Maggie Estep (1963–2014)

Estep's best work ever. Met my criteria for a damn good book: made me cry and I didn't want it to end. Alice Fantastic is quite a stretch from the author's beginnings as an angry grrl poetess and writer of essays colorfully describing some of the more unique life forms inhabiting New York City and Coney Island. This book reached in, grabbed my heart and gave it a good twist. Wonderful. One of my favorites.

I sought this book out because of Sara Gran, author of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, mentions it in an interview listing five of her favorite books (https://crimereads.com/sara-gran-my-best-friends-are-books/) and the writing lessons she learned from them. In this case, Gran notes that she learned you can take mysteries and set them in places you know and love; in the case of Hex, the oddly conjoined worlds of Coney Island, a Queens racetrack and Julliard School of Music.

So anyway, show more this is good stuff. I realized rather quickly that it wasn't really about the mystery, not very much. It's like one of those lit-fic books that is about a group of people connected to the main character, Ruby, sort of like a Tales of the City, I imagine, with a lot less sex and a lot more mystery. Although there is quite a bit of sex for a mystery book, at least the kind I tend to read, where lone private eyes are, you know, lone. It does lead to one detraction for me--besides the fact that it was included at all--in that all the women love sex, all the men are irresistible, although many of them have various hang-ups, and apparently, no one who has sex is gay.

All of that aside, characterization is interesting. It's all first person point-of-view, largely from Ruby's viewpoint, although every other chapter is from one of her friends or neighbors. Somewhat surprisingly, because sometimes it seems like there's a certain sameness to an author's style, the voices all feel quite different. Estep manages to make most of them feel quite human: troubled, caring, vulnerable, funny.

The writing is solid. The stables, the subway, Coney Island; all feel very real, artfully created for the reader in a few solid sentences. As Gran mentions in her description, "Maggie took the amateur sleuth mystery and put in a world she loved and understood." I can picture the opening scene so clearly, I feel like I'm there:

"I'm eyeing a willowy blond woman's red wallet when the F train stops abruptly, causing two large Russian ladies sitting across from me to loose control of their grocery bags. As the Russian women make loud guttural exclamations, frozen pierogies spill out of one of the bags and all over the mottled floor."

I wasn't so sure about the narrative from Ruby's good friend Oliver at first--what was he, an addict?--but he turned out to be a fascinating, unpredictable character.

"Some days it's so bad I can't move, other days it's the kind of bad where I have to move. I wasn't quite sure which this was gonna be but the sun was streaming in, blending with the bright yellow of the walls, hurting my eyes a little with its brilliance, and though I was nauseated and had pain traveling up and down my body, I threw back the covers, got up, and put on Ol' Dirty Bastard's first record, which I knew was the only thing that would get me moving."

Which reminds me of a small complaint: I didn't care for how his character was dealt with in the end. It felt more plot-convenient than realism convenient, and everything until then had felt quirky-but-possible, but that just seemed highly improbable.

I'm wandering all over, aren't I? It's much like this book, really; there's a plot, certainly, but the reader has to be okay watching it wander, or waiting as pieces slowly come together, with occasional sidetracking. It's kind of like going to ride your favorite roller coaster at an amusement park, in fact: you may have an ultimate goal, but half the point is the walk getting there.

Three and a half tokens, rounding up show less

In a charming piece that manages to be touching in spite of itself, Maggie Estep spins the story of how Alice Hunter, her sister Eloise, and their mother navigate their way through very challenging lives. It’s a hysterically funny piece, full of gallows and self-deprecating humor. Novelist Jonathan Ames says Ms. Estep “is the bastard daughter of Raymond Chandler and Anaïs Nin.”

So yes, the sisters are so abrupt with each other and their mother, both in thought and word, that their show more outward, gruff exteriors may be described as hard-boiled. And though the author portrays the ever-present inclination among all three to express and act upon their erotic desires, this inclination never intrudes on the story; it always serves it as an integral feature that at times brings the three women closer and at other times drives a wedge between them.

This novel is about the growth of all three women, who are closer in age than most mother-daughter combinations. The women grow in fits and starts, through painful episodes, like the incarceration of a lover, and an unexpected pregnancy. Ms. Estep knows her subject, and doesn’t let any of her narrative decay into sentiment (which is warded off by wise-cracking and verbal bullying), or rancor, because eventually we know it’s no more than skin-deep. This is the growth that’s on offer. It will affect you; it gratifies with its balanced treatment and realistic conclusions.

