One of the things that YHB finds interesting about rereading novels is seeing what sticks in the old memory, and particularly what errors creep in. Before I reread Beauty, I would have said that the point of the book was that as the main character ages, she takes on different characters in different fairy tales. I couldn’t have told you which ones, although my guess as I picked the thing up was that she was Beauty in Sleeping Beauty, the fairy godmother in Cinderella, the stepmother in Snow White, and the old witch in Rapunzel. The first two are true (although of course not sticking straight to the canonical versions), but the last two are wrong. She does happen on Snow White, but not as the stepmother, and although there is a reference to Rapunzel, Beauty doesn’t meet her. The stories she falls into are Tam-Lin and Noah’s Ark, and more vaguely Atlantis and a Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the book isn’t actually about the stories and the way they interact, the way they open up to different interpretations, the way they are the same and different one from another, like people.
No, the story is about hope and hopelessness, and about retreat and engagement. It’s a profoundly misanthropic story (as most of Ms. Tepper’s are). The fulcrum of the story is a bit that I had put out of my mind entirely, when Beauty goes first to the twenty-first century and then to the twentieth. Ms. Tepper presents a long downhill slide from Eden into hell, the slow but inevitable destruction of Beauty in all its forms by an uncaring and shortsighted Man. Ych. No wonder I blocked out that part from my mind.
Of course, like all misanthropists, Mr. Tepper truly reviles urban life, with its noise, its congestion, and its desert of concrete and glass. When she imagines a Noah’s Ark of all the beauty in the world, she includes lots of early and medieval buildings and only two structures from the history of the US, both small houses (I infer from context that one is Fallingwater). It goes to show that people are different, one from another. I love buildings, and I love cities. I love the Transamerica Pyramid, and I love seeing it from one of the hills of the town, with brightly painted Victorians in the foreground. I love Copley Square, with the church framed by the New Hancock Tower. I love Manhattan. I’ve got nothing against trees and streams, and I think we should work to hang on to them, and keep lots of spaces where there aren’t any roads, but I also love bridges, and frankly, I’ll spend longer looking and thinking about a bridge than a tree. I’ll spend longer imagining the work that went into it, the choices, the plans, than imagining the tree growing.
Oh, there are ugly buildings, sure, lots of them. There are ugly trees, too, if it comes to that. The proportions are different; most trees are lovely, at least some of the year, and probably most buildings are not. Beauty, though, is where you find it, and other than the occasional moment when Beauty is smashing you over the head, you find it where you look for it. I look for it in cities and towns, in books and sculpture, and things that people make. And I find it. So a book like Beauty that assumes that the reader will find only horror in cities, and Beauty in the countryside, well, no wonder the whole point of the book slipped out of my memory, and left me with just the clever bits.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I was briefly confused, because I didn’t follow the think at first, and thought you were talking about the Robin McKinley book of the same title. That would be an interesting way to re-read a novel: Instead, read a different novel with the same title…