Publicizing the Personal

...The novel's second section takes place in 1968 and '69...

...Like Fear of Flying, probably the foremost example of the genre, American Made is full of the trappings of the emotionally troubled?burdens of the past, frequent attacks of angst, a train of therapists, occasional thoughts of suicide...

...A stringing together of impressions...

...Neither sentimental, nor gothic, nor extravagant in the manner of Peyton Place and Gone With the Wind, it is, instead, a hip, sexually explicit, yet essentially moral account of a hip, sexually active, yet essentially good woman...

...In the first of two sections, describing the period between 1959-63, 14-year-old Shylah Dale is sent to live with her father and stepmother in Key Lime, Florida, following the suicide of her mother...

...such novelistic concerns as character (other than the main one), plot, form, and style fade into the background...

...It would, in any case, lose its pretense of being an American life, and become more of a novel...

...American Made, in a sense, can be seen as a kind of Moll Flanders of the '60s (just as Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March was a Tom Jones of the '50s...

...There is little depth of experience or feeling, nor much of the tension and sense of necessity, the poetic justice, that one expects from fiction...

...That distance was a prerequisite for his success...

...With Shy-lah (Boyd or Dale), for example, the life supercedes the need for plot...

...This literary schizophrenia shows up in Shylah Boyd's writing style...

...The difference is that Moll Flanders was written by a man, which meant that Defoe was aware of the gap between himself and his leading character...

...And needless to say, because style is less important than Life, she stops short of stream of consciousness and its considerable implications...

...in many other women's novels these artistic concerns are ignored in favor of a political or feminist point...

...She spends several months in a mental institution, divorces her husband, discovers a feminism that allows her to paint again, returns to Key Lime, makes up with her father, and finds love (with her father's new best friend...

...It forced him to look at her with an artist's critical eye...

...But too many authors have failed at this...

...Stuck in some no person's land between fiction and autobiography, American Made, by contrast, never distinguishes between the sensibilities of the two Shylahs, author and character...

...The happy ending is essentially gratuitous: Shylah's lover, the reconciliation with her father and her salubrious radicalism are a triple deus ex machina rather than a fully justified conclusion that makes sense from what we know about the heroine...

...Through the years, we have seen a succession of autobiographical novels—from Southerners, Jews, blacks, all of the groups that have dominated American fiction in the 20th century—in which the life of the main character is, in some unexplained way, taken to be significant beyond its immediate circumstances, taken as saying something about the culture as a whole...

...Rambling...

...Although American Made implicitly aspires to be an American woman's Bildungsroman of the '60s, the story of a person and a time, its emphasis is always on Shylah Dale...

...Most novels from Don Quixote to the end of the 19th century were painted on broad and expansive canvases, detailing society and social issues, and encompassing long periods, often whole lifetimes...

...Joyce, of course, was a master, and such others as Hemingway and Proust also succeeded in turning their private experiences into literature...

...It is so straightforward and sincere that it reads like an extended psychoanalytic monologue...

...But if anybody is to blame for its existence?apart from the author, editor, publisher, typesetters, etc.—that individual is probably James Joyce...

...American Made encompasses 11 years...

...In addition to her poor ear for speech (a particularly unfortunate handicap in a book that is over half dialogue), she can never decide what kind of narrative stance to give her fictive persona, what kind of relationship she wants to undertake with the reader...

...Yet whatever the legitimacy of the Women's Movement, good fiction, unlike journalism, cannot be based on grievances...

...The result is a stylistic mishmash...

...She passes through a somewhat happy albeit not entirely normal adolescence in Key Lime, attending a Massachusetts boarding school for a year because of the amorous attention of her father's best friend...

...And both are biographical (if not auto-), told in the first person, focusing on the life, sensibility and experience of a single character...

...Whew...

...Shylah has married and become an artist, but she is experiencing a great deal of difficulty with each of these aspects of her life...

...The current crop of women novelists, portraying characters and events solely because they happen to be true, is no less captive to the autobiographical fallacy...

...Similarly, the themes of the book—love, relations between parents and children, art, men and women in today's society—are merely presented, never really dealt with...

...No formal base...

...If American Made were shortened by half, and given a more coherent structure, it could, conceivably, be effective...

...She is quasi-raped by him with her dad's quasi-approval...

...In both books, the heroine emerges from a time of trials with a new optimism and many of her conflicts on the way to being resolved...

...Yet it fails even as autobiography, for by adopting the appearance of a novel, it loses the depth and direct relationship between author and reader that autobiography demands...

...Yet since Joyce, with his stories and his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, writers have commonly assumed that personal matters could be transformed into fiction...

...One finishes the novel feeling this is a biography about a woman who, however nice, pretty, intelligent, and downtrodden, simply does not deserve a biography...

...A broader view is needed...