of Daum's talents to write remarkably about what her narrator observes, rather than moaning on about her messy innards. Lucinda buys a house in P.C. and falls in love with someone who is much more complicated than she recognizes at first. She messes up, offends people, goes to tanning salons.
Daum describes Lucinda's irresponsible drug addict boyfriend Mason this way: "Prairie City was for him, as it was for many of its citizens, a place in which the margin of error was as wide as land and sky itself." In New York, on the other hand, "we were packed so tightly and moving so rapidly that one misstep could knock us permanently off course. We always seemed an instant away from losing everything." So there's something hopeful, and also perfectly reasonable, about the image she leaves us with in the end -- that of a colt kicking his wayward legs, with open space to fall down, and more space to get up, try again, keep running. By that last page, I suddenly realized that Daum had traveled halfway across the country and actually gotten somewhere.
Strawberry Saroyan packed up the getaway car much sooner than Daum or her fictional alter ego, who remained in New York into their late 20s. Saroyan took off at 25. In her collection of essays, "Girl Walks Into a Bar," she details life as a 20-something Manhattan media girl on the make, a 20-something single girl making her way through the bar scene and then, later, a 20-something media girl on the make in L.A. (and making her way through the L.A. bar scene.)
