Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton

It's impossible to imagine Jane Austen writing in and of our day. Yet, Jane Hamilton comes close in her new novel, "Laura Rider's Masterpiece." She brings an Austen-like wit and perception to Austen's interest: manners, love and romance.

The surface details of Hamilton's story are clearly of day. "Laura Rider's Masterpiece" is the story of a threesome that is initiated and conducted in part through email. It is in part an e-pistolary novel? The chief instigator and architect of the romance is Laura. Officially, she and her goofball/hippy husband Charley run a successful nursery/garden in a small-town between Madison and Milwaukee. In truth, domineering Laura is the brains and drive that have made it a success. And, everyone knows it, including Charley. On the surface, she stills loves handsome and lovable Charley, but...she's grown tired of his insatiable sexual appetite and the two sleep in separate rooms. Still, she loves him, she's convinced.

Laura's restless. Something's missing. Although she's never really written, or even really read a whole lot, she keeps fantasizing herself as a writer, an artist, a thinker. The sort of person who might be taken seriously by her idol, public radio talk show host Jenna Faroli (who bears more a passing resemblance to Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca). Faroli is a pretentious, misanthropic know-it-all, who hides her huge ego, just barely, behind a facade of culture, tolerance and down-to-earthiness. Laura's bought into her personae. She views her as the epitome of sophistication, culture and thought. For Laura, Jenna is a feminine ideal to which she would aspire.

In an effort to get next to her idol/crush Jenna, Laura slowly and subtly maneuvers circumstance so that the charming and handsome Charley is thrown into Jenna's path. She basically arranges an affair between Jenna and Charley. At first, this simply means sitting in on and often ghosting an email exchange the two start up. The pretentious Faroli terms this "an epistolary relationship"(66).

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Charley and Jenna falling in love is Charley and Jenna falling in love. They are not a likely couple. Reversing the gender of Austen's poles, Faroli is the queen of sense. Faroli has never fallen in love, or even experienced too many rich emotions outside of those mediated by art. As to passion and lust, Faroli harbors an unconscious aversion. She's a bit above such vulgar, human foibles. She fashions herself, "Jenna Faroli of the sexy mind...if the multitudes wanted to fuck her, it was her brain they wanted to penetrate, the luscious cranial fruit on those broad shoulders of hers-what hidden folds, so soft, so moist, so yielding. She considered that big fruit, and then the rest of her, the drag of her body, to be the ultimate product of the feminist revolution"(73). Of course, for the sake of appearances, she would claim there's more to her than her mind,that she was whole. But, deep down she doubts it.

In stark contrast, Charley is the simple man of feeling, prone to wonder and emotion, and keenly interested in sex. He thinks of it as a "wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos...it was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished"(29). In Hamilton's telling of romance, she makes sensibility male and explicitly erotic.

Charley is simple to the point of simplistic. He apparently got through high school due to the kindness of teachers. He is extraordinarily childlike, creepily so. While Laura eats a salad and chicken patty, Charly dines on two corn dogs, a "bowl of tater tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk(49)" and tosses "his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air,...seeing if he could land them in his mouth"(50-51).

Without ever being fully conscious of it, Laura initiates a relationship between Charley and Jenna. Laura conceives of coupling them as a project, an experiment. Her project/experiment is a study from which she hopes to gain insight into romance (primarily into what Jenna, a woman she admires, thinks of men and romance) so that she might write a romance.

Yet, Laura is also interested in getting close to Jenna via Charley. Laura's Jenna idolatry partakes of a crush, a female version of Eve Kosofsky's homosocial continuum of desire. In this case, that desire is expressed and mediated through a man who seems a blank slate on which they consciously and unconsciously to each other. Charlie brings more to the table than his male anatomy; yet, on some level, both women are interested in him for what he can tell them about the other.

Laura expresses/protests uncertainty as to her intentions in setting up the relationship. In large measure though, she sees Charlie, especially as he expresses himself via emails she authors, as an expression of herself which she offers in hopes of gaining Jenna's love. She gets a charge out of Jenna paying attention to Charley, to her bothering to reply to the emails she authors/co-authors in his name, and "had to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie"(103). Jenna's wanting "to communicate with Laura/Charlie was definitely a boost to Laura's self-esteem"(108). In Laura's mind, "Jenna was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself"(130).

By her lights, Laura instigates and observes the relationship in hopes of writing a romance featuring and appealing to a modern, powerful, every-woman such as Jenna, such as herself. She clearly views Jenna as a modern, every-woman: evolved, cultured, confident, self-possessed. Her writing project is intended to test the possibility and potential for such a romance.

What sort of role remains or is born for the modern man in her conception of romance.
In Laura's telling, "in traditional romance, the heroine was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn't going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her [Jenna's] status, and it might not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge"(107). Laura tells herself the "tables could very well be turned in her romance, the woman, by her love, raising up the man to his fullest potential"(109). Laura has clearly fallen out of love with Charlie.

Indeed, Laura's fallen out of love with love. She looks on love, romance and sex with disdain, as a foible and a foolishness, and a vulnerability she hopes she's outgrown. However, another part wonders if one can sensibly fall in love, fall in love but keep a modicum of dignity, self-respect and sanity? Or, as she puts it to Jenna, "I've been trying...to study what....an ideal woman..actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when she's already sort of perfect"(176).Can a modern woman fall in love and be bettered by the experience? In setting up Charlie with her idol of feminine sense, Jenna, Laura seeks the answer to all these questions.

She is bitterly disappointed by Jenna's answer, even if she never is able to admit it to herself. Jenna in love proves to be like most people in love; foolish, sentimental and vulnerable. In reading over their email exchanges, "what struck Laura most was the banality of the exchanges....they were saying things to each other that had been said by lovers through the ages, and yet they seemed to think they were inventing the concepts"(144). Yet, she can't her writing, her research is contingent upon their being a better answer, a sensible romance. So, although Jenna and Charley end up "exposed as...perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs," Laura the writer believes that they can still get through this stage and via their romance "reclaim their best selves"(196).

Laura is more than simply disappointed that Jenna has failed to present a convincing romantic pathway for the modern woman. Deep down, she is downright pissed-off and seeks revenge. While she would never own her anger, nor the satisfaction deriving from it, it is there. One could argue that it's prompted by more than Jenna's failure to fall sensibly in love with Charlie and reveal his charms to Laura. Although never explicitly stated, Laura clearly harbors a long-standing grudge against her idol, and it's not hard to see why she might wish to take down the arrogant and contemptuous Jenna.

Throughout the novel, Laura acts with an incredible blindness. She is driven by a truly destructive hatred and resentment of her ostensible idol and yet is oblivious to this. Hamilton skillfully brings the reader into Laura's experience on this front. When she blows at the end, it surprises at first, but makes perfect sense upon reflection. As readers, we detect the wrath she harbors without it's ever actually registering in our conscious thoughts.

Despite it's sensational story, Hamilton's book has conservative strains. Laura treads close to a traditional female stereotype: the woman who sees anger as unfeminine, denies it in herself, and in so doing feeds it till it grows into a rage that will be expressed. There is also an implicit conservative nod to traditional values in Hamilton's depicting both women as failed mothers.