A Surplus of Allusions
TAYLOR, KATE
A Surplus of Allusions One Pill Makes You Smaller By Lisa Dierbeck Farrar Straus Giroux. 312 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Kate Taylor Editorial assistant, the "New Yorker" Psychoanalysts, film...
...The Glass family this is not...
...I advise you not to throw your ideas away...
...Though she doesn't think much of her father's work, Alice has artistic aspirations of her own...
...Presented with a new collage by Alice, her father chastises her for cutting up expensive portrait photographs of herself to make it:'"I reappropriated them,' said Alice, carefully articulating the big word...
...Not surprisingly, this has provoked various literary speculations...
...Like all men, the 29-year-old J.D...
...Founder Hans Balthus, another famous artist in "retirement," is absent from the scene, but Alice receives encouragement and advice from the sculptor Odette Noko...
...is immediately entranced by the nubile preteen...
...Carroll (a.k.a...
...A pair of twins, Hope and Faith, who photograph tableaux of toy soldiers killing and maiming each other (their older brother died in Vietnam) scorn Alice's collages as "derivative...
...The mix of fear, anger and sexual curiosity J.D...
...After suffering a series of "alarming rapid-growth spurts," 11 -year-old Alice Duncan stands 5'7" with "a kid's head grafted onto a woman's body...
...Not really,' Alice said...
...He thinks the girls in the study are "growing quickly—because they needed to...
...That this 11-year-old's lexicon includes "mercurial" but not "corrupt" throws the narrative off balance...
...One Pill Makes You Smaller falls far short of their artistry...
...Your thoughts are a resource," she says...
...Reviewed by Kate Taylor Editorial assistant, the "New Yorker" Psychoanalysts, film directors, rock musicians, and psychedelic drug enthusiasts cherish Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland for evoking the distance, and the tension verging sometimes on violence, between the worlds of the child and the adult...
...This smart set of tags—pointing mostly to pedophilia—does not do much to advance the novel's themes of child neglect and victimization, it simply clutters the story of Alice's plight...
...Dierbeck also tries to bring us closer to Alice's mind by telegraphing her confusion at unfamiliar words, especially in conversations with J.D.: '"Am I corrupting you?' he asked in his high voice...
...was a mercurial personality...
...His passive-aggressive coercion of the girl into drug use and sex leaves a permanent scar that the author acutely records, "It would seem for many years afterward as if she'd raped herself...
...Hope dismisses a collage as "reheated Dali...
...Dierbeck performs this sort of borrowing—her main sources are Carroll and ID...
...That dead look intensified the bad feeling Alice often had...
...From the creeps who menace the heroine of Lisa Dierbeck's first novel, it appears she believes Carroll may not have been the most wholesome pal a girl could have...
...Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) famously befriended and photographed young girls...
...Dierbeck's decision to cast her novel in a juvenile version of the art world—"Given the choice between a Rothko and a pile of puke, I'd definitely take the puke," says Faith—enables her to turn the issue of artistic borrowing into a recurrent motif...
...Alice's identification here with Holden Caufield adds little to his fantasy by draping it in pop culture, and after several of these pilferings One Pill starts to read like a teen novel that has broken out in a pox of literary allusions...
...stirs in her is affectingly rendered, but underneath all his free love rhetoric J.D...
...Like you did when you made the assemblages of '64.'" At the Institute, the twins debate whether Alice has absorbed her influences into a fully realized work...
...Yet the girls in his photographs radiate a sultry air of world-wisdom that causes even his admirers to wonder whether he could so adore his young friends' purity without in some way tainting them...
...Its Wonderland is the Balthus Institute, an arts camp in disrepair where Alice is sent by Aunt Esmé before she chases after her rock star boyfriend in L.A...
...She'dhave her arms open wide, like the boy in the book, to catch them when they fell...
...Thawing out a few stale postmodern tricks, Dierbeck comments on her own literary collage work...
...Alice's flower child mother, Rain, fled to Italy two years back "to rediscover joy," leaving her daughter a closet's worth of dresses and no shortage of guilt...
...She pastes together collages from cut-outs of magazines and rock album covers...
...But when we hear the vague "bad feeling"—as opposed to loneliness, fear, or nausea— and the puerile, if imaginative, shark simile next to "intensified," the sound is stilted, neither genuinely childlike nor a convincing act of mental ventriloquism...
...As she moves from the topsy-turvy, oversexed, drug-addled world of 1970s New York to an arts camp in Dodgson, North Carolina, Alice is dragged prematurely into adulthood by her precocious hormones and a series of so-called grownups who behave like self-indulgent children...
...Whether Alice's accelerated growth is the cause or the result of her abandonment is up for debate...
...Fineman, telling Alice that her messy family life is "ultimately of little consequence" and that she has artistic potential...
...Salinger—too often and with inadequate care...
...He was an unstable person who never behaved consistently, who always changed...
...When the twins play a cruel trick on Alice, daring her to sneakinto Balthus' house and steal apuppet—a prop from his most famous photographs—Alice's distress drives her to the company of the local drug dealer...
...Moreover, the indirect sampling of Alice's consciousness does not effectively capture her experience...
...Alice doesn't understand what J.D...
...NE PILL overflows with outlandish, often quite clever, plot devices, but Dierbeck's style is terse and overly simple—an attempt to mimic the consciousness of a préadolescent: "Some of the stuff Aunt Esmé had started taking slowed her speech down and gave her eyes a blank, deadened quality, like a shark's...
...In her name game, Alice's pets—a hamster, a dog, and a salamander—are called Charlie Chaplin, Persephone, andEdgar Allan Poe...
...Her physician, Dr...
...At one point she imagines clothing the nude girls climbing the mountain on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy in dresses snipped from Voglie and placing herself "on the peak armored in a coat of steel," à la "the statue of Alice in Wonderland in Central Park...
...is the book's least charming villain...
...When her father, the aging artist Dean Duncan, who built a reputation painting adults in baby clothes, goes off to "summer camp"—a Connecticut mental hospital—she is left in the custody of 16-yearold Aunt Esmé (actually her half-sister), whose cocaine habit and nightclub going allow her scant time to look after Alice...
...Aware of the jealousy and desire her body elicits from adults, Alice blames herself for her parents' absenteeism...
...She didn't know the word 'corrupting.'" When she takes off her clothes, he calls her altruistic, and she agrees, "wondering what altruistic was.' There is a distracting inconsistency to the author's use of the tactic as well...
...The genius of his prose is its glimpsing the richness of children's imaginations and inner lives...
...means by suggesting that he will "seduce" her, but only a page before we had this description of her thoughts: "She'd learned, in the very short time they'd been acquainted, that J.D...
...Fineman, has enlisted her in his national study of girls developing prematurely, designed to demonstrate a relationship between psychological environment and physical maturation...
...She counters the psychologically deterministic Dr...
...Her unmasking of Carroll and Salinger as literary creeps is unstartling, and for all its debts to them...
Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5
