Maggie_Response

[Sondra Perl]

#545

I actually find Lynn’s voice unsettling in this piece, unsettling in a way that I couldn’t understand until I had read it all the way through. My unease began with the second sentence: “After a dozen years at the university pool, most of the regulars, including faculty , even some students, migrated three years ago to the newly opened community recreation center” (39). I found it difficult to read, awkwardly assembled and strangely split between two different kinds of time, the dozen years that presumably pass in the first clause and the date three years ago that is tucked away in the main clause. The reason this made me uneasy was that, after that sentence, the writing was very clear and flowed simply from one thing to another. It wasn’t until I went back to the beginning and reread the piece that I realized that the difficulty of this sentence had been a warning to me–such an oblique warning that I really didn’t pay attention–about the fact that this was actually a difficult story.
Because I was totally drawn in by the first part, lulled into a (false) sense of security by the series of vignettes that could definitely be the secrets of the women’s locker room from the title. The story of the woman with electric heat stood out as a perfectly timed joke: the conversation seems predictable, even slightly mundane, a commiseration about the problems of home ownership. The the other woman brings up her sons in the middle, an odd non sequitur until the last line, the punch line: “’ll sell the house. That will get them out!” (41). As for beauty, I keep going back to the descriptions of the women’s bodies. There is something about Lynn’s use of adjectives here–and I usually don’t like adjectives–that is seductive to me: the “agile” but self-conscious teenagers, the “discreet” the butterfly tattoo, the “inky” weave of the bracelet tattoo, the “ragged” concentration numbers (42).
These funny stories and delicious descriptions made me think that my difficulties at the beginning had been a fluke. Even when the piece shifted from the rec center, I wasn’t immediately alarmed because she started her sojourn abroad with the luxurious Japanese “country inns” (43). When the scene shifted to Stockholm, I simply thought it had been selected as a contrast for Japan, unaware that this was actually the moment the entire piece had been building towards. And then it all made sense, the way the beginning was so difficult, but then the piece seemed to resolve itself, only to reveal two thirds of the way through that this was not a simple, funny, pretty story about the rec center, but an account of something violent and dark that happened somewhere else.

[Sondra Perl]

#558

Maggie, I think you really pinpoint a helpful dichotomy upon which Bloom’s piece is structured: ease and difficulty. It’s this negotiation, for me, that makes the writing so effective. I too felt disarmed by the opening, but then I was soon lulled by the quotidian descriptions of the locker room. Here there was a syntactical ease, the writing voice occupying a space of levity and good humor. This diction encouraged a position of readerly passivity, at least for me. I felt kind of serene, and totally seduced by the beauty–as you put it–the description of the women’s bodies.

The difficult beginning does seem to point the way forward though, through the easy camaraderie of women and toward the difficult climax: the heart of darkness the essay edges slowly toward. And exactly as you said, at this point the essay surfaces as a “an account of something violent and dark that happened somewhere else.” I think Bloom’s technique of lulling the reader with an easy prose style, only to confront that ease with a difficult, thorny description of violence is very provocative. She enacts the sense of shock and trauma she is writing about. And with these thoughts in mind, it seems even more clear to me how much Bloom uses voice to make her complex and disturbing argument.

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