Tama Janowitz was a member of the 'Brat Pack', a group of writers including herself and Bret Easton Ellis and in her late-’80s heyday she appeared on David Letterman and posed for ads for Amaretto liqueur and Rose’s Lime Juice (NY Mag, 2016). Janowitz writes her witty and fun short stories based on New York's peculiar characters with the most penetrative observation. In reading the stories as a collection, certain themes manifest themselves as both a commentary on New York in the 80s and a discourse on the life of Janowitz herself. Case history #15: melinda (223-226) is no exception to that rule.
Melinda's strange situation is a product of a city emptied of love and sympathy, especially for women it seems. "The animals, she thought, were a substitute for a man and a real relationship...the animals loved her in a way in that no man ever could" (223). As this section shows, Melinda is alone in a society in which she can find solace only in mangy, broken animals - I think this is Janowitz's commentary on the big mixing pot of artists whom inhabited New York and lived meagre lives to achieve 'celebrity'. Janowitz of course lived that life and did become successful and well known, but this must have allowed her to observe many who were not so lucky. Melinda later finds a love interest in "Chicho" who "was a true child who worshipped Melinda and thought everything about her was wonderful" (225). She is clearly attracted to him primarily because he offers her an antidote to this endless unimportance.
Melinda goes on to describe all the animals she cares for and its written in a comedic way which I read metaphorically - gummy Schnauzer's and petrified attack dogs included. Janowitz might just be describing, in abstract terms, some of the odd, almost funnily pathetic people whom she met along her road to fame and celebrity in New York. In 1986, Jay McInerney wrote for the New York Times; "reading many of these tales, I couldn't suppress an image of the author wearing sunglasses, standing at a safe or, perhaps, sophisticated distance" (NYT, 1986). Janowitz consistently comments on the thirst for success and notability amongst the art world. Earlier her most hilarious and annoying character, Marley Mantello says, "In today's world, all we have are celebrities, people known for their well-knownness" (201).
Another of the themes identifiable in Janowitz's stories is that of women being subordinate to men. Its as present as ever in this chapter. "Most of the men she [Melinda] knew didn't mind their own mess but it was quite a different story in a women" (224). Melinda's internalised thoughts here speak to the gender disparity in the strange community that Janowitz's characters inhabit; the way in which men appear to put themselves on a pedestal, unjustifiably, above women. In a preceding story in the collection, another of Janowitz's female characters, equally dissatisfied by her situation, warns a friend on the telephone, "If you live with this guy in New York, you'll be a slave" (15).
A hopeless optimism is key to the way in which Melinda and Chicho are presented and is congruent to many of the other characters in the whole text. Chicho hoped to get a job working with elephants at the zoo or studying dolphins in Florida (224-225) which of course is far from his reach and later as Melinda laid dying "she knew that Chicho was probably thinking about her all the time" (226) which of course, he was not. He was in fact selling her animals, re-painting her apartment and sleeping with her best friend. Fairly dire circumstances to which Melinda can only be "neither joyful nor despairing" (226).
It is this exhausting indifference which I find to be the most interesting part of Case history #15. Melinda appears to be part of a culture or society which so desperately lacks empathy for one another, and love, that she simply recedes back to her life of pitiful indifference and loneliness having been a part of the most physically and emotionally tumultuous events. Maybe Janowitz viewed her life in this very arena to be similarly empty and vacuous, despite being exciting and fun.
1. NY Mag
2. New York Times
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