The Books: “The Colorist” (Susan Daitch)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

The Colorist – by Susan Daitch.

God, I adored this book – and it looks like it’s out of print or something. It was published in the 80s – and I write my purchase date on the title page of every book I buy, it’s a weird quirk I have – and I know I associate The Colorist with a certain time in my life – it’s just odd to see the date there, in black and white: “Oct. 91”. That month and that date signify a kind of nadir of existence – a whirlwind of awful-ness … so bizarre, surreal almost. Anyway, I remember where I was when I bought this book – I was in a bookstore in Berkeley, California – and I don’t know why I picked this book up, but I did. (The other books I bought in this same trip were: Lives of the Saints, by Nancy Lemann, and Passion by Jeanette Winterson – I basically hit the jackpot with this one trip to the bookstore). I don’t know why I was in the mood for trying new things, new authors – I had heard of none of these authors … and 2 of them were first novels … and I’m not big on first novels, unless they come highly recommended to me by someone I trust.

The Colorist is about a Julie, a young woman, with a kind of disoriented, passive personality, who lives in New York City and has graduated from art school and she now works for a comic strip – one that’s been around since WWII – and the main character is “Electra”. Electra sounds a bit like a Wonder Woman character – all va-va-voom, not much substance and lots of cleavage – and she’s had to change over the years to reflect the times … I believe she now wears go-go boots as well … But anyway, Julie sits at a desk every day, and colors in the strips that come her way. She doesnt’ come up with the storyline, she doesn’t do the lettering of the narrative … those are for other people. She colors in. She’s not wacky about Electra, the character – but she also doesn’t think or worry about it too much – she has too much else on her mind. One day, she is up on her roof – and she is attacked at knifepoint by some random dude up there. It freaks her out (naturally) – but our narrator is such that you don’t get a clear reason of how much, or how often. Julie is not a panicker – but this experience kind of did her in – so she moves in with a guy she just started dating – Eamonn – a guy she has only known a couple of weeks. Eamonn is a photojournalist – his life is photography – he’s from Northern Ireland, he’s political, he’s secretive, and he’s kind of a snot. Like – he doesn’t really respect Julie’s life. It’s not serious enough for him. Julie suspects that the only reason he allowed her to move in with him is because, with the knife-point attack on the roof, Julie comes CLOSE to having some kind of REAL experience … of danger, war, whatever. Eamonn is a dick, obviously. But a very interesting character! Julie is obsessed with his photographs, and sits up late into the night, staring at them – trying to get to know him better by looking at his photos. Who is this man? Meanwhile, she takes her work home with her – so Electra bounds all over her table … and drips dry in the bathroom, and Julie obsesses over which blue to use to make her black hair particularly shiny … etc. etc. And Eamonn judges her – judges her for taking her work seriously, first of all – because it’s stupid work – and then also judging her for not being serious ENOUGH. Julie, eventually, is laid off from the comic strip – basically, Electra cannot compete with newer strips … Julie sits at home, depressed, lethargic … and, if I recall correctly (it’s been years) – she, out of boredom, out of anger at Eamonn, out of anger at the passive-ness of her own life – begins to create HER Electra – the Electra that SHE wants to create. An alternate reality – an alternate version of Julie – perhaps exorcising her fears and anxieties about the dude with the knife on the roof, or being victimized or whatever – Julie starts to pour all of her focus into this NEW Electra – even though no one will ever see it … Electra begins to have grittier experiences – and Julie experiments with writing out the narrative for the first time. And for the first time, Electra starts to reflect Julie’s own life.

That’s all I really remember of the book – although I do remember loving it (and picking it up, just now, and flipping through it – I can see why I loved it. I was coming across passages I liked this morning, remembering them … and they still seemed good to me).

The Colorist is about things falling apart. All the images in the book have to do with buildings toppling, cracks in the sidewalk, subways screeching to a halt – machinery breaking down … possible apocalypse … a certain comic-book sensibility about the world and its fragility. I needed to read about chaos at that time in my life when I bought it.

And – if I might analyze it a bit further – Julie has man problems, to say the least. Eamonn is elusive, he’s kind of a liar, yet he also has this ramrod sense of integrity that he holds her to. There are other men – she tries to date other men – but it doesn’t work out. Nobody seems able to connect in this book. Everyone is a self-involved little unit, circling around endlessly – never intersecting. That was totally my experience of the world at the time that I bought the book. I almost felt like there was a thick layer of glass between me and the rest of humanity. The Colorist is all about that. Even Electra – the comic strip character – is trapped, isolated – within the pages of her storyline – can she bust out? … Julie tries to help her escape the bounds of the comic strip boxes – tries to give her some LIFE … but Julie’s just the “colorist”. Without the folks giving her the storyline ahead of time, she finds it very hard to continue.

