The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Cool for You: A Novel by Eileen MylesElizabeth Sheffield
Eileen Myles. Cool for You: A Novel. Soft Skull Press, 2000. 196 pp. Paper: $14.00.
According to its back cover, Eileen Myles’s Cool for You is a “nonfiction novel” about the “downbeat progress of a girl growing up in working-class Boston” who eventually becomes a poet. The validity of the term nonfiction novel seems to be substantiated by the eponymous first-person narrator and the abundance of gritty, precise details documenting the narrator’s encounters with each of the various institutions—her family, Catholic school, the mental hospital where her grandmother was a patient, the state school for the mentally retarded, the summer camp, and the nursing home—that briefly employ her. To further justify the term, there is no plot in the traditional sense, no carefully set-up, causally linked series of events culminating in a climactic moment in which Eileen suddenly realizes her literary vocation. Yet to call Cool for You a nonfiction novel seems diminishing, as the term downplays the inventiveness of Myles’s narrative, the artistry with which facts have been arranged. In the novel’s strongest sections, the narrative possesses an oblique rigor. A specific emotional revelation is reached through the seemingly casual juxtaposition of images and memories, as at the end of chapter 16, where the narrator’s description of a job at a nursing home suddenly and shockingly collides with the portrait of an elegant, independent woman she knew as a child, “one of the most covered people I had seen in my life,” in the moment she sees this same woman’s “big bare butt being lifted off a potty seat by a nurse.” In opposition to the obliterating orders of the family, heterosexuality, religion, and state, Cool for You, at its best, creates its own order, an order which rescues dignity by bringing the indignities imposed by those institutions into revealing focus. [Elizabeth Sheffield]