Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Newfangled by Debra Monroe

2000; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2000.0048

1948-7142

Brooke Bigelow,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Newfangled. By Debra Monroe. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. 299 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Brooke Bigelow Utah State University, Logan The heroine of the novel Newfangled by Debra Monroe is Maidie Bonasso, and her latest professional advancement is to the position of curator at Tucson’s Museum of Domestic History and Home Economy. Detailing and organizing domesticity is Maidie’s profession, but it is also her personal life. Monroe details with dazzling complexity the minutia of Maidie’s life which becomes a living exhibit of the ambigu­ ity and weariness of domesticity in the 1990s. To Maidie her roots are “uncomfortably oldfangled,” but Monroe shows Maidie’s frenetic fondness for novelty, including constant upheaval in her most intimate friendships (293). She has a defiantly newfangled history with two hus­ bands in her wake, dozens of confidants, a fractured childhood of aban­ donment, two hometown sisters she hasn’t seen for eleven years, and a wandering father about to marry for the third time. Monroe’s tale at first look appears superficially individualistic: Dianne L. Reeves. SEIZING PENUMBRA. Book made of handmade, dyed abaca paper, cow rib bones, test tubes, casing, alligator feet, cicada shells, beaver claws, gauze, gesso, and PVA glue. Ja The artist depicts a journey into the encasement of the shadow area in life; living under shad­ ows of past experiences and conformity, we can see where we have been and where we are now, but we are unable to see forward. The shadow cast behind us contains all of our past experiences, ancestry, and information for our survival—who we are. 462 WAL 34.4 W INTER 2 0 0 0 just another story about an independent, intelligent, self-absorbed 1990s woman. But on deeper scrutiny, Newfangled becomes a kind of manifesto of the Everywoman. There are far too many Maidie Bonassos in our society and in the history of womankind who have no positive domestic role models. Just how do women carry marriage and family successfully for the long term? Maidie doesn’t have a clue, partially because of the history in her own family: her grandmother left her mother when she was so young that all M aidie’s mother remembers of her is “that cherry smell, Jergen’s [sic]” (163). And though Maidie’s mother experienced firsthand the void where she only knew her mother by a triggering smell and saw her “out the edge of [her] eyes,” she too abandons her children (163). Maidie’s academic expertise in domestic history and her personal life seem to say there are only two choices for domestic women, grin and bear it out or flee into oblivion. However, there is an in-between option, vague and uncertain but colored with hope, that Maidie senses, then seeks, and eventually grasps: “Maidie didn’t want to be a wife, no, but she didn’t want to be alone either, a moldering root, a buried resource. Her own garbled prayer was about making it all the way just once, to the altar, no, but past a state of dormant uncertainty leading to . . . What?” (92). It’s these other possible “whats” that Monroe uncovers with her intricate, careful plotting. At the end of the novel Maidie sees that per­ haps a place “to cease perpetual motion and make small adjustments,” however messy and demanding the relationships get, can offer other choices (299). Choosing to stay and belong can supply a balance between the “oldfangled but steadfast” and the newfangled, between the values of domesticity and the emphasis on self-exploration in the 1990s (293). After all, Monroe asks us, aren’t women everywhere suf­ fering from a lack of positive signs that can lead us, and our daughters, out of the woods so the negative aspects of domestic history are not generationally repeated? Debra M onroe’s writing is flamboyant, even athletic. Again and again she positions two discordant images side by side and encourages the reader to make connections— a subtlety that demands work from the reader at the same time it entertains with verbal handsprings. And M onroe’s celebration of language is a joy to follow as she threads this sectioned novel together with repeti...