THE GETAWAY GIRL: a NOVEL and CRITICAL INTRODUCTION By
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THE GETAWAY GIRL: A NOVEL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTION By EMILY CHRISTINE HOFFMAN Bachelor of Arts in English University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas 1999 Master of Arts in English University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas 2002 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December, 2009 THE GETAWAY GIRL: A NOVEL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Dissertation Approved: Jon Billman Dissertation Adviser Elizabeth Grubgeld Merrall Price Lesley Rimmel Ed Walkiewicz A. Gordon Emslie Dean of the Graduate College ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to several people for their support, friendship, guidance, and instruction while I have been working toward my PhD. From the English department faculty, I would like to thank Dr. Robert Mayer, whose “Theories of the Novel” seminar has proven instrumental to both the development of The Getaway Girl and the accompanying critical introduction. Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld wisely recommended I include Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris as part of my modernism reading list. Without my knowledge of that novel, I am not sure how I would have approached The Getaway Girl’s major structural revisions. I have also appreciated the efforts of Dr. William Decker and Dr. Merrall Price, both of whom, in their role as Graduate Program Director, have generously acted as my advocate on multiple occasions. In addition, I appreciate Jon Billman’s willingness to take the daunting role of adviser for an out-of-state student he had never met. Thank you to all the members of my committee—Prof. Billman, Dr. Price, Dr. Grubgeld, Dr. Ed Walkiewicz, and Dr. Lesley Rimmel—for their time, effort, and thoughtful feedback. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the influence of Andrea Koenig. I am grateful for her enthusiasm for, and interest in, the ideas that coalesced into The Getaway Girl . Our time spent studying the novels of Virginia Woolf as part of an independent iii study course has greatly influenced my understanding of time and narrative in the novel. The earliest drafts of The Getaway Girl were written for her workshops. My parents and brother are deserving of many thanks and much love just for being who they are: silly, constant and irreplaceable. My mother deserves special recognition for being a faithful, sacrificing travel companion on my trips to Stillwater. During my time in Stillwater, I was blessed to make many lifelong friends. I am especially thankful for Laurie Rupert-Ingle and Kala Krzych. Rare are the friends who will talk William Faulkner with you one minute and watch old episodes of Party of Five with you the next. They are treasures. Finally, I would like to thank my USDA-Office of Inspector General co-worker, Jill Talbot and Carli Cooper, for being such attentive listeners around the lunch table. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION...................................................................................1 A. INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................1 B. STRUCTURE......................................................................................................4 C. POINT-OF-VIEW ...............................................................................................9 D. THE GERM OF THE NOVEL: CHARACTER VS. SETTING ......................19 E. SUBURBAN LIFE IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL .........................................27 F. THE GETAWAY GIRL AND THE NOVEL OF MANNERS ...........................40 G. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................45 II. THE GETAWAY GIRL..........................................................................................49 1. GHETTO............................................................................................................50 2. MAKEUP ARTIST ............................................................................................78 3. FRANCIS MACOMBER ................................................................................119 4. THE NEW COVENANT .................................................................................156 5. REFLECTING POOL ......................................................................................194 6. LILIES .............................................................................................................207 7. HARI-KARI .....................................................................................................222 8. THE GETAWAY GIRL ..................................................................................235 9. CHANTICLEER ..............................................................................................251 10. FANTASY LEAGUE ....................................................................................264 11. HIGHBOY .....................................................................................................294 12. SOLITAIRE ...................................................................................................324 13. OPEN HOUSE ...............................................................................................359 14. INHERITANCE .............................................................................................390 15. EPILOGUE ....................................................................................................421 III. WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................438 v CHAPTER I CRITICAL INTRODUCTION A. INTRODUCTION The Novel—pick a novel, any novel—is the story of a homeless man, or woman. At least that is what George Lukács argues in his Theory of the Novel . When he speaks of homelessness as a defining trait of the genre he means a kind of “transcendental homelessness” or “homelessness of the soul” (62) that plagues the hero and results from him being at odds with his community’s ideals and behaviors. In other words, Lukács’ hero “is the product of estrangement from the outside world” (66). Although Lukács is interested in homelessness as a state of mind, think of the wide array of novels that detail characters’ experiences (no matter how botched or brief they end up being) with more literal homelessness. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes to mind. So does The Grapes of Wrath . And The Catcher in the Rye and Rabbit, Run . This is only the smallest sampling, but the characters in these novels are programmed with the same Manifest Destiny software that came standard in the pioneers of the nineteenth century and motivated them to press on beyond the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. They simply cannot stand still because “they are seekers” (Lukács 60). A seeking person plus an acute sense of homelessness equals a quest about to happen, and, really, what 1 more is needed to jumpstart a novel? As Walker Percy proves in The Moviegoer , nothing. That is it, in a nutshell. Percy’s Binx Bolling is among the most prototypical of novel heroes because he is admittedly looking for what Lukács defines as “[t]he world of man that matters,” the one “where the soul, as man,…is at home” and has “everything it needs” (65-6). Binx Bolling, with his usual cavalier, conversational eloquence declares, “my peaceful existence in Gentilly has been complicated. This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search” (10). He does not want to be a puppet of his domineering aunt, whose house, when he has lived in it, makes him angry and depressed. His “exile in Gentilly has been the worst kind of self-deception,” he realizes while listening to his friend talk about his wife and house. He has been confronted with his own homelessness, and the cool darkness of his beloved movie theater will no longer suffice as a substitute home. While watching the girl sleep in his bed, Andy Quinn has a similar experience in Chapter 1 of The Getaway Girl . He, too, must embark on a search and the only logical place to begin seems to be Kansas City, where he came closest to having a home. The Getaway Girl is concerned with literal homelessness and the homelessness we feel when convinced that we do not belong to the local world we live in, or feel emotionally connected to anyone around us. Andy’s reckless financial and ethical decisions repeatedly leave him either homeless or on the verge of homelessness, and he ends up squatting in the Van Dynes’ empty house after Brook and Frannie have moved away. Being the Getaway Girl has left Meg Wilder, who lives out of hotel suites and rented condos, homeless, too. Ferrell Nash has a house of her own, but the proliferation of knickknacks and her penchant for hyper color coordination reveal her struggle to make 2 a home for herself. Moreover, Andy, Meg, and Ferrell do not have families to provide them with a sense of belonging. The hero seeking a home is only half of a novel’s story. The other half is the generic but inexhaustible love story, pegged by John Updike as a “pervasive, perhaps obsessive, thread” ( Picked-Up 19) essential to the novel. Lukács may not have needed to mention it at all because the quest for home and the quest for love are really the same story. Andy, Meg, and Ferrell know this all too well. To them, having four walls and a roof over their heads is all but intolerable when they are the only ones in the house. The three of them are desperate for love. Love, as expressed