Gucci models inspired novelist’s tale about face-eating blonds
There’s only so much revenge women who are not blond can exact against women who are: a sideways insult, a dumb blond joke, a spilled drink, a cold shoulder.
Canadian novelist Emily Schultz won’t admit to harbouring any specific grudges against her eumelanin-challenged sisters, but when the opportunity presented itself — in the form of a full-page magazine ad featuring a clus- ter of golden-maned models — the diminutive brunette vented big time.
“It was a Gucci ad in Vanity Fair and these blonds looked like a gang of absolutely murderous women,” Schultz said this week in an interview about her third novel, The Blondes.
The ad stayed on Schultz’s desk during the short time it took the former Harlequin Romance proofreader to construct her yarn.
The Blondes is about a young, pregnant woman dodging hordes of rampaging, face-eating blond females, the victims of a deadly virus, as she flees from New York for Northern Ontario.
Schultz layers in astute observations about women’s relationships as well as loads of corrosively humorous commentary on social, sexual and cross-border politics.
Schultz accepts comparisons to the darker feminist offerings of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro as compliments, but she sees more cohesive parallels in the movies of David Cronenberg — particularly Rabid — and the novels of Don DeLillo ( White Noise) and Cormac McCarthy ( The Road).
“It’s my hope that blonds will enjoy the book as much as anyone else,” said Schultz, who divides her time between the Wallaceburg, Ont., and New York homes she shares with her husband, writer and visual artist Brian Joseph Davis, and their new baby.
“It’s about much more than hair colour. I’d been toying with the idea of an action-thriller about beauty, with a female protagonist, and once the blonds entered the picture it came together pretty quickly.
“I love film and the idea of exploiting the plague genre excited me, as well as the hum of misinformation and mass media fallout that’s in the background of the story,” said Schultz, who is, with Davis, the cofounder of the short-fiction e-publishing outfit Joyland (www.joyland.ca).
The writing came quickly, she said, in one complete draft that went through four subsequent revisions and a few weeks in a cabin in California’s Mojave Desert.
“It’s more plot-heavy than other books I’ve written, so it just went faster. One episode would close and I’d ask myself, ‘What happens next?’ Even though the published story isn’t a consecutive narrative, that’s the way it was written.”
The real challenge was writing for the first time in the first person, Schultz added.
Heroine Hazel Hayes talks to her unborn child, the result of an affair with a married U of T professor, throughout their adventures, which culminate in a claustrophobic cottage lockdown with his vengeful blond wife.
“Writing in the third person, I feel I have more authority, and I can do things to and with the character that might not happen in a firstperson narrative,” Schultz said.
“And Hazel’s younger than I am, somewhere in her 20s, so her voice is not my voice. In the first draft she used too much slang and she didn’t speak directly . . . it was an impediment to the storytelling and it was a challenge to make her convincing as a narrator.
“But she’s definitely not me. She’s more passive. I kept having to make her do things that I wouldn’t. She lets people take advantage of her, and she doesn’t know they’re doing it.” Like seducing her professor? “Sleeping with a married man has to have consequences,” Schultz replied. “Putting Hazel alone with her lover’s wife is the worst thing I could do to her.
“I had to go there, to see what these two women would make of their situation. Would the hatred grow or subside?”