I enjoyed Alice Fantastic more and more as I got into it. I’m glad I stuck with it because 40% of the way in, I wasn’t sure I would. Give this a go. Maggie Estep’s book is bright, clever, very well paced, and surprisingly affecting. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Back in the 1990s when I was a member of America's performance-poetry community, author Maggie Estep held a special place of esteem among me and my friends, as one of the only slam poets in history to successfully transition into the world of paper books; but this being the poetry scene we're show more talking about, where dysfunctional personalities are as important as the actual work being produced, this esteem of course came with a Roger-Marin-style asterisk, that Estep's books were mostly poetry-scene-type stories about poetry-scene-type people doing poetry-scene-type things. And so has Estep ended up having a career that's lasted much longer than the popularity of slam poetry itself, but only by writing about artsy people with trainwreck lives, in such low-selling cult classics as Diary of an Emotional Idiot and Soft Maniacs.

And so that's what makes her latest, Alice Fantastic from our friends at Akashic Books, such a surprise; because it's not actually an irony-laced story about hipsters at all (or, not really, but we'll get to that in a bit), but more a plain-spoken and sincere tale about women washing up on the wrong side of middle age, women who seemed like they had it all together when they were younger just to wake up one day and realize that they've become the worn-out, stringy-haired white trash they used to make fun of. Certainly, the Alice of the book's title is a perfect example of this -- hovering around forty, living in a nondescript home in Queens left to her by her now-dead absentee father, she used to be the kind of girl who hung out all night in Manhattan and dated junkie rock stars, now an aging professional gambler who most people don't even look at twice, who prefers the run-down environs of more urban horse tracks like Aqueduct to the pretty landscaping of a place like Belmont. She's the kind of woman who seems simply beat up by the world at large, who instead of friends has mostly acquaintances made up mainly of fellow full-time gamblers, whose only romantic interest these days is a masochistic, borderline-retarded drifter she can barely stand, the kind of permanent pessimist who seems many times to have simply given up on life in general.

This is then contrasted to Alice's younger sister Eloise, just about to enter her thirties herself, still dating the strange urban dwellers (the book opens with the death of her latest boyfriend, a Brazilian trapeze instructor), confused about her sexuality and what she wants out of life; and now add to this the sisters' aging mother Kimberly, living a lesbian lifestyle in the upstate hippie enclave of Woodstock (where most of the book's action takes place, and not coincidentally where Estep lives in real life), a former drug addict turned full-time dog saver. Stir together with the threesome's mutual love for damaged canines, a Kate-Winslet-type bisexual actress as a new next-door-neighbor, and a lot of confusion among all three as to sexual identity and relationship politics, and you essentially have the story of Alice Fantastic from beginning to end.

As you can tell, there's not a lot of actual plot that takes place in this book; it is instead almost entirely a character study, a slow-moving dramedy that almost exclusively focuses on the relationship between these three examples of "damaged goods," and how the shifting circumstances of their lives force them into a new understanding of each other. And as such, then, there's a lot of people who aren't going to like this novel one bit, and in fact I'm often tempted to be one of these people when usually confronted with slow-moving characters studies like these; but in this case I found myself charmed instead, because Estep pulls off the difficult feat of making these people truly fascinating just on their own, or at least fascinating enough that they don't need much of a plotline to propel their story, but to simply be let loose in a specific environment so we can watch them interact. It's one of those kinds of books, the kind to just sit back and languidly enjoy the mere atmosphere of, to not worry so much about what "happens" but to simply enjoy their company for a bit. And enjoy these people's company I did, because Estep has a way of really getting under their skins, of making them alive in a way that doesn't require much of a plot to move things along; she's one of those rare authors able to push a story along just on the strength of the characters alone, and to make you care about their fates even when barely anything is actually happening in their lives.

Like I said, it's not for everyone, and there are sure to be lots of readers today who will vehemently disagree with my assessment of this book; but for those who enjoy simply getting lost in a very compelling environment, among characters you end up truly coming to care about, Alice Fantastic is definitely for you.

Out of 10: 8.3 show less