Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York

Gail Parent's Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York (2004; orginally published in 1972), is a sort of rough and tumble, more realistic and more depressing prototype version of HBO's Sex and the City (1998-2004).

Parent's novel is pithy, with an eye for telling detail. Sheila, the protaganist, is caught up in the confusion of being a single woman living at the onset of the sexual revolution, second wave feminism, and civil rights -- and the more traditional pressures of finding a well-set husband. This is made all the more conflicted and interesting thanks to her Jewish family background. Sheila Levine longs, or sometimes longs, to be a Tina Balser, her married-with-children contemporary from Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967). Ah, irony. One wants to get in, the other wants to get out. Sheila's double helix tale could easily be called Diary of a Mad Singleton. The grass is always greener on the other side of Central Park, I suppose.

The structure for Sheila Levine, like Diary, is memorable: instead of Kaufman's diary form (in turn loosely inspired by Nikolai Gogol's 1835 "Diary of a Madman"), we have a long suicide note reflecting on Sheila's sometimes fun but mostly miserable experience living in Manhattan through the 1960s. She does not hang out with the hip Warhol crowd. Far from it. Instead, she is stuck with irritating roommates, cheap and lousy boyfriends, partying but not very hip gay friends, a lesbian stalker, and loads of guilty feelings. She plunges into all sorts of apartment and house parties and other social events, even teaching, to find a suitable husband, but all to little avail.

Though the novel is mostly comic and satirical, there is also a sadness to it, maybe best typified by Sheila's secret arrangements for her own funeral, in the process of which she discovers that even in death, it is considered socially preferable to be or have been married than single. Body image issues have even more currency.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

A couple of pertinent Albert Camus quips:

"There is only one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."
"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

Bon voyage!