The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Manuel Puig and the Spider Women: His Life and Fictions by Suzanne Jill Levine
Keith Cohen

Suzanne Jill Levine. Manuel Puig and the Spider Women: His Life and Fictions. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 448 pp. $27.50.

Suzanne Jill Levine’s biography of Manuel Puig is a model of tact and gossip: she has included essential information that anyone enamored of Puig’s novels needs to know, and she has passed on important data about Puig’s love life which, at least for this reader, would be difficult to gather anywhere else. Particularly impressive are the details of family life and the oppressive atmosphere of General Villegas, the village where Puig grew up. Levine is quite perceptive about both sides of Puig’s influences; here are Hollywood’s presentation of the real world and a romanticized paradise, and both his literary background (Puig’s acquisition of foreign languages and his broad reading during the Boom) and Freudian background (his cousin Bébé, who would become a psychologist, instructed him early in theories of homosexuality). Levine is very thorough, moreover, to keep us abreast of which people in Puig’s life became incarnated as characters and which events he fictionalized. At times the biographical and the critical impulses clash, such as when Levine, narrating the tortuous process by which the Spanish edition of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth gets published, neglects to tell us how it ended up at Jorge Alvarez. Although she has an excellent sense of which traits of the author appear acted out in the novels, her contention that Molina and Valentín (of Kiss of the Spider Woman) represent two sides of Puig seems unconvincing to me. Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman deserves high praise for its insights about the literary process that go beyond Puig’s own work. It should remain an essential reference on Puig, a writer who, in Goytisolo’s words, “knew no other commitment than the one he had contracted with writing and with himself.” [Keith Cohen]