I Wanna Be Haunted, I Wanna Be Loved, I Want a Lot of Friends and a Lot of Drugs: Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria – Conor Hultman
October 14, 2024
A friend once told me she felt pity that I would never experience girlhood. I asked her, What’s so good about it? Everything I ever heard was bad…
Juliet the Maniac is an institutional novel. These are subgenres that have their own tropes and conventions, centered on accepted, regulated apparatuses, traditions, and events. The Prison Novel, the Campus Novel, the Holocaust Novel, etc. And while usual literary subgenres (e.g. Westerns, Noir) go through a codification process that, once rigid, is subverted and bent pliant again through parody (think of the generic work of Brautigan, Lethem, or the recently departed Robert Coover), institutional subgenres are seldom subverted. Rather, they are kept at hand as ready-made structures, employed in autofiction and historical fiction alike when expedient.
Escoria’s first novel is not subversive of institutional novel conventions. What is unique about it is that Escoria makes an assemblage of several institutional subgenres, sequences them aptly, executes them aptly, and achieves a total effect and tone that is good, as well as her own. Juliet the Maniac is a bildungsroman that dovetails first into the High School Novel. Just as Juliet is setting the stakes over her popularity, her identity, and her family, incidents of hallucination and a suicide attempt throw the narrative into the Mental Hospital Novel. Our narrator makes note of the generic movements: “I picked them [books] up, flipped through the titles, trying to figure out why they were there. The Bell Jar, Go Ask Alice….To my parents, this was a stack of explanations.” The reader can add One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or any other psych ward book. From there, the heroine eventually ends up at one of those outdoor troubled teen camps, an institution perhaps too new to have its generic rules ironed out.
The chapters are short, often flash fiction-length, which highlights the cut-up quality of the story, a jerking back and forth through time, an in-and-out of metanarration. The only aspect of the hybrid here that falls flat is the inclusion of photographs, doodles, psychiatrist reports and medication dosage charts. Such a concrete element can only distract if not used to necessary ends.
The triumph of Juliet the Maniac, besides being good, clean writing (if the subject matter is neither quality), is the genuine optimism the narrator/subject/author achieves by the end. Let the emphasis underscore genuine. We have lived through the largely useless and abortive literary period some called The New Sincerity, where with few exceptions bourgeois morality was enshrined as a golden calf to ward off hard questions and to excuse bad writing. Generation X was little better, halfhearted cynicism anxiously influenced by greater experimenters of the past. Escoria is of a generation that augurs well for our country’s literature. Juliet the Maniac doesn’t wail, or preen, or try to look cute or desolate for the camera eye. The letter it comprises for the narrator’s past self is honest, gracious, hope without sugar, told with an integrity one would expect more from journalism.
My friend never could quite explain what it was about girlhood I missed out on. But her smile told me everything.