The Flea Market
by John Moore
Ekstasis Editions, 2003
Reviewed by Adam Swimmer
Can a man effectively write female characters? As a
male writer myself, perhaps I'm not the best
person to
answer that question, but it's one that begs
to be
asked of John Moore's novel, The Flea Market,
which is
written in the first person from a woman's
point-of-view.
Moore avoids painting the main character, Eve, as the
classic bimbo or bitch persona many male writers
assign to characters of the opposite sex. Her actions,
for the most part, don't come off as stupid or
malicious. However, as an ex-model turned agent, the
reader assumes she is quite attractive. In fact, she
states it outright in the first chapter: 'I
always
looked better in jeans and a t-shirt at a laundromat
than most women did dressed to the nines in a
nightclub.'
And although I can't claim to know the inner
workings
of a woman's mind, Eve seems to be more
obsessed with
sex than the average man. And not to imply that I
believe all women are simply 'sugar and
spice' but her
turn of phrase, even if it is in her head, seems a
little crass and derogatory to be coming from a woman.
For example, at one point Eve explains her boss, Laine
'couldn't have gone from glad to mad
faster if I
reached across the glass-topped desk and tweaked her
tits nestled in their countoured La Senza
cups.' But
then, Laine is even crasser than Eve. Here, it seems
Moore wrote the most chauvinist, bossy male character
he could, and then used 'Find and
Replace' with the
names and personal pronouns.
The Agency, Eve's work, frowns on models
sleeping with
clients in order to get more work because of the image
it presents and Eve becomes indignant when she finds
borderline child pornography of her boss's deaf
daughter. But Eve casually refers to women she
doesn't
like as 'cunts,' and spends much of the
book
ruminating over the various sexcapades she and her
husband engaged in between their fights, from the time
they made love on the cold cellar floor while moving
boxes in the cellar, to how her husband was
'like a
cat burglar trying to steal a Farewell Fuck
Diamond'
from her after she told him she was leaving. So she
reduces women to little more than sex objects herself.
It seems Moore envisions Eve as some sort of classical
beauty from a perfume commercial, who's
secretly a
dirty girl who likes it every which way she can. Even
the storyline, which takes awhile to get going as the
first few chapters are loaded with largely unimportant
exposition and backstory, follows suit. The second
book in Moore's series on West Coast life, The
Flea
Market follows the uptight Eve as she learns to fill
the emptiness of her soul and breaking out of her
stodgy career and perceptions by taking up with a man
she met at a swap meet. Remove the swap meet and
it's
like numerous French foreign films (read softcore
porns) for rent at the local video store.
Unfortunately, all of the 'good bits'
are missing and
the book has no pictures.
But then perhaps I'm being harsh. The point of
the
book is that Eve frees herself from the shackles of
her previous life by selling off her possessions, from
housewarming gifts, to various trendy objects she has
collected over the years and had no real use for. That
and the relationship with Buzz, the junk store owner,
allowed her to reinvent herself.
And I know this because the book told me so in so many
words:
'The Sunday before, as Buzz and I sold off the
house-warming presents to a young couple who were
thrilled to get such a deal on a set of pillowcases
for their young daughter's first single bed, I
experienced a feeling of relief, of lightness and
liberation, more intense than anything I felt when I
left the oppressive house in Toronto. I hadn't
had so
much fun since I learned to masturbate.'
In fact, much of the book is hampered by this
forthrightness. The reader is not allowed to discover
things in the novel as everything is so directly put
and it becomes a bore to read.
And even if the reader was to acknowledge the
book's
reasons for Eve's transformation, it still
seems
shallow and not very interesting. As Eve says to her
boss:
'I don't want to sell people anymore,
Laine. Not even
their images. I don't want to take young girls
and
turn them into vapid bimbos to sell toothpaste,
tampons or clothes. But I can sell things. Buzz has
taught me.'
So instead of making insipid spokesmodels for the
consumer world, she instead joins it herself by
selling secondhand junk at unreasonable prices. Hooray
for Eve!
So as for whether male writers can write women
characters, I'm still not sure. But I think I
can
safely that John Moore cannot.
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