ALL AMERICAN DREAM DOLLS
By David Haynes
Milkweed Editions, 275 pages, $21.95
It is a wonder that David Haynes is able to inhabit the female persona so completely, crossing gender lines to raucously spoof beauty pageants, sibling rivalry and TV shows in what is one of the smartest books of 1997.
Set in the Midwest, “All American Dream Dolls” centers on Deneen Wilkerson, 37, a successful, Minneapolis-based advertising executive who gets dumped by her boyfriend on their way to a vacation in Door County, Wis. Deneen, deep into a nervous breakdown, hops a plane and retreats into the basement of her mother’s home in St. Louis, where single-name TV hosts (“Rikki/Maury/Geraldo/Sally”) keep her company, lifting her spirits.
Deneen’s mother, now nearing 60, had remarried after her daughter left for college. She had been rearing her 12-year-old daughter from that marriage on a bourgeosie regimen of tennis and arts classes. When Deneen returns home with barely an explanatory word, her family continues on its way, preparing for her sister Ciara’s entry into the All American Dream Dolls beauty pageant.
What follows are Deneen’s forays to and from that basement, which may not be the subterranean world of Dante’s “Inferno” but which glows with the TV set’s blue light.
As in his previous novels, “Live at Five” and “Somebody Else’s Mama,” Haynes’ characters are strong and certain of themselves even when searching for solutions to personal crises. And Haynes again displays a keen, multidirectional and cutting sense of humor:
“Strictly for the pros, this (pageant) was a hush-hush, private affair, held discreetly in the ballroom of a downtown hotel. (This) crowd eschewed the hoi polloi–the hot-comb and family-van suburban rabble–who traveled from pageant to pageant with a carload of bucktoothed daughters, looking to catch a break as Junior Miss Feedcorn.”
“All American Dream Dolls” is breezy about its middle-class values and profits from the author’s eye and ear for compelling, closeup imagery. Indeed, in concentrating on the small details, Haynes is free of the black writer’s expected responsibility of prescriptive spokesmanship, free of the kind of cultural ghetto that limits experiences to violence and drugs and cliched hardships:
“I love a shopping mall food pit: the yellow sharp smell of greasy fried foods, the sounds of guilty pleasure as families huddle together at tables shiny with spills, enjoying foods that even the children know probably shouldn’t be eaten. . . .
“There was Ciara stuffing a giant cheeseburger into her mouth. I hid behind a support column, mesmerized.
“She tore at the sandwich, removing enormous jagged hunks of meat and bread and toppings with each bite. The bun was glassy with grease. She picked up whole fistfuls of french fries and stuffed them in her mouth and then washed a wave of Coke into it to flush the mess down. I was thrilled and repelled, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was supposed to do.”
And even as Haynes stretches out in this, his most sure-handed work to date, his stylish prose holds the reader’s attention for the whole ride:
“Ciara did one of those obscene open-mouthed tongue-wagging head-lolling gestures that your least mature National Basketball Association players do to enrage their opponents. I pointed my finger at her, but couldn’t find the words. She swished her hips out of my view, simpering at me over her shoulder.”
But while entertaining and sharp, “All American Dream Dolls” may not provide insights deeper than the laughs. If one is not expecting the next great American novel, then one will not be disappointed if “All American Dream Dolls” is ultimately only a little more profound than the subjects it tackles.
