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Gloria (HarperFlamingo $27)
In his eighth novel, Gloria (HarperFlamingo $27), Keith Maillard revisits his Lucky Strike American youth to profile a neurotic intellectual who hides behind the façade of a clothes-horse debutante. Despite being chosen as Prom Queen and president of her exclusive sorority, and despite her straightA average, Gloria Cotter struggles to hide her real self, "a queer, neurotic, terrified, hollow, poetry-reading priss-the biggest misfit in the Delta Lambda."; Daughter of a steel-mill executive and engaged to a handsome tennis player, Gloria becomes a reluctant expert at preening and learns the Mona Lisa smile to hide her insecurities. She's a meticulous keeper of diaries, but she can't bear to write down the thoughts of her conscience. "...you'll never really fit in, not in your heart, because you're irrevocably different from those girls. You're a strange, dark Gypsy girl. No one knows you, and no one ever will."; Gloria's mother, Laney, hates her aging body and her life in the "crude, ugly, stupid town"; of Raysburg, wishing she could go back to New York. She resents her daughter's youth. Gloria's father, Ted, a Lieutenant Commander in the second World War, works six-and-a-half days a week as vice-president of Raysburg Steel. His life would be perfect if only he had that bomb shelter built.
Gloria is a novel that delves into deep and commonplace American insecurities. Typically, as the steel company's youngest vice-president, Gloria's father worries about eating a hotdog at the Fourth of July lawn party. "He had the familiar, thoroughly enjoyable tingle at the back of his
neck that told him he'd had a bit too much to drink on an empty stomach and should eat something fast; what he wanted was a hotdog, but he couldn't bring himself to ask for one. Right beside the hotdogs were big slabs of prime beef; they were coming off the grill perfectly cooked, dripping blood, and they were what you were supposed to eat if you were the senior vice-president of the Raysburg Steel Corporation.";
Always the fraud amongst girls wearing girdles and their boyfriends' fraternity pins, Gloria finds inspiration from Eliot, Roethke and Yeats. She finds herself the only girl invited to professor Bolton's "notorious Thursday night bull sessions"; at the Blue Cellar tavern. Gloria's carefully constructed world comes apart the summer after she graduates from college. She must face the reality of her father's smoke-spewing mills and her nightmares of Billy Dougherty, her father's old navy buddy.
"Billy had never lost something of the perpetual boy-maybe it was his winsome, lop-sided grin or his habit of rubbing the back of his neck and looking off to one side as though he were about to say, 'Aw, shucks, ma'am,' in a Jimmy Stewart Voice..."; Billy's insistence on calling Gloria "princess";-a name only her father calls her-becomes especially disconcerting after Gloria catches him watching her. When she'd first met him, he'd told her to call him Uncle Billy, but Gloria, who had been fourteen at the time, was not about to call any man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere Uncle anything."; The novel culminates in a harrowing, prolonged sexual encounter with Uncle Billy, who forcefully attempts to humiliate her. Gloria's response is radical and cathartic. 0-99-990329-2
[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]
Gloria is a novel that delves into deep and commonplace American insecurities. Typically, as the steel company's youngest vice-president, Gloria's father worries about eating a hotdog at the Fourth of July lawn party. "He had the familiar, thoroughly enjoyable tingle at the back of his
neck that told him he'd had a bit too much to drink on an empty stomach and should eat something fast; what he wanted was a hotdog, but he couldn't bring himself to ask for one. Right beside the hotdogs were big slabs of prime beef; they were coming off the grill perfectly cooked, dripping blood, and they were what you were supposed to eat if you were the senior vice-president of the Raysburg Steel Corporation.";
Always the fraud amongst girls wearing girdles and their boyfriends' fraternity pins, Gloria finds inspiration from Eliot, Roethke and Yeats. She finds herself the only girl invited to professor Bolton's "notorious Thursday night bull sessions"; at the Blue Cellar tavern. Gloria's carefully constructed world comes apart the summer after she graduates from college. She must face the reality of her father's smoke-spewing mills and her nightmares of Billy Dougherty, her father's old navy buddy.
"Billy had never lost something of the perpetual boy-maybe it was his winsome, lop-sided grin or his habit of rubbing the back of his neck and looking off to one side as though he were about to say, 'Aw, shucks, ma'am,' in a Jimmy Stewart Voice..."; Billy's insistence on calling Gloria "princess";-a name only her father calls her-becomes especially disconcerting after Gloria catches him watching her. When she'd first met him, he'd told her to call him Uncle Billy, but Gloria, who had been fourteen at the time, was not about to call any man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere Uncle anything."; The novel culminates in a harrowing, prolonged sexual encounter with Uncle Billy, who forcefully attempts to humiliate her. Gloria's response is radical and cathartic. 0-99-990329-2
[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]
Submitted on July 22, 2003 in By David.