I really liked the book – sorry to see it’s out of print.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from The Colorist – by Susan Daitch.

Sometimes I think I’m too old for this. Martin in a doorway, desperate calls to comics, Eamonn who comes and goes. I heard about a woman who was in my class in high school who has two children, life insurance, and a rich husband who sees other women when he can. She’s way ahead of me. She lives in a big house that looks like a prison built by Louis XIV and it’s next door to the house she grew up in. The east side of the avenue near Seventh Street is a series of five-story buildings and at night they look entirely like a trompe l’oeil painting, a false front stuck in a landscape where real-estate values make the idea of its falseness absurd. I know it’s not true. From the street, people can be seen in their apartments and you can walk around to the back. It’s not painted on. People live in those (not) trompe l’oeil buildings, and they probably don’t consider themselves living according to trompe l’oeil inclinations. The woman in the Louis XIV prison who waits for her husband until early in the morning, as she looks at her neighbors’ houses, does she think they’re a painted setup, fakes staged to make her feel miserable? I don’t feel tromped on or watched by my fakes, and this is the reassuring part.

I have tried to assign definitions to my fakes whether reproduced Electra stories or imagined meetings with Martin. I ask myself where the heart of fakery lies. It’s the kind of thing I tend to forget when it’s raining pleasantly outside; Orion’s obsession is in remission, and Electra appears content in her spaceship. But there are situations, dramatic and easily dreamed up, which give the fakes a nudge, sends them spinning into a troubled frenzy.

EPISODE III
Electra Returns to Earth

Electra shut the book on Kandinsky again. Dr. Mary Atlas hadn’t coded her against claustrophobia or homesickness and longing, by-products of a good memory. Orion was pelting her with intergalactic valentines, but his offers were annoying, dangerous, and offered no companionship. She suspected that if he was in love with her, he would still appear a kind of pest, another (space) chiseler who, instead of spare parts or a lift, might want only a little sympathy. She felt sorry for him but wished he’d glom onto someone else. She was curious about Earth. What had happened to Kandinsky and Cocteau? To her mother? She turned her spaceship around. Orion went numb. He couldn’t follow her. On Earth he’d be a mammoth, a freak with an ursine cast to his features. No privacy, no secrecy, no subtle way to plead his case. He’d be seen from miles away. He couldn’t function on the planet of Electra’s origin. As far as he was concerned, that whole galaxy was a Palookaville, nothing more. The disappearance of the object of his desire turned the universe into a dull, barren place inhabited only by early life forms, evolving slowly. He watched her ship grow smaller, until only a faint light remained hundreds of miles away. His gorgon-like assistants clutched the buttons and dials of the cockpit in terror of Orion’s violent depression. In his frustration he pounded the controls of his spaceship, and a fragment of an amnesia=inducing ray pierced Electra’s thermaglass window. It was only a small bit of a ray, but it erased the part of her brain that stored the memory of Dr. Atlas. The spaceship still headed toward Earth. It was too late to change course. Though slight, the laser beam did more than just alter Electra’s memory. Her spaceshift disintegrated as it fell through the Earth’s atmosphere, and Electra grew lighter. She landed beside Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park, clutching a microchip from her image duplicator.

Eamonn frequently sold his pictures ot newspapers. We lined them up on the table in chronological order, and they read like a nursery rhyme before I swept them into a pile. One jumped in front of the R Local, two shot a teller and a bank guard, three escaped from prison and were found alrady dead in a Williamsburg basement, four were threatened by white gangs, a family of five living in an abandoned car in an abandoned lot. None of the pictures was in color, and in their black-and-white harshness I found no clues as to his foolhardiness or bravery. I had no desire to say to him, Did you really see that, were you really there? It was his job, that was all.

Blue-and-white roadblocks crossed Fifth Avenue. A bomb had gone off in an embassy. The avenue metamorphosed from a street whose history had always been one of order, expensive clothing, and jewelry to one of police sirens, ambulances, fire engines, and camera crews. In the chaos, what had been valuable, even priceless, suffered the displacement of archaeological relics uncovered at a location where their original context had been rendered impossible to guess. A neo-Baroque facade shattered, angel body parts were found five bocks away, flying slivers of glass blinded tourists on their way to the Metropolitan, credit-card machines smashed on curbstones, bloody cuffs on mannequins. People who passed by or ran to the site from unaffected blocks had two choices: to watch or to walk away. They stood behind the cordons, some of them, and struggled to see or to be recorded by a television camera or by Eamonn. Later, at home, witnesses could repeat, Today I saw …