Arts

Brooklyn Moms Still Get Busy

The realistic, enjoyable sex scenes in Amy Sohn’s Prospect Park West.

  • Posted: Thursday, September 24, 2009 12:16pm
  • By Hanna Rosin

This is part three in a dialogue between Hanna Rosin and Amy Sohn about Amy's new novel, Prospect Park West. Read part one here and part two here.

Amy:

You are so right to bristle at complaints that the characters are not “likable.” Of course, a novel is not a popularity contest, and a novelist has every right to make her characters as damaged and unappealing as she wishes. It’s probably only because of Bridget Jones that we have that expectation, anyway. In fact, it was brave of you, in a novel that’s designed to be readable and accessible, to stay so dark.

You have forced me, then, to refine my objection. Of course there are plenty of compelling heroines I would not want as friends (Anna Karenina comes to mind). The issue is that I found it difficult to connect to some of your leading ladies or find a way into their emotional predicaments. They are all described with a kind of cold, hard scrutiny that feels much more like cruelty than empathy. Melora goes through every station of celebrity hell. Even the Fug Girls would have cut her a break at some point before the last few pages.

Karen, we both agree, is a recognizable overprotective mother type—organic snacks, knee pads at the park, etc. Yes, she had a difficult childhood and a distant husband, which should humanize her. But she is so single-mindedly focused on mommy status symbols (real estate, schools, fertility calendar), and her behavior unravels in such a disturbing way that the more we learn about her, the more we want to back off.

She presented a particular predicament for me as a reader. On the one hand, I found the drama between Karen and Melora surprising and gripping. They were indeed made for each other, and made to enact this perverted theater of friendship they fall into. On the other hand, reading about her left me feeling like I was doing a version of what she was doing at Melora’s house: peering into the pathetic life of a neighbor and feeling superior. It didn’t feel edifying or good.

I had a similar reaction to Kate Walbert’s recent novel, A Short History of Women. There, too, the women in the novel existed in separate spheres, damaged, constrained, irrational, and utterly unable to comfort one another. This is surely a simplistic and unfair reaction. I did not even know there was this sisterly feminist in me, but there she is, demanding that all novels by women about women reverse the long literary history by which heroines suffer alone and then die. (Again, Anna Karenina.)

One thing I did love: all the sex scenes. The masturbation, interrupted by baby cries. The absent or awkward marital sex. The affair, the lesbian longing. We have just launched The Desire Blog, in which we are asking women to talk about their sexual fantasies for a grand research project. And it’s been amazing to read. It’s just like what you say: You wander the streets, saying hello to your neighbors, but actually you have no idea what’s in their heads.

Tags: a short history of women, amy sohn, anna karenina, bridget jones, kate walbert, Park Slope, prospect park west

Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.

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