Bad Habits: A Love Story
by Christy C. Road
(Soft Skull Press)
One summer, bisexual punk rocker Carmencita “Car” Gutierrez Alonzo escapes her conservative Cuban-American family and flees to Brooklyn, where she floats from love affair to love affair while trying to work through the aftereffects of her father’s abuse – experiencing, along the way, drug-induced ecstasy, wild dance parties in dark bars, and all manner of mischief. The novel is brief and the story is swift and breathless. In many ways, Christy C. Road’s voice is reminisient of that of Anais Nin: light on the more traditional elements of fiction, and rich with blunt, honest reflections on love, identity, and the human psyche.
I guess now’s a good time to mention that, with the exception of Collages and the erotica, I’m not a big fan of Anais Nin.
The problem, for me, with this type of writing is that the self-psychoanalysis that takes up page after page – at the expense of actual storytelling, as evidenced by all the episodes that are hastily summarized instead of narrated – is seldom worth all the space it’s given. “Maybe I’m an asshole too,” Car muses after her third or fourth breakup of the novel. “Or maybe I’m too naive and sympathetic over someone I shouldn’t even be sympathetic about. Maybe I’m mistaking sympathy for attraction? The dude’s got it rough now. But something in me wants to rehabilitate what’s there, even just a friendship. I don’t know.”
“You’re both crazy,” her friend responds. “You’re both so crazy.”
You don’t say. Look, the situation she’s describing is actually pretty common. So if it’s not worth the narrator’s time to actually tell us the story of how she mistook sympathy for attraction, then her experience isn’t going to seem any different than yours or mine or anyone else’s. Sure, there’s something to be said for universality, but the reason we keep telling the same stories over and over again is because we want to reinvent them, not rehash them.
Add to that some pretty tortuous prose, and you’ve got a novel that creaks under the weight of its own literary aspirations. “The aroma of sewage had revisited the basement.” Maybe I’m a fuddy-duddy, but what’s wrong with “The basement smelled like sewage again?” “Everything ends, and sometimes, it’s supposed to.” Gosh, I never thought about that. “She smiled at I.” What? “Our eyes interlaced.” Whatever that line’s supposed to mean – some variation on gazing at each other, I guess – it doesn’t stand a chance against the bizarre mental image of eyeballs sprouting flagella.
Anyway, that’s the story. But what I really want to talk about is the art.
When she’s not penning semi-autobiographical novels, Road is an artist and ‘zine publisher, and it’s in the black and white illustrations that accompany each chapter where she really shines. In one drawing, Car, a beatific look on her face, is held aloft by a dancing crowd. Her hand is held out gracefully; her untied sneakers lunge into the foreground. The dancers’ faces aren’t visible – the most you see are the backs of some heads – but every raised arm, leg, and tentacle (no joke!) is pointing towards her. Whether by happy coincidence or mass infatuation, Car is the queen of this party; her shadow almost resembles a throne behind her, and even the brick wall is sparkling. In another drawing, Car cuddles with Sally, her latest fling, in a taxi. A wonderfully vaginal coin purse is open on Sally’s lap, and she’s pulling a deliciously phallic dollar out of it to pay the fare. In every picture, landscapes and still lifes create a gritty but strangely satisfying atmosphere, and beautifully rendered faces and bodies seem to pop out of the page.
The best drawings, though, are the ones in which characters are opening up to each other – quite literally. The cover depicts Car pulling her heart out and mending it with a needle and thread. In an early chapter, a column of crows soars above her exposed brain. In one of the most touching illustrations, Ashby (the beau for whom she mistakes sympathy for attraction) is lying on his stomach with his ribcage open and globs of viscera spilling out. Car inspects the mess with her finger. “Yeah,” she says in a speech bubble. “I get it.”
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Christy C. Road is the most talented illustrator I’ve come across in a long time. The artwork is where this novel really comes to life. In fact, the story occasionally slides into comics, such as the five-page-long scene in which Car, stoned out of her mind, mistakes her friend Luis for her conscience. Suddenly, her writing style – well, most of it – makes perfect sense. The bland observations melt into sumptuous backgrounds and visual metaphors; most of the prose still feels forced, but the story tells itself much more confidently. Give me two hundred pages of this! Ms. Road, if you’ll allow some random blogger to dictate what you should do with your creativity – for god’s sake, write a graphic novel! Write ten! Write a hundred! I promise, right now, to buy and read and love every single one.