Classic ‘Basic Black’ relevant again in new feminist era
From its first few pages, Canadian writer Helen Weinzweig’s arresting and unforgettable “Basic Black With Pearls” seems as though it’s going to be an exotic, erotic spy thriller. Shirley, our intrepid protagonist who is also a Toronto housewife, has for years been carrying on a tempestuous affair with a man called Coenraad, an affiliate of an international organization known only as The Agency.
Their secret trysts around the globe — in Tikal, Guatemala; Marseille, France; and Vienna, to name a few — are prearranged by way of a complicated code known only to the two of them, passed on through issues of National Geographic. Shirley prefers to be known — on her passport, in hotel registers — by the name “Lola Montez” but dresses in the respectable bourgeois uniform of a tweed jacket, a black dress and a string of real pearls. Coenraad, on the other hand, is a master of disguise — sometimes a bellhop, sometimes a wino — who, “when he has no other safe means of communication” will signal her “with a deep look” into her eyes, “blinking three times between unwavering stares.”
But after a few pages, one begins to realize that Weinzweig’s story is something else entirely, a hard-toclassify tumble into the mind of an intelligent, passionate, underestimated and unpredictable middle-aged woman’s attempts to grapple with her frustrated dreams and thwarted desires. When Coenraad summons her inexplicably back to her home city of Toronto — site of the Jewish neighborhoods of her deprived immigrant childhood — Shirley feels set adrift.
In her afterword, Sarah Weinman calls the book “an interior feminist espionage novel.” She also notes that upon its 1980 publication, the book “was greeted with a mix of praise and misunderstanding,” for “critics sensed its daring and applauded its formal inventiveness, but those qualities also kept people at bay.” Now, eight years after the author’s death, this new edition from New York Review of Books Classics offers readers in the United States a not-to-bemissed opportunity to rediscover an important and underrated voice.
A seemingly conventional housewife herself, married for more than six decades to the Canadian composer John Weinzweig, Helen Weinzweig did not begin writing until age 45, when a therapist suggested it as a way to combat depression. The first of her two novels, “Passing Ceremony,” came out when she was 58. “Basic Black With Pearls” was worth the wait: The book is singular and without flaw.
Weinzweig’s slim and increasingly surreal volume defies easy comparison, but like Jane Bowles’ off-kilter cult classic, “Two Serious Ladies,” this tale of a woman on the edge revels in its own absurd logic and its protagonist’s daffy yet deeply committed perverseness. Like Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49,” the novel’s atmosphere is steeped in darkly comic conspiracy and paranoia. And like Muriel Spark’s metaphysical shocker, “The Driver’s Seat,” the book is a feminist exploration of alienation and the instability of selfhood.
The book’s confidential tone holds the reader almost suffocatingly close to Shirley’s perceptions. Weinzweig depicts with acuity the flanerie of those who want to kill time, as well as the strength needed to wait and the determination required of the passive. Shirley’s cracked diamond of a mind draws readers in as they follow her physical and verbal perambulations.
Early on, Shirley observes that Auden defined poetry as “the juxtaposition of irreconcilable elements.” This book is absolutely poetic in that regard.
Perhaps better than any spy thriller, it invites readers to contemplate the mystery of how, in a society where the pressures and expectations put on wives and mothers are great enough to drive anyone mad, maybe so-called sanity itself is the greatest deception and putative normalcy the flimsiest disguise.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk” and “The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte.”