Act of reinvention through fiction
By Dan Kois |
August 26, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
EVEN when she was MOLLY RINGWALD, Molly Ringwald wasn't content just being Molly Ringwald. In 1988 the teen idol reteamed with her "Pretty in Pink" co-star Andrew McCarthy for "Fresh Horses," a talky drama about a tough, sullen Kentucky country girl who catches the eye of an engaged engineering student. For moviegoers who went in expecting the plucky high schooler she played in the earlier movie, or "Sixteen Candles," "Fresh Horses" was a real downer. The group of much more popular friends to whom I recommended it abandoned me halfway through for "Ernest Saves Christmas" and never hung out with me again. I loved it, though - in part because you could see how hard Ringwald was working to be not just a teen-movie star but an actress. That she couldn't yet pull it off made "Fresh Horses" poignant, and no less enjoyable - and as fans of the ABC Family series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" know, in the end she has become an actress, and not a bad one at all.
Almost 25 years later, Ringwald's attempting an even more difficult reinvention with "When It Happens to You," her fiction debut. Subtitled "A Novel in Stories," "When It Happens to You" revolves around Greta and Phillip, a southern California couple whose marriage dissolves amid revelations of infidelity. We meet their daughter, Charlotte; the rebound partners to whom they each bounce; Greta's prickly mother and Phillip's hardworking brother. The stories' repetitive structures (and attendant flaws) will be evident to anyone who's ever participated in a writing workshop: most of the eight stories in this collection have their main characters engaged in some innocuous but symbolically apt activity (walking in a garden, flying across the country), musing over the past for pages at a time. As a result, the stories feel less like narratives than like exposition uploads, with action happening mostly in the past or in imaginations.
Ringwald's characters feel rather than do, and their feelings are often expressed schematically rather than dramatically.
Curious readers who parse "When It Happens to You" may be disappointed to see that only hints of Ringwald's other life as a famous person seem to make it onto the page. One character, Peter, is the star of a children's television program, a long-running hit in which he performs alongside an animated polar bear. On a cross-country flight he's upgraded to first class by adoring flight attendants - but must cheerfully endure an impromptu photo shoot in the galley while other passengers look on resentfully. Flopping into his first-class seat, Peter feels "as though he had never before paid so much for a ticket in his life."
The collection's centerpiece is the title story, a stylistic departure written in the second person, a catalog of the way that "your" marriage will one day fall apart. The "you" of the story, and its narrator, are revealed in the final sentence, a minor coup of storytelling that buoys the piece, transforming it in retrospect from a slightly pedestrian experiment in point of view to a touching portrait of grief.
Just as she did with "Fresh Horses," Ringwald's pushing herself into an unfamiliar realm. If she is, once again, a bit tentative and awkward in her new persona, it's heartening that in this day and age "literary fiction writer" is something a famous person might want to be.
Almost 25 years later, Ringwald's attempting an even more difficult reinvention with "When It Happens to You," her fiction debut. Subtitled "A Novel in Stories," "When It Happens to You" revolves around Greta and Phillip, a southern California couple whose marriage dissolves amid revelations of infidelity. We meet their daughter, Charlotte; the rebound partners to whom they each bounce; Greta's prickly mother and Phillip's hardworking brother. The stories' repetitive structures (and attendant flaws) will be evident to anyone who's ever participated in a writing workshop: most of the eight stories in this collection have their main characters engaged in some innocuous but symbolically apt activity (walking in a garden, flying across the country), musing over the past for pages at a time. As a result, the stories feel less like narratives than like exposition uploads, with action happening mostly in the past or in imaginations.
Ringwald's characters feel rather than do, and their feelings are often expressed schematically rather than dramatically.
Curious readers who parse "When It Happens to You" may be disappointed to see that only hints of Ringwald's other life as a famous person seem to make it onto the page. One character, Peter, is the star of a children's television program, a long-running hit in which he performs alongside an animated polar bear. On a cross-country flight he's upgraded to first class by adoring flight attendants - but must cheerfully endure an impromptu photo shoot in the galley while other passengers look on resentfully. Flopping into his first-class seat, Peter feels "as though he had never before paid so much for a ticket in his life."
The collection's centerpiece is the title story, a stylistic departure written in the second person, a catalog of the way that "your" marriage will one day fall apart. The "you" of the story, and its narrator, are revealed in the final sentence, a minor coup of storytelling that buoys the piece, transforming it in retrospect from a slightly pedestrian experiment in point of view to a touching portrait of grief.
Just as she did with "Fresh Horses," Ringwald's pushing herself into an unfamiliar realm. If she is, once again, a bit tentative and awkward in her new persona, it's heartening that in this day and age "literary fiction writer" is something a famous person might want to be.
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