Stewart O'Nan
Doubleday, $22.95
by Peter McCarthy
In his three previous works of fiction, Stewart O'Nan employed spare, cutting
prose to dissect and examine the lives of blue-collar Americans. Like such
contemporaries as Pete Dexter, O'Nan seems comfortably enrolled in the less-is-more
school of writing. But though his subjects, like his style, have been simple,
seemingly commonplace, his books as a whole have been anything but. In The
Names of The Dead, he provided a moving exploration of the day-to-day
life of an upstate New York truck driver forced to confront the horrors he
encountered in Vietnam. In Snow Angels, his best book to date, O'Nan
mixed the plain and the extraordinary to create the visceral excitement of
a thriller in a literary novel about a boy's awkward teenage years in suburban
Pittsburgh. But with The Speed Queen, O'Nan has turned away from the
world he depicted with such insight in the past to construct a variation on
the standard themes of American pop iconography. Here he seems to be trying
to work the alchemy of Snow Angels in reverse--placing literary themes
on a foundation of pulp and throwing in some pop references to lend the whole
enterprise an aura of authenticity. The upshot is a thriller that is dull.
The Speed Queen is a book that begs for a Hollywood pitch: Marjorie
Standiford, the most notorious member of an infamous gang of serial killers,
sits on death row in Oklahoma the night of her execution. The unnamed author
of a slew of best-selling horror books has secured the rights to her story
and sent her a list of questions to answer on tape. Her story is one of cars
and crime, sex and drugs; of Lamont, her abusive, car enthusiast-cum-amphetamine
addict husband--the actual trigger-man in the killing spree, she claims; and
of Natalie, another partner in crime, also her sometime lover. Flashbacks,
lots of gory detail. With death staring in her eye, Marjorie's last, entirely
unapologetic wish is that her book--a gritty true-crime testimonial by way
of bloody road movies like Natural Born Killers and capital punishment
films like Dead Man Walking, with a little Russ Meyer kitsch thrown
in for good measure--will outsell Natalie's.
Though mechanical and lacking the emotional nuance of O'Nan's previous books,
The Speed Queen's runaway storyline works well enough in allowing minor
details of the plot to shed light on Marjorie's overall view of what transpired--a
view O'Nan deliberately pushes beneath the surface of her words. She meets
Lamont while working the night shift at a self-serve gas station, polishing
off fifths of cheap vodka ("It was a good job for an alcoholic," she says).
He pulls up one night, fills the tank of his "fire-mist red 442," and speeds
away without paying; but before Marjorie can fill out the paperwork he's back
to pay the tab, "his eyes like an eclipse." Lamont is that stock character
of American literature and film, the bad-boy with a heart of gold, and Marjorie
of course must fall for him, hard.
She gets pregnant and, against her mother's wishes, marries Lamont. There
are little incidents of domestic violence as well as money problems, but at
least for a while the couple live in bliss, traveling to car shows and popping
speed. Marjorie gives birth to a son, and soon after is arrested: the scene,
involving her mother, a car wreck, and a bag of crystal methamphetamine, is
humorous. In prison she begins an affair with Natalie, and when they get out,
they move in with Lamont. With this love triangle in place, they begin taking
speed with increasing regularity until at last they are completely drug-addled
and dead broke. Desperate, they cook up a drug-dealing scheme that goes bad,
precipitating the novel's violent climax.
O'Nan clearly wants not only to employ such clichs of American desperation
but to tell us something about them as well. He seems to have ambitions to
introduce elements of psychological and moral awareness into the story, particularly
in establishing what was "good" in Marjorie's seemingly grim past. Sometimes
he succeeds: His rendering of the alternately euphoric and debilitating aspects
of drug use ring true, as does his description of Marjorie and Lamont's gradual
slide from pill-popping to shooting up. This is not just hypodermic chic.
But when it comes to important developments like the affair between Marjorie
and Natalie, O'Nan loses his touch. This could have been an interesting movement
in an otherwise "straight" narrative, but he develops the relationship between
the two women so quickly--jumping eagerly to tell about the various "devices"
they employ in their daily sexual routines--that it seems like nothing more
than an excuse for kinkiness. Searching for signs of genuine emotion, the
reader is left in the awkward position of voyeur.
Elsewhere there are signs that O'Nan wants to establish Marjorie as an unreliable
narrator. She swears her allegiance to absolute truth, but her confused loyalties
and loves become apparent as she talks. A deft touch that establishes the
suspect nature of her musings is her conscientous replacement of "fuck" with
"heck": characters caught in the throes of bloody gun-play holler "Get the
heck out of here!" and "What the heck?" O'Nan also closes several chapters
with Marjorie pondering various forms of capital punishment in alternately
fearful and wryly humorous tones:
They still hang people in Washington and Montana. Nowhere else though.
The books make it sound like a hard job. It's supposed to snap your neck,
not strangle you like you'd think. You have to get the length of the drop
right, and the knot, otherwise it'll tear your head off. I don't see a big
difference, but I guess it would be embarrassing. I can't imagine it would
be that hard though. A lot of people do it at home.
But these moments in which we get a glimpse into Marjorie's anxieties and
fears, as well as a sense of her wit, are all too rare. Mostly O'Nan holds
her voice hostage to the requirements of plot development. Her fact-by-fact
account is straightforward, flat, designed to prevent insight into her character.
That could very well be the point: Marjorie is terminally separated from
her own feelings. She represents a terrible American death-wish, her life
of crime intended as an incrimination of a whole culture's fascination with
instant gratification. But O'Nan fails to develop a perspective on this material
that gets beyond his stylized presentation of it. Referential prose filled
with pop symbols can work if there is something there to back it all up. Likewise,
a narrator whose voice and insights are rather banal can provide tension when
placed against a violent plot. Neither of these transmutations occurs in The
Speed Queen, however, and in the end his book is left the cold corpse
of a crime novel. The inevitable massacre with which it ends only makes things
worse. Lacking the nihilistic elegance of a Peckinpah film, it is just so
much blood and guts: we get to see all of it, but to no effect.
In his best work, O'Nan has offered a generous sense of humanity and the
sort of exacting vision of America that one remembers long after putting a
novel aside. His characters--the universal nature of what they say and do--have
been imbued with authenticity, his prose serving to elevate their rugged,
blue-collar lives to the realm of high art. Perhaps in The Speed Queen
O'Nan wanted to go further, to investigate the mythic substructure and deep
pathology behind the surface of American life, as Capote did with In Cold
Blood and Mailer did with The Executioner's Song. Perhaps he just
needed to get it out of his system. But despite his new hip stance, O'Nan
adds little to distinguish The Speed Queen from the more common type
of lurid "true crime" works now experiencing a surge in popularity. In short,
where a book like Snow Angels stands, The Speed Queen only strikes
a pose.
Originally published in the Summer 1997 issue
of Boston Review
home