December 11 2013
Wednesday

It’s been fifty years. but I can still see myself reaching for the book, still see the pink twin set with a strand of pearls that the cover artist has chosen to portray Kathy, the protagonist of Grace Gelvin Kisinger’s 1958 novel More Than Glamour. The book was shelved in the fiction section of the Bishop McDevitt High School library, on the north wall, at about eye level, not far from MacKinlay Kantor’s work.

The library was presided over by Sister Mary Rita, a Sister of Christian Charity whose habit included a heart-shaped bonnet with a bow under the chin, like the one shown on the doll on the left in the picture. I was a library volunteer, reading shelves one period a week, but I was there most mornings as well. I’d sign in to homeroom and then go upstairs to the library, where I looked for a while at a book called something like A Directory of Women’s Religious Communities. It was like a college view book, with each order of sisters having a double page spread. A member of the order was pictured on the left (in color — I was fascinated by the community that used a pink habit). The right-hand page gave an overview of the order’s history, ministries, geographic areas where they worked, and information on how to contact them. I sent away for material from the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who minister to, as my fifth grade teacher said, “girls who have run away from home.” At eleven, I pictured them hosting girls who had escaped their mean parents to live in something like a sorority house. By the time I was in high school, I understood that these sisters were community organizers who worked to improve the lives of women of the street, women who were marginalized, undereducated, imprisoned. I wanted to do work like that, and I believed I had been called by God to do it in a professed religious community.

Grace Gelvin Kisinger was born in 1913 and died (young, I would say) in 1965. She wrote several titles aimed at teen girls. The New Lucinda, about a girl who changes what she thinks is her mundane image, is evidently the most popular. It’s out of print, but there must be scads of used copies around, because it can be had for less than a dollar. More Than Glamour, by contrast, appears to be quite rare, listed by a popular used book clearinghouse for $40. Fortunately, it is held by several public libraries, and I was able to borrow it through interlibrary loan.

It’s about Kathy, an ordinary girl from an ordinary mid-western small town, the kind of generic setting seen in soap operas and Lifetime Channel chick flicks. Kathy has an ordinary life, lives with her ordinary parents and ordinary siblings, and has some ordinary friends. Suddenly, however, she is targeted by Lee Carstairs, the reigning Popular Girl, who invites Kathy to join her exclusive secret sorority. Kathy is flattered because she doesn’t realize that the only reason Lee wants anything to do with her is the fact that Kathy has gotten the attention of Jim, a tall, handsome basketball player. Jim is such a fine example of the kind of young man mothers want their daughters to date that when he comes to pick Kathy up, her mother “literally beamed at [him].”

Yes, literally. That’s the kind of writing we have here, along with an omniscient point of view so distant and dancing that it’s hard to keep your bearings as a reader. It’s full of stereotypes, such as the overweight girl who dresses like a boy and has an unattractive name (“Edna Shollenberger”) to boot, wooden dialogue, improbable logistics. But I kept reading, trying to remember just what had been so memorable.

Kathy blunders along, ditching her faithful girlfriends because Lee doesn’t like them. She doesn’t tell them this directly, she just makes excuses about why she can’t go anyplace with them. The pink twin set becomes a plot point. Lee has decreed that the girls in her little group (about six of them) must have one (her father owns the department store where they’re being sold). Kathy’s mother at first balks at the purchase, because money is tight due to a younger child’s illness, but Kathy whines and pouts until she gets her way.

The plot takes a turn when the father of Midge, one of the other girls in the clique, is arrested for embezzlement from the bank where he is a big deal vice president. Lee expels Midge from the group, over Kathy’s somewhat mild protests — isn’t this a time when you really need your friends? There is a scene where Lee freaks out at a basketball game because the disgraced Midge has worn the pink twin set, giving the appearance of still being part of the group. Kathy goes on a date with a “fast boy” (her mother didn’t beam at him because he didn’t come to the door to fetch Kathy, just beeped the horn for her). He takes her to a nightclub in a neighboring town and calls her “an old maid schoolteacher” because she won’t have a beer. (They are both 17, remember.)

I’ve forgotten now how Kathy, who seems preternaturally thick-headed, comes to understand what a false friend Lee is. It might have something to do with Jim giving her a good talking to about her ostracizing of Midge. She mends her fences with her old friends (“figuratively,” we’re told), and, a sadder but wiser girl, goes on to star in the school play with Jim.

The part that I remembered most was a description of the house of the wealthy Carstairs family. Lee had her own apartment within it! It had a bed/sitting room with a “pale blue French Provincial sofa,” a dressing room, and a private bath. This totally eclipsed the advantages of a classmate whose circumstances I envied. All she had was a Princess phone extension in her room.

I read fiction largely to learn. Some of my friends disparage me for this. You are supposed to read fiction to be entertained, they say, and the stories of loss and redemption (or not) that make up the bulk of today’s literary fiction leave them unhappy. I read the work of writers I meet on my literary gallivants, who win the prizes I want to win, who get published in the journals I want to be in.

I can’t say why I undertook to devote 10 or 12 hours of my time to re-reading a book that I knew, by the third page, had little to show me except a bad example of genre writing that is no longer popular. The 16-year-old me was less critical. I must have loved this book to remember it so clearly. Kathy was a stranger in a strange land, someone who wanted to be something that she wasn’t, who had to lose what she had in order to gain the wisdom to appreciate and accept herself. They’re the themes I continue to explore in my own work.

I read ten novels or story collections in 2013. This was not the worst, but it was, probably, the most fun. I might even get myself a pink twin set. I already have the pearls.