So, it's 1:30am on Tuesday, and I can't sleep. Rather than sit in my bed waiting for sleep to come, I decided to read. The book I was reading was Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. It's supposed to be a thought-provoking, eye-opening, affecting story of growing up "different" in the middle part of the 20th century. It is none of those things.
Perhaps when it was first published in 1973, it got attention for being new and shocking, and so its flaws were overlooked. But after 28 years, it is clear that those "virtues" were only such because of the times. The heroine, one Molly Holt, is flawless. Pretty, intelligent, determined, she escapes her poor white trash beginnings to become a strong independent woman blah blah blah. I hate flawless protagonists. That isn't the only way this book departs from reality. In Rita Mae Brown's worldview, all women are lesbians, it's just that most don't know it or want to believe it. The only people who will treat lesbians well are those who are unaware. Otherwise there is a uniform disgust/resentment. In men, this is the result of their resentment towards strong women for emasculating them, and towards other men for oppressing their universal homosexual tendencies. In women, it is a result of their unwillingness to embrace their lesbianism and their oppression by the patriarchy.
She idealizes men and women, gay and straight, into cliched archetypes. Each actor is a plot element, even our beloved Molly. Of complex character portrayals there are none. The prose is pedestrian and uninspired. It is quite clear that Ms. Brown was trying to be trenchant and witty in her unoriginal perspective, but she falls short. Her depictions of the trials and travails endured by our fearless heroine are also laughable; in most situations, you could swap lesbian for black or Jewish and leave the story basically unaltered. Then there is the complete lack of subtlety in Ms. Brown's condemnation of prejudice. Conversations between characters quickly become polemics against the intolerance of society. Various characters exist solely to spout an offensive and intolerant view of lesbians/blacks/Jews/Puerto Ricans/etc. in a heavy-handed attempt to illustrate the ridiculousness of these perspectives. It's like reading a lesbian Ayn Rand, except (thankfully), a much more brief one.
Don't get me wrong; this is not a worthless book. Your life will not be worse for having read it. But there are so many better ways to spend your time. This book will bring you nothing that could not be conveyed better and more effectively by other means (literary, film, musical, or other). This book is like the literary Elizabeth Taylor; she is now famous for having once been. It is a cultural relic, significant only because it of what it once was, not what it is today.
Blech. Written at 3am, but posted at 8am because my DNS servers broke.