Darcey Steinke

What happens when the teenage angst carries on with a character later in life? Suicide Blonde is the by product. Darcey Steinke seems to be the sort of person who learns a new word and wants to use it over and over until people are impressed by the vocabulary. Anemic is sprinkled across the novel - can we really call it a novel, by the way, rather than a 191-page woe-is-me manifesto of dire situations and melodramatic flub?

With an obvious ending, an unlovable main character (Jesse, a fag hag who hopes that her very homosexual boyfriend, Bell, will lover her again one day rather than mope around his exboyfriend, Kevin), sexual situations that are off the charts, etc., one would probably be better grabbing a hammer and nailing your right hand on the wall than read this book.

I'm glad I didn't pay full price for this book. I'm also no longer listening to Amazon's recommendations.

So why two stars and not just one? Well one has to accredit the fact that I actually finished the book rather then dropping it in the garbage - trust me, the paper from this book shouldn't be recycled - and pretending it never existed. So, yeah, it has its moments. Rare, but they're there.… (mehr)

Suicide Blond’s first sentence “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” threw me off immediately. I like a little foreplay at least in the first paragraph, and the introductory sentence left me feeling like the victim of a literary drive by. This is not to say that I am prudish, especially in my reading, but this sentence was crafted just to shock the reader. It left a bad taste in my brain, but not as much as the main character. Jesse is self involved and shallow, as far as characters go. She blames those in her life for making her feel inadequate, but I believe she is projecting. Normally, this would not bother me, but we are supposed to identify with her and pity her, something I cannot bring myself to do. She moves from Bell to Pig to Madison, seeking someone who will ultimately take care of her and give her meaning. Jesse thinks she can punish Bell for not loving her enough by running off to live like a bad girl only to return and tell him all of the horrible things she is doing, further showing that it was not out of self discovery but to snub someone who already doesn’t care what she does. I found the rest of her characters fascinating and lifelike, albeit somewhat stereotypical. It is the protagonist that falls short and contributes to the novel’s wanting.

It would be easier to enjoy this novel were it not for the dreamy way you meander through the pages. Reading it feels ephemeral; I found myself striving towards a plot that tried to evade me at every turn. The structure is labyrinthine, and I do not mean that to be complimentary. Occasionally there is a beautiful gem of a sentence that you go back over and digest before moving on to the next random plot contrivance. It is obvious that underneath the indifference that Steinke possesses talent, she is just doing too good of a job hiding it under a boring plot.

Steinke wishes to take the reader to a place that she believes is dark and cutting edge. She wants you to see how troubled Jesse is and pity her in her own self involvement. I came away believing Jesse to be responsible for her own problems and experiencing a sense of lost time; I know I read it and I know time has passed, but there isn’t much to show or remember what happened between the covers. It was not that I found myself lost in the literary world but that I found myself in limbo just outside of it. I finished with indifference. Even Suicide Blond’s ending is anticlimactic and failed to draw me in enough to feel any kind of closure. Then again, it also failed to invest me in the story so I figure I didn’t lose out. It reads like a first novel for someone who shows great promise but just doesn’t know how to show it yet; the only problem with Suicide Blond is that Steinke has published before, which I find regretful.

By far it is not the best novel I have ever read, but Suicide Blond is also not the worst (you should hear what I have to say about House of Sand and Fog). I doubt I’ll ever pick it up again to read in its entirety, but there are a few sentences there that I, even now, want to read over again. This gives me a glimmer of hope that Steinke may put something else out that is really worth reading one day and gets across the beauty of prose that ghosts throughout the novel. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I tried, and I failed.… (mehr)

Suicide Blonde was a beautifully written book. There were several passages and phrases that I had to stop and reread simply because they were so well written that
I wanted to enjoy them again. This is the first book I have ever read by Steinke, but it won't be the last.
The book follows a girl living in California with her troubled bisexual boyfriend who will not let go of an ex-lover from ten years ago. The main character also has her own demons to struggle with and leaves her ex-boyfriend to go live with an exotic dancer and becomes a bartender/call girl under the wing of this new friend.
A great quick read and definitely one that I will probably be reading again.… (mehr)