As Bellow proscribed, Marlena rests on perception which Buntin shrewdly designs as ardently detailed, expressed without fussiness, and ultimately limited. A work of art should rest on perception.” In Cat’s case, the pressure to speak is embodied in her painstaking revival of the spirit of her friendship with Marlena and the often grim aspects of life in Silver Lake: truancy, drinking, opioids - and especially, the sinister presences and behavior of men. They are earnestly moral, didactic … they exhort and plead and refine, and they are books of error.
Saul Bellow once complained that American novels, including his own, “pant so after meaning. Buntin may seem to set this expectation in her first sentence: “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.” But Marlena is unforgettably gratifying for reasons quite different than conventional outcomes or lessons learned. Their narratives allow both reader and main character to depart with a package of psychological and moral values, a transportable foundation. Such novels rest on the assumption that experience does more than fill one’s head with memories – it teaches and inspires. The circumstances of Marlena’s life scare me more now, in retrospect, than they ever did then.”Īs a story dealing with a formative period in Cat’s life, Marlena fits within the sub-genre of Bildungsroman. My knowledge of drugs came from school handouts and TV movies with moralistic endings. Cat says, “Tweaked out, I knew, had something to do with drugs, though I couldn’t have said what.
Marlena’s father cooks meth in an abandoned railcar and “tweaks out,” and her mother is gone. The mother cleans houses for wealthy summer residents, while Cat befriends Marlena, her 17-year old neighbor. Back then, her divorced mother had packed up Cat and her older brother Jimmy for a move to Silver Lake, a town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (“a gas station, a trout fishery, a church, and a sex shop”). The story is told by Catherine or “Cat,” a 32-year old librarian in New York who recalls a mere eight-month period that had occurred 18 years previously. The death of Marlena Joyner – perhaps by drowning, perhaps not – is revealed at the outset of Julie Buntin’s first novel Marlena.
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