This is a guest post by the novelist Rob Palk.
Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.
Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)
Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.
One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.
By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)
I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.