Prologue NYC, 1966 Vivian, three-inch make-up wand poised, opened her eyes wide in the Maybelline compact to put on her blue mascara. Then – feeling the sunset on her smooth thick skin – she returned the little brush to its place on the floor without having used it. It was the eighth item in the clock-circle of pots, wands and compacts that were arranged around her. Viv was sitting Indian-style in the center of the circle, still holding her small pisshole-in-the-snow-eyes (as her dead father had called them) as wide as they would go. Then she rose very slowly, her too-small head held very straight – as if she were balancing a book on it, like a girl practicing for the Miss America title – and walked over to her big curved bay window. Her face is tighter than when we’ll see it next, but less sharp. She’s coated in a layer of dishwashing liquid and 50s kitchen radio. But the soft cheeks don’t hide the look she’ll still have 16 years later – the look that makes her appear always to be plotting something. Viv stood straight and motionless at the open window that faced the Hudson River and New Jersey, which had only Palisades, and no high-rises yet. She listened to the rhythm of the needle hitting the end of side 1 of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over and over again.
Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space Nora Chassler Grandmother Divided by Monkey... is a quirky, fast paced novel brimming with dark humour. Carrie (11), Eli (13) and Viv Martian (41) are living in small flat on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1982. They are broke and Viv is a pothead with unconventional ideas. Her boyfriend, Alex Woods (21) lives with them in the one bedroom flat. The children fight; Viv gets pregnant; Eli tries to make it to a showing of the Shining that isn’t sold out. When the family are befriended by an old lady who lives around the corner who makes her living as psychic she reveals a different part of her life story to each of them. She lived in a bohemian community in Rhinebeck (Upstate NY) in the early 1900’s and was involved in the murder of a young boy. Miss Rosa, aka Phoebe Curtis, the psychic, has a burning need to tell someone her story and this dysfunctional family is the best she can do.
Valley Press PB £8.99 9781908853455 224pp Fiction (FA)
Viv waited. She drank some Tropicana out of the carton (the one with the racist graphic of the native girl in a grass skirt, with huge eyes and a basket of oranges balanced on her head). She followed the progress of a rusty, high-heaped garbage barge ploughing downtown in the wine-red river, the seagulls circling above it, as if on stiff wires. Thank God, she thought, as the last thick drip of orange juice slid to the back of her throat. It’d been six years, and there were several moments every day where she actually thanked god to be out of her mother’s house. Viv ripped a piece of paper from a composition book that was on the sill, got to her knees above the rathe-ate-her so she could see the river, and wrote:
33 |
MARCH