December 11, 2007
Return to the Valley of the Dolls


I’ve been sick in bed (and sick out of bed too, quite a bit, actually, but I’ll forbear the bent-kneed yakking details) and so I’ve indulged in a bit of bad fiction. I reread Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls; it was as delightfully awful as I remembered it to be.

I first read the book in my impressionable late teens most likely on a beach while wearing one of those tan-thru bikinis popular in the very early 80’s. Mine had tiger stripes. It didn’t really work, then in the pre-ozone hole summer, there in the weak Vermont sun. It did, however, give me the illusion that I could get the lovely toasted marshmallow all-over tan I coveted and still be seen in public, which was really the aim, if not the achieved affect. I remember reading the book in that bikini, reading with one eye out for someone to fuck and one hand on my baby oil.

This copy, the one I devoured in two nights in my ground-glass-bone fitfulness of the past couple of nights, was given to me for my birthday two years ago from my friend Daisy Duke. It’s an original 1966 hardcover, still all dressed up in its jacket confetti-strewn with candy-colored pills. It’s tough for an insomniac such as myself to read a book that does luscious nothing in such detail as sing paeans to Seconals, but I suppose we often want what we can’t have.

Rereading this book, I found myself held hostage to Susann’s fast-paced, drug-fueled, lust-driven morality tale as much as I had when I first read it twenty-fivish years ago. As before, I was easily drawn into the her story of the fractured female trio of the beautiful Eastern ice princess Anne, the beautiful and carnal Jennifer and the not-so-beautiful but terribly talented and extra feisty Neely. As before, it was Jennifer with whom I felt most connected. Her extraordinary body, her uncomprehending sexuality, her vulnerability, her incessant looking for love, her getting swept up in…whatever. Her seven abortions. We have so much in common.

Unlike my first reading of Dolls, though, this time I read it armed with a mountain of schooling. I may have abandoned my doctorate, but being trained to read for the still-beating viscera of a text, I can never, and I will never, come across a text innocently. I will never be able to read something without thinking about how it fits into some critical dialectic, how it challenges certain cultural proscriptions and how it cedes to others. I’ll never be able to read anything-ever-without reading like an academic, and this is both a loss and a gain.

Valley of the Dolls isn’t a very good book. It’s deeply predictable. You know that each of the three main characters will each be successful. You know that their narratives will turn on the conflict of love and career. You know that one of the three girls is going to die. You know all that, and if you’re anything like me, you keep on reading, not once, but twice.

What’s compelling about this book is not its placard-deep characters. It’s not the story-line. It’s not even the titillating bits, though those do have interesting implications. It’s not even that the book sets its interweaving narratives within the conflict of love v. career in the lives of these three very predictably tortured characters. It’s that it resists happy endings-for anyone-and in doing so, the book seems to really want to punish women, men too, but especially women.

On the upside, the novel does suggest that good sex is really, really important. In its frequent and varied articulations of women looking for men who are “good in the kip,” which I believe means “sexually pleasing and ardent,” the novel argues the ideology that it doesn’t do you any good to stay in a relationship with a person with whom you don’t really sparkle, even if he or she helps you in other ways. This message is one I can get behind. I just wish the book didn’t feel the need to punish its characters for giving it.

Reading Valley of the Dolls, I don’t get the sense that Jacqueline Susann liked either men or women very much, even if in her life she married a man and loved women. She might be more interested in women-her narrative does center on three of them-but she doesn’t treat either men or women particularly well in this novel. No one is very likeable. People make decisions based on self-serving egoism. People float into and out of relationships, sometimes staying for years, for reasons that seem to base mostly on fear of being alone, or fear of making changes, or fear of a worse decision. Happiness is ephemeral in this novel, friendship is meaningless, parents are cold, success is lonely, beauty is both fleeting and of paramount importance, and love fades faster than beauty.

Each of the main characters in the novel struggle with how to define themselves as successful in a culture that demands a kind of plastic perfection from women and a kind of robotic presence from men. No one-not the blue-blood Anne or the salty Neely, not the charismatic Lyon, and not the workaholic Henry-seems able to inhabit the lives they make for themselves with any level of comfort. No place-not magical New York or bucolic Lawrenceville, not glamorous Hollywood or mythical Europe-can satisfy. Everyone and every place is lacking something, or someone, or both.

The end of the novel, closing as it does with Jennifer’s suicide, Anne’s slow dive into a loveless marriage, and Neely’s continuing Demerol-aided super-nova, suggests that you can’t always get what you want, and if you try, you’re going to fail. Sure, it’s a morality tale-no one here has made good decisions, what with their solipsism informing every move they make-but the novel doesn’t offer much alternative. There’s no good way to live, the book seems to suggest. No matter what you do, you’re going to get old and fucked up, and most likely in the exact ways you wanted to avoid. It’s a morality tale, then, without much of an alternative.

I’d like to think that this novel is a precocious piece of mid-sixties pop-lit. I’d like to think that in its proto-third-wave feminism undertones, it ushered in the possibility for novels like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, for Nancy Friday’s Secret Garden, for Rachel Kramer Bussel’s erotica collections, for even blogs like this one. I’d like to think that, but I can’t help wondering if the novel didn’t end up shoring up the very premises it seemed to want to tear down: that women must choose between being sexual and being loved; that women can’t both be mature and attractive; that women need to choose between success and family. And that failure to adhere to any of these cultural mandates, or much worse to challenge them, is to incur punishment.

Maybe this Valley of the Dolls punitive thinking has gone the way of nylons and sleep cures. I’d like to think so. Even more, I would like to think I’m doing my part to put a happy nail in its coffin.


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