News

Woman's World, by Graham Rawle, Counterpoint, 439 pages, $19.50

Author's website http://www.grahamrawle.com/index.html

W oman's World , by Graham Rawle, is a novel written entirely using cut-and-paste clippings from 1960s woman's magazines.

It's not just a font that appears like collage, but literal glue-and-scissors text, including the page numbers. It took British artist and writer Rawle five years to conceive and assemble. Woman's World is an often funny, over-the-top kitsch festival, and unlike any novel you'll likely come across this year.

For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, the disparately sized letters and mismatched fonts harken back to the pre-Internet 'zine era; for those of you without this frame of reference, imagine a very long ransom note.

Initially it is jarring, with sudden bold or capital letters providing no purposeful emphasis, or bits of advertisements pushed together to make a sentence.

But sometimes the resulting language is pleasantly off-the-wall. Working within this found constraint – both collage and the vernacular of 1960s woman's magazines – results in phrases a writer would probably not conjure when typing into Microsoft Word.

As an art project, Woman's World is an astonishing feat. As a work of experimental text, it is pure quirky goodness. As commentary on woman's magazines and pre-feminism 1960s, it brims with colourful irony.

As a novel, if you take away the bells and whistles of how it was created, you have an interesting story, with some predictable twists and turns.

At first, we meet Norma Fontaine, a young woman obsessed with femininity and all its trappings – or magic, depending on your perspective. She speaks in quirky idioms and advertising-speak, fixated on fashion, cosmetics, domestic duties and the male gaze. She lives with her housekeeper and her often-absent brother, Roy.

Norma is the first-person narrator, and Roy comes to us in third-person, although it soon becomes clear, earlier than the actual unveiling in the story, that they (spoiler alert) are the same person. Roy is a cross-dresser, haunted by his young sister's death in childhood and driven to dress in her clothes. Norma's housekeeper is actually his mother, who quietly tolerates Norma around the house, but hopes Roy will discontinue the cross-dressing, get a job and a wife, and embrace a proper gender role.

Roy meets a young woman and falls in love. They begin an affair, and he proposes marriage. But Norma continues to struggle with her place in the increasingly tense household of Mary and Roy. Roy struggles to keep his cross-dressing a secret from his fiancée.

Though we are supposed to spend most of the novel unaware of Roy and Norma's sharing of necessary organs, Rawle makes things pretty obvious. When Norma sneaks out of the house, a man poses as a glamour photographer, asking her to take part in a photo shoot. His name is Mr. Hands, so we're pretty sure from the get-go what will likely ensue should the two meet in private. We see how Norma is treated in public, and it's fairly easy to deduce why. Giving the readers fewer cues might have upped the suspense. Still, Rawle manages to weave a very complicated plot and varying points of view.

One only has to glimpse the many versions of CSI to note the stereotype of transvestite/transgender killer is ubiquitous in pop culture. Like the lesbian vampire, the female bisexual maniac, the Italian mobster, the snobby French person etc., it is somewhat predictable that Norma eventually stabs Mr. Hands with a high-heeled shoe. Rawle manages to escape the stereotype, but just barely. He does allow Norma both a naive, child-like perspective and a fairly complicated emotional interiority, given the confines of the 1960s woman's magazine lexicon. She is a wonderful parody, but Rawle walks a fine line.

On occasion, the text gets in the way of the narrative. For example, on page 319, when the suspense is high and we are not sure if Mr. Hands is indeed dead, we observe a boy carrying Sugar Puffs cereal under his arm. This is followed by, “Sugar Puffs are the tasty breakfast treat made from crisp wheat puffs glistening with sugar and golden honey! Energizing honey – to give kids extra ‘go'! (No need to add sugar.)” Obviously culled from an advertisement, the effect on occasion is interesting, but 319 pages in, the repetition of this tactic loses its original sparkle, and pulls me out of the story. There are a few instances like this of for trends that become tiresome, which could have used a tighter editorial eye.

Writing within a constraint can produce inventive work, despite the sometimes uneven quality of the resulting narrative. Woman's World succeeds in telling a campy mystery evocative of 1960s England, but you have to embrace the reading process as an integral part of story itself; whether you enjoy the tilt-a-whirl visuals and oddball language will influence how much you enjoy the actual story.

Zoe Whittall's second novel, Holding Still for As Long As Possible, will be published in the fall .