<< Back 5/15/02 Writing talent lost in awkward language, confusing themes By Jeff Minick A Collection Of Beauties At The Height Of Their Popularity by Whitney Otto. Random House, 2002. $23.95 — 256 pp. A Collection Of Beauties At The Height Of Their Popularity, Whitney Otto’s novel about young friends and lovers in San Francisco in the 1980s, reminded me less of literature and more of an exotic union of television shows: “Friends” told by that old Sholin monk on “Kung Fu” (though the influence in the book is Japanese rather than Chinese). This novel is written in Ottonese — that’s Japanese as envisioned by Whitney Otto, short esoteric thoughts whose sentential rhythms seem lifted from an intermediate Dick and Jane reader. A review of A Collection Of Beauties in Ottonese would go something like this: Here is a story of spectacular beauties and handsome men. They fall into one another’s lives and beds like blossoms in a strong wind. Elodie, a woman who gives herself to men to pay for her lodging when she is not housesitting, keeps a pillow book at the Youki Singe Tea Room. Elodie frequently records the intimate details of her life and the lives of her friends in the book then gives the book to the bartender of the Youki Singe for safekeeping. The acquaintances of the mysterious Elodie, the men and women who move in and out of these pages, are mysteries as well. They drift, they enjoy various drugs, some indulge themselves in the live sex shows above the Youki Single Tea Room. Some of them are cruel, some kind, some exotic as lotus flowers in Norway. Life is a tea cup swirled in the sunlight beneath wind-lifted curtains. Ripples occur in the Floating World of San Francisco. Gracie takes Roy from another woman. Roy sells drugs at parties. The beautiful male model and artist Micha falls in love with the extraordinary Suzanne. Coco is weary of life, Lenny is without hope. Elodie loves an older man, The question is: Can the purity of love be muddied by the way of love? A Collection Of Beauties has the delicacy and ritualism of a Japanese tea ceremony, but the whole time I was reading it I kept wanting to roll my eyes like a 14-year-old girl getting a lecture from her mama. The people in the book aren’t convincing; they dont seem capable of creating such lofty thoughts. In many parts of the book, the characters didn’t think or speak like Americans; they sounded like Americans trying to speak like geishas and Japanese sages. Would Americans, even those living in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, really make comments like those below? “I must have it,” said Georgia, to which Nash agreed “You must have it. I shall get it for you.” (This sounds like Heming-way doing Hemingway.) As she told Kit yesterday, “I act cool and hip and ironic until my emotions run wild and then I revert to all that is primitive. I look too hard, I only care about saving myself. At anyone’s expense. Of course, this is under a veneer of understanding.” (Of course it is.) “Jelly, ” he said, gently winding his finger in her hair. “love you in my own way. This you know.” This I know. (For the Bible tells me so ... ) Otto makes extensive use of a series of woodblock prints by the 18th century Japanese artist Utamaro, who depicted different scenes from the Floating World, a place of brothels, theaters, gambling joints and expensive eateries in Tokyo, then Edo, a sort of toffish Las Vegas East. Yet her juxtaposition of 18th century Japan with modern day San Francisco is often confusing. Are we to understand that the young post-modernist feminist women of her story are like the expensive prostitutes of 18th century Japan? Is she saying that Americans, at least Americans living in San Francisco, have the same delicate sensibilities toward life, sex, and love as her stylized and largely imaginary Japanese? In her high-falutin’ Ottonese, is Whitney Otto telling us that we also are highly civilized, that what often appears as a wide-open society of sex, drugs, and drift actually has much more in common with haiku and a Japanese flower arrangements than we know? Whitney Otto deserves success as a novelist, for she is a writer with talent. You just won’t find it put to good use in this book. (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)