Tag Archives: Lucy

{Finished with Lucy}

Debby: While this book was published in the early 90s, the setting is about twenty years earlier (late 60s, early 70s). On a number of occasions, Simone de Beauvoir’s book “The Second Sex” is referenced. Second Sex was published in 1949, the year of Lucy’s birth (Coincidence, Ms. Kincaid?). Lucy is quite obviously a coming-of-age novel, steeped in a staunchly feminist worldview. Yet Lucy explicitly rejects the passage Mariah offers her from “The Second Sex,” saying, “I had to stop. Mariah had completely misinterpreted my situation. My life could not really be explained by this thick book that made my hands hurt as I tried to keep it open” (p. 132). I’m curious to know why Beauvoir’s theories are handled to obviously, but dismissed so abruptly. Thoughts?

Tim: Well, I am completely unfamiliar with de Beauvoir’s book, but I shan’t let that stop me from speculating wildly. (Hopefully not too wildly or speculatively, though.) I think a lot of it has to do with Lucy’s aggressive rejection of being tied down by any sort of tradition, person, or cultural expectation. At multiple points she goes out of her way to describe how she wants to situate herself outside the norm. This works the same. Lucy likes sex because it feels good. That’s clear from the first time a boy fondles her breast and she discovers sexual excitement. Lucy’s biting, blunt nature cuts through a lot of the cultural ornamentation of Mariah and Lewis’s house and society, and the book’s sexual ethic is handled with a similar directness.

Debby: I’ll make sure to loan you my copy! I like the idea of Lucy rejecting any one particular “doctrine” on the female sex. Beauvoir’s book is mostly concerned with women’s oppression throughout the centuries and how “it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.”

Tim: It is funny how much she objectifies men. Also funny: it didn’t bother me. Not quite sure why that is. Maybe I just didn’t care enough about Lucy. Poor Paul, though.

Debby: All I’m trying to say, with regards to de Beauvoir, is that “The Second Sex” covers exactly the issues that Lucy deals with in the book: from birth control, to daddy issues, to independence and intelligence, to attitudes towards sex. I just found it interesting that Lucy’s character, who loves reading and desires to be a woman worthy of significance, would so caustically brush aside de Beauvoir’s work. Especially when so much of the feminist movement during her time was instigated and propelled by Simone’s brilliant and challenging writing.

{Finished with Lucy}

Tim: So let’s start with this: What did you think about the ending?

Debby: I was sitting at our local Peet’s Coffee Shop, enjoying the cool evening air (and a delicious caramel macchiato), when I arrived at the end of this novel (novella? It’s short enough to be in that category, almost). I interrupted my reading buddy, Laura, to dramatically read the last paragraph aloud. It was THAT absurd. What a ridiculous way to end this book. I don’t understand it, like it, want it. I thought the entire last chapter was distorted, giving everything before it a vicious slant that spoke to the darkness of Lucy’s character, rather than the genuine and attentive person she truly was. I think the author took a lot of qualities that a young woman should pursue with zeal and twisted them into something deeply isolating. In summary: I was insanely frustrated by the ending.

Tim: I think I arrived at mostly the same conclusion by a very slightly different path. For me, the last chapter felt like a very natural extension of the rest of the book, absurd though it sometimes seemed to be. As the book progresses, we more and more see Lucy as a spiteful and unfeeling person. The directness she takes with others goes from seeming a cultural artifact to a personal one. Even when she’s talking about the people she “loves” – the children, Mariah – she tosses them to the side so easily. I actually didn’t quite buy that she was at a point where she was ready to collapse in emotion like she did at the end of the book. The first half of the book had me intrigued. The second half, especially the last quarter, felt like it wasted my time.

Debby: Hang on. I want to argue one of your points real quick. I don’t think Lucy is “spiteful and unfeeling.” I think she is spiteful because she doesn’t want to feel. She shuts out anything and everything that reminds her of home, of her mother, etc. The memories we glimpse of her past are all tinged with anger or frustration, because that is NOT what she wants her life to look like. She doesn’t want her future to be attached to her past.

Tim: Well, yes, I meant unfeeling in that she consciously shuts others out. It may be to cover up stuff that’s painful, but even in those glimpses of her past we see, there are reasons to be angry, but not reasons to be so aggressively antagonistic to everything that has to do with that life. She talks a lot towards the end about things that would have killed her if she let them in, and I see this a lot more as weakness in her character than a genuinely traumatic series of events she’s had to shut out. The stuff she lets us in on is never that bad. Again, I think she’s just a mean person. Maybe the end of the book is supposed to make me sympathetic, but it was very, very difficult for me to care about Lucy after seeing the way she disposed of so many people.

