Arts
Faerie Tales From the Rainbow Library
The Wrestling Party
Book
Review
The Wrestling Party
by Francesca Susanna
Reading
The Wrestling Party, by Bett Williams, is like sitting at a bar
on a dead night with some out-of-town chick, who would be attractive and
interesting, except she just drones on about herself, all the cool parties
she's been to, and all the cool people she knows, whom you've never met
or even heard of. It is supposed to be a non-fiction memoir that reads
like a novel, but it is a disconnected group of too-personal essays that
read like a lot of self-absorbed dreck.
The Wrestling Party revolves around
two things: an intense and doomed affair between Williams and a Euro-trash
chick, Anikka, and the question of when desire for someone much younger,
specifically a teenager, becomes exploitation. The two themes don't really
come together since Anikka is twenty-nine and Williams a few years older
when they meet, but in order to turn a pile of unrelated essays into something
novelesque, Williams throws in ruminations about an affair with a seventeen-year-old
high school senior she had when she was thirty.
"No one wants to talk honestly about
sex between adults and teenagers... except to just say it's bad,"
Williams writes. It is a thrill to read this, as if that blah-blahing
bar fly is finally going to start a real conversation about a real issue,
maybe even let you get a word in edgewise. Unfortunately, Williams doesn't
want to talk honestly about it either and immediately picks up where she
left off: talking about herself.
Early in the narrative Williams complains
about going to see a performance in which a storyteller "meticulously
chronicles" an ordeal with an ovarian cyst, in hopes that the process
of sharing her story will heal her. "Maybe it did," Williams
writes, "but it made me quite ill." It's brilliant irony, because
Williams is doing much the same thing as the cyst survivor; chronicling
an intense and debilitating experience for her own sake. Who cares about
the audience? Like the story teller, she is engaging in mental masturbation.
About two-thirds of the way through, the
book really shines in a ten-page passage that describes the wrestling
match for which the book is titled. In this passage, which is really worth
the effort of going to Borders and reading it in some sunny window, Williams
gets out of her head and takes on the voice of one Shawna Blackwell,
"guest sportswriter." The writing is hilarious and honest. It
does everything that Williams tries to accomplish in the other 184 pages
of whiney prose. Shawna Blackwell seems to be a thinly disguised Shawna
Kenney, an L.A. writer and S/M scenester who contributed a glowing blurb
to the back of The Wrestling Party, and may or may not have "guest-written"
those ten pages as well.
Williams' characters, real life friends
of hers, are an unusual and interesting lot. There is her best friend
and sexual advisor David, "...a Zen priest and a martial arts teacher...
also Scottish, a pervert and degenerate writer," Anikka, the beautiful
Swiss "pervert" with whom Williams is obsessed, and Allison
who sort of tags along for the ride. David oddly resembles an actual writer,
Barry Graham — a Zen Buddhist from Scotland who lived in Phoenix
for a time and whose website is linked to Williams'. He also contributed
glowing blurbs in praise of The Wrestling Party.
There is a story in there. Bett is on the
rebound from her relationship with the underage Shannon who has really
thrown her for a loop. Bett is going from one party to another, taking
drugs, writing away the pain, and searching for the meaning of her life.
She meets Anikka first at a dance club then sometime later at a cookout.
The first date is dinner and sex at Bett's house. Another day they go
raspberry picking. They party, they wrestle, they break up and become
friends. In between, Bett explores the edges of trendy sex and they end
up like every other lesbian pair: processing over a bottle of wine.
None of this is new. It isn't told from
some fresh new angle, and no new insights are revealed. Since Williams
uses most of her energy writing about herself, none of the characters
come to life enough for the reader to really care what happens to them.
Some of the book is sexy and titillating, but there are all those volumes
of Lesbian Erotica which offer more and better along that particular vein.
Williams touches on important topics in
her book, but doesn't explore them. When does desire for someone younger
become exploitation? When is it acceptable or sexy or therapeutic for
a grown woman to piss on the floor? These questions could use some discussion,
but she is too busy partying and being hip to stop and really think about
them.
Francesca Susanna reads and writes in Burlington.