{"id":8293,"date":"2020-03-12T15:49:34","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T19:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8293"},"modified":"2020-03-12T15:51:18","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T19:51:18","slug":"feast-your-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/12\/feast-your-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Feast Your Eyes."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes<\/a><\/em>, shortlisted for the\nNational Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel\nnarrative technique \u2013 or gimmick, depending on your point of view \u2013 to tell the\nstories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a\nfew very specific choices they both made. The mother, Lillian, was a\nphotographer who made headlines when a series of photos she took led to an obscenity\ntrial; her daughter, Samantha Jane, is the narrator, and tells the story of\nLillian’s life in a series of essays and quotes as she writes the catalog for a\nretrospective of her mother’s work. It is an unusual way to tell a story, and\nhas a long ramp-up until it truly gets rolling, but when it clicks it zooms by \u2013\npuns intended \u2013 as Goldberg has created a truly memorable, compelling,\ncomplicated character in Lillian, and wants to talk to readers about just how\nmonumental and important a woman’s right to choose can be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lillian grew up outside Cleveland in modest but not poor\ncircumstances, and fell in love with photography at an early age, deciding not\nlong after high school that that was how she wanted to make her living \u2013 or, at\nleast, to make art, and hope to find a living to support it. She moves to New\nYork, becomes pregnant while still young, and goes to have an abortion, only to\nbail at the sketchy and unsanitary circumstances. That baby is Samantha, whose\nvery existence alters the course of Lillian’s life, mostly for the better,\nalthough the artificial\/societal conflict between motherhood and vocation\nbecomes explicit \u2013 pun intended \u2013 when Lillian publishes a series of photos\ncalled Mommy is Sick<\/em>, which shows a half-naked, prepubescent Samantha\nhanding a glass to Lillian, who is in bed, bleeding after a completed abortion.\nSamantha was the subject of some of her mother’s photos before that series, but\nwhen it lands Lillian and the gallery owner in jail, and eventually goes before\nthe Supreme Court, Samantha’s life is permanently changed as well, as she is\nnow The Girl in the Photos and later switches to her middle name, Jane, to try\nto avoid the unwanted notoriety the photos have given her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

We know early in the book that Lillian has already died\nyoung, but Goldberg still makes her death pack an emotional punch because of\nhow Mommy is Sick<\/em> drove a permanent wedge between mother and daughter,\nand from how Lillian never quite grasped its impact on Samantha. Lillian is a\nreluctant feminist, progressive for her era but less so even to her own\ndaughter, writing just twenty years or so later, especially as Lillian never\nwanted the First Amendment fight she sparked; for Lillian, it was about making\nart, and that was enough. Samantha clearly feels like she was often second to\nthat desire to make art, but also strives to understand her mother through her\nphotographs, and interprets the photographs (and thus her mother) for the\nreader through the series of essays and comments, interspersed with\nremembrances from several major people in Lillian’s life whom Samantha\ncontacted for the catalog. She resents her mother for making her a symbol in\nher photos, and for choosing a lifestyle of working poverty that allowed her to\nkeep taking photographs, but also accepts the sacrifices her mother made for\nher, especially when Samantha has an abortion of her own and considers how that\nchoice changed the course of her mother’s life (and created her own).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have to buy into the narrative device to appreciate Feast\nYour Eyes<\/em>, and I imagine some readers simply won’t be able to get on the\nbook’s wavelength for that reason. For the first few pages I wasn’t sure if I would,\nbut it started rolling for me maybe 20-30 pages in as the story itself began to\ngrab me and the titles of the photographs or series faded into the background.\nGoldberg’s best trick here is that she pivots within each comment or essay from\nthe photo right into something larger from Lillian’s past; there actually isn’t\nthat much detail about photos that we never see, which could have been dreadful\nto read. It also works here because Goldberg manages to tie the fabricated\nphotographs to times and places that spur different recollections, by Samantha,\nor former friends or lovers of Lillian’s, that explore more aspects of her\ncharacter, and sometimes of Samantha’s as well. Even without the two\noverarching, feminist themes \u2013 how society pressures women to choose between\nmotherhood and career, and how essential a woman’s right to choose is to her\nagency elsewhere in life \u2013 Feast Your Eyes<\/em> would have been a strong\ncharacter study, but those additional layers give it impact beyond most of the\n2019 novels I’ve read so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Another novel from last year, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel narrative technique \u2013 or gimmick, depending on