mennonite in a little black dress

I saw Rhoda Janzen’s mennonite in a little black dress at the library and I picked it up because I’m always willing to take a look at a memoir of growing up in a religious subculture. Even if it’s not exactly my cup of tea, it may be useful to recommend to my students, who often want to write about their own religious subculture but generally need to build their skills in communicating to a heterogeneous audience that includes folks with very different backgrounds and premises, up to and including non-Christians. Even atheists! So I checked it out for possible amusement/pedagogical value, despite the two strikes against it: one, it came out in 2009, so this is not a book review I can peddle anywhere, and, two, it was blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, as laugh-out-loud funny.

http://www.rhodajanzen.com/

Not that I think Eat, Pray, Love is terrible or anything. But there was a certain glibness to it, a willingness to divert attention away from truly wrenching emotions into light comedy without fully acknowledging and exploring the pain. And not that I have anything against comedy, or think it incompatible with profundity. But there is a difference between the mood and impact you can build with a protracted, cumulative life narrative, and what you can get with a bunch of episodes from a situation comedy. In the latter, there’s always a distance between us and the characters; we never fully enter into their experience. Their catastrophes tend to be played for laughs like those of a cartoon character flattened by an anvil or exploded by dynamite. I do understand, and partly admire, the self-deprecatory impulse that leads Gilbert and Janzen to cast themselves as feminine Wile E. Coyotes or Elmer Fudds: they fear, and rightly so, the self-aggrandizement of the high-tragic memoir. But really, there is room on the tragicomic spectrum for writing that allows, right alongside the laughs, sincere respect for human suffering (including one’s own, including that which is brought on by one’s own errors).

I almost quit reading mennonite in a little black dress a few chapters in, when I could see that no narrative arc was under construction. Nothing about it compelled—or rewarded— my sustained attention. But it was easy pleasant reading to dip in and out of and I left it on the kitchen table to while away odd minutes. And then, at a certain point, I had accumulated enough biographical tidbits about Janzen to know that I liked and respected her. I had encountered enough tidbits about Mennonite culture to feel I was learning something. And I had run across a few real gems of expository or meditative prose, e.g.: Feo Belcari (a 15^th century poet/dramatist so obscure here and now that his only Wikipedia entry is in Italian) is introduced in humorous, accessible terms, along with the information that there are a few people, including the author, who actually care deeply about his work. A significant theological inquiry into the relations between god and man is introduced gently in the context of a family board game and pursued many chapters later in an old woman’s reminiscences about her missionary family in China. There’s a screamingly funny (at least to a teacher) joke about undergraduate writing slipped into an account of a kind friend’s holding Janzen’s hand to get her through the heartbreak over her husband’s betrayal. There are some amusing first dates with snappy dialogue. And finally—oh, but almost too late for readers to care—we see an object of great significance from Janzen’s childhood, the symbol of her attraction to worldly sophistication, the spur to her ultimate intellectual growth and exploration outside her homogeneous community. Rhoda! Why did you wait so long to tell me about the blue silk hosiery envelope?

Janzen is a well-published poet. That bent no doubt has something to do with why her book reads more like a collection of humor columns than it does like a book-length narrative. It feels more like a series of good first dates than it does like a long-term relationship. Still, I’m going to give mennonite in a little black dress four out of a possible five stars. That’s about half a star higher than I gave Eat, Pray, Love, but maybe I’ve just undergone some spiritual growth since then.

I sure like Rhoda Janzen. And, students, the book has plenty of valuable craft lessons to teach, despite my complaints (the missing narrative arc, of course, and, well, some of the characterization is a tad bit flat as well). If you can fill up your portfolios with scenes and settings this well drawn, with sparkly humorous highlights and pockets of hinted-at depth, you’re getting an A, all right.