Debby: Wow. I saw her past quite differently. Her mother named her after Lucifer??

Tim: Ok, but do you really believe that was her namesake and not just something a frustrated mother said and regretted?

Debby: That thought literally never crossed my mind. I’m trying to remember if we are ever explicitly told when her mother became pregnant, but we do know that her father was the sperm donor on at least THIRTY children. Lucy specifically acknowledges that her mother married him for the peace of mind of having a secure relationship, even though it was to a crummy man who carried a ton of baggage (includes crazy, murderous ex-girlfriends). My assumption was that she got pregnant, tried to get rid of the pregnancy (which she explicitly teaches to Lucy at a young age) and failed. That is just about the worst predicament a woman can be in. Lucy despises her mother for “[throwing] away her intelligence” (p.123) and submitting to the culturally acceptable safety net of marriage and homemaking. Lucy’s birth was a spite to any dream her mother might have had, her very own devil.

Tim: I go back to an idea we’ve already talked about some, that Lucy isn’t a reliable narrator. I believe the facts that can be pulled from the stories she tells, but not her interpretation of the information. We also know that Lucy’s mother loved her pretty unconditionally – despite some very mean words and actions from Lucy, her mother continues to pursue and look after her. We’re also told that Lucy’s mother never envisioned anything higher than a nursing job for Lucy, that she couldn’t imagine her daughter as a doctor. Given the time and culture her mother would have grown up in, that seems reasonable, and it would have colored her own dreams as well. I still argue that none of this merits the vitriol Lucy expresses towards her upbringing and to the majority of the people in her life. She could have kept up a loving relationship with her mother and pursued medicine on her own terms if she were so inclined. We see repeatedly how Lucy uses people and rarely seems to attach much emotional weight to her relationships. Some of this may be motivated by her past, but can we agree that she’s carried those “lessons” way too far?

Debby: I agree that she takes everything to the extreme. But I don’t think Lucy is as inaccurate a narrator as you seem to believe. In that same passage I was referring to, Lucy states, “I am not like my mother. She and I are not alike… She should not have thrown away her intelligence. She should not have paid so little attention to mine.” (p.123) I think those two statements are deeply connected. She sees her mother as a passionate, commanding, god-like individual who was only subdued by the fact that she had a lousy husband and too many mouths to feed. Her mother submitted to her own fate– a fate that Lucy refused to incline herself to.

Tim: Sure, I agree with that. And we may be rapidly approaching “Agree to disagree” territory, but for me that never adds up to the anger and hate Lucy expresses not only to her mother but to many people in her life. Those are perhaps catalysts for the action which the book captures, but the ending – where Lucy is completely isolated – seems like a gross personal overreaction to issues which she could have overcome by taking similar action but just being nicer about everything. And I hate even using that word because I’m not sure “nice” is necessarily that important. But Lucy doesn’t interact with people symbiotically once in the book. She uses people, and she comes by something approaching a real relationship only when people get past these outrageous defenses by accident.

Debby: The thing is? I don’t think Lucy truly hates anyone but herself. I think she sees her own failures and places them in a context where they reverse into successes. The more she isolates herself, the more superior she can feel to the rest of society. The more she criticizes her mother, the further she feels she can distance herself from becoming the same person. I think this book captures a very specific “point” in a young woman’s life: the point in which you try so hard not to be all the things you despise in others, that you cross into a self-created isolation. Lucy weeds out all feeling, so as not to feel specific ones. I don’t think she’ll stay on her island. I don’t think anybody truly can. But I do think a lot of people need to feel that separation in order to reassess the value of community, and the security that comes from relationships with others (no matter the level of “falseness” one might feel).

Tim: Ok, if you want to say she “behaves hatefully” rather than “is hateful” I have no issue with that. I agree that it does go back to a lot of deep-seated personal insecurity. The degree to which she isolates herself and the methods undertaken to do so I find to be extreme. Over the course of the first half of the book, especially, these were just beginning to be revealed, and so I found her to be interesting. It was the full revelation of the nature of these qualities that eventually grew repulsive, and I think that’s exactly what we’re saying – her approach to self-actualization is a matter of several important degrees further than most go.

