The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon
Martin Riker

Jaimy Gordon. Bogeywoman. Sun and Moon, 1999. 343 pp. Paper: $12.95.

Jaimy Gordon is an extraordinary writer and Bogeywoman is her best work so far. Readers familiar with the Rabelais-inspired Shamp of the City-Solo and her acclaimed road novel She Drove without Stopping know that Gordon does not give repeat performances. Each work presents its own set of aesthetic possibilities, its own idea of what the novel can be.

In the most basic terms, Bogeywoman is fantasy-picaresque novel narrated by a young woman who calls herself the Bogeywoman. The Bogeywoman discovers her lesbianism at Camp Chunkagunk Tough Paradise for Girls; carves up her arm and so is sent to the “bughouse”; falls in love with the beautiful Madame (Dr.) Zuk, and escapes with her toward the Eastern-bloc country of Caramel-Creamistan . . . In short, she moves—is constantly moving—through a world that is at times familiar, at other times strange, and that by the end of the book seems to have broken with reality entirely.

There is a kind of manic energy that runs throughout Bogeywoman, the source of which seems to be the narrator’s bad-girl sensibility—a mixture of street-smarts and naïveté, cynicism and charm. For example, she composes a song for her friend Emily, stuck in the bughouse and refusing to eat: “Because I couldn’t stop for lunch / It kindly stopped for me. / The van was PIZZAS BY HASSAN / FAST FREE DELIVERY. . . .” But most of what makes this book so interesting cannot be paraphrased. There is something very disturbing that evolves in the background, behind the plot’s motion and the narrator’s smart-ass remarks. It’s as if all of the book’s wackiness is insufficient veil for some sort of drippy chaos, an impressionistic swamp which can (and toward the end does) overcome whatever sense of security and normalcy readers might think they are feeling. [Martin Riker]