The Bold One
Two narrators tell the tale. The boldly printed text is by a first-person narrator generally understood to be a metaphor for the cancer eating away at the protagonist’s body. This narration is heavy with metaphorical language. “I suppose one can only be a disaster tourist for so long before the cruel old ennui starts to set in. But the Greeks said that in the beginning, there was boredom. The gods molded mankind from its black, lifeless crust and this is, of course, encouraging.” This occurs within the second paragraph of the book, and it is intended to be purposely obscure. At this point, the bold print narrative voice hasn’t even taken on much metaphorical shape. It is, in its own words, an “itch” and a “think” and with lofty pronouncements such as these creating figurative identities like “disaster tourist” worked into a state of deadening monotony by persistent boredom. This narrative voice is situated as being in the early stages of creating consciousness as well as form.
Hollywood’s Surrealism
Classic musicals are Hollywood’s contribution to the avant-garde. They are the surrealistic daydream alternative to the more nightmarish surrealism of world cinema. "After much persuasion from Peter, she had packed again reluctantly for a final time and left with him in a terrible mood, her bag snarling behind her along the floorboards of the hallway, and Lia had danced them out, shut the door far too loudly behind them, and it had all felt like the beginning of a musical number in a colorful Hollywood film, like she should be spinning in a fabric shop on the Upper West Side looking like Natalie Wood.” The dark implications of coercion and the sinister personification of the bag situate this scene as something that Lia is resisting. Suddenly the avant-garde aspect of the classic musical genre takes over and everything transforms into an upbeat and frothy scene from a musical into which the surreal quality intrudes into reality and the moody atmosphere explodes.
Commentary
The bold print narrator eventually begins commenting directly upon the protagonist’s narration. Some might argue these are the most successful moments in the book. The discourse clarifies and the personality of the bold print narrator becomes less obscure and more enjoyable. This example of the use of simile is also a demonstration of the various means by which the narrative is conveyed structurally in the book.
“Aha! Here’s her love of poetry beginning;
I feel it unfurling within her
like a whole magnolia
blossoming completely over
one night.”
The framework in which this simile is structured is significant because the bold print narrator is not just providing critical commentary about the protagonist. It is also creating form that matches content. The point is to show that the bold print narrator is intimately connected to the protagonist. The structuring of the commentary about poetry in the form of poetry—and the assertion of being able to feel the love of poetry—is acknowledgement that while there may be two narrators, there are not necessarily two completely separate narrators.
Darkness
Novels since the end of World War II have become ever-increasingly populated with darkness as a metaphor. It began before then, of course, but the atrocity exhibitions within human hearts by the thousands unleashed the term as the defining metaphor of the modern age. That it should show up in a novel covering the subject that this book covers should not be surprising. “He was shedding skin from the beginning to the end. But it was these private glimpses – of his lightness, perhaps, his darkness – that gave Lia the sense she knew something true of his soul that had been kept from everyone else.” The “he” here is Matthew with whom Lia shared a passionate introduction to romance. The paradox that his darkness could be lightness or vice versa will prove the ironic undoing that keeps her from sharing his soul.
The Girl on the Bus
A portrait of a Lia on a bus, looking through the window. “It was as if her body were undergoing a quick and violent state change from a liquid to a solid, from glorious sex-smothered girl to just another person sitting on a bus, getting off a bus, waiting to cross the road.” Such an intensely robust use of simile to describe a transformative state would seem to be reserved for a bus trip to someplace sinister or menacing. Instead, it is just a ride into town from the country. The intense transition is all internal and related to the complicated consciousness of the girl on the bus. The city is still the same city it ever was, but Lia is dealing with not being the same girl she’s always been.