(Halfway through Lucy)

(Debby would like it noted that she was rather sleepy when this post was composed, and thus may not have fully articulated everything she meant to. Poor Debby.)

Debby: Let me go ahead and get this out of my system: Lucy is a little punk. I understand that her circumstances are less than wonderful, but her attitude is cynical and her words and thoughts are often cruel. I understand that we’re going for “honesty” here, but this is a short book that relies heavily on Lucy’s disdain for it’s main attraction. Again, I totally get that she has reason to be unhappy. But since when is cynicism a theme?

Tim: Well, and the way the whole thing hides behind this shroud of cultural revelation. At one point I got to thinking, Lucy really sees herself as the magical negro. All these stupid white people are running around like headless chickens, and here she is with the wisdom to reveal their stupidity. And she’s probably right, at least in part. But yeah, she’s a punk right down to her choice of friends (which I thought was funny). If not for her growing love for Mariah – if we can believe that love is what it really is – she seems very much like a robot, or an idealized spirit, or something like that. Lucy’s real family, I think, will hold the key here. Everything we know about her relationship with them looks like it should be healthy and positive, but Lucy clearly doesn’t see it that way. There has to be more of an answer than teen angst.

Debby: One thing I do appreciate about Lucy, though, is how self-possessed she is. While she admits that there are so many new things to take in and experience, she quickly and concisely acknowledges that they are “new” and takes them in stride. No googly-eyed rapture for Lucy. She is systematic, alert, and aware of her surroundings. For a young girl, far away from home, this is a huge feat.

Tim: I think that’s why her character remains interesting. She has the capacity to be unfazed by anything, it seems, and that cloth cuts both ways. At times she seems cynical to an unhealthy degree, at others, a confident young woman we can root for.

(Halfway through Lucy)

(Debby would like it noted that she was rather sleepy when this post was composed, and thus may not have fully articulated everything she meant to. Poor Debby.)

Tim: Let me start out discussion of this book by saying I’m now halfway through the book and have very little idea whether (overall) I like it or not. Which is a weird feeling. That does not, however, mean that there aren’t things to talk about, and the foremost of these has to be the character of Lucy herself. I am deeply interested by Lucy, and while I believe she is at times quite insightful (I’m sure we’ll have to devote another post entirely to the cultural dynamics she brings up), I don’t believe for an instant she’s a reliable narrator. The fun in her is that she’s so subjective while being dispassionate and objective in her own mind. It could also be a post unto itself, but the example that springs to mind is her attitude towards sex and love. She seems too calculating. Particularly given some minor traumas in her life it seems we’re still likely to uncover, I think it’s, in part, a careful facade to keep from getting hurt.

Debby: It’s interesting that you use “sex and love” as an example of Lucy’s facade. I found her knowledge and interaction with her physical side the most honest and least fabricated part of her narrative. For instance, when she explains that she was “sucking [Tanner’s] tongue because I had liked the way his fingers looked on the keys of the piano” (p. 43), we are confronted with her deep innocence. I loved when she continued: “Someone should have told me that there were other things to seek out in a tongue than the flavor of it.” Instead of viewing this as a calculated facade, I see glimpses of an idyllic young girl who has been separated from her family– and all the people who might have told her what it is to kiss a boy.

Tim: I agree, but that’s kind of my point. A few pages later, she continues the story with Tanner: “I noticed his hands on my breasts, first rubbing delicately and then very hard, producing an exciting feeling. I do not remember how I knew to do this, but I pressed his head down to my chest, and as he licked and sucked by breasts, I thought, This must never stop.” There’s just a hint of true emotion there, just a hint of Lucy cutting loose. It happens at other times, too, with some of her interactions with Mariah, or with the children. It makes me wonder not about the facts of her story, but of the feelings.

Debby: Hmmm.. Like how she “loves” Miriam? I think that’s a beautiful picture– Lucy bonding with this precious little one, always carrying her through the woods and such. I think the distinct contrast between her harsh moments and her gentle ones are dramatic in the story.

Tim: And that’s really all I’m saying. Lucy is narrating the book, not a third party, and we do get at least glimpses of other sides to her, even if most of what we see is a dispassionate look at the world. She’s self-assured and saying what she believes to be true, but there’s just enough discrepancy at some small points that we can see she’s not God. Does that make sense? Like with other first person narrators, you often get parts of the story where they tell you how wrong they were. Lucy doesn’t seem to believe she could be in any meaningful way. It’s like seeing shading at the edge of a circle – it lets you know it’s really a 3D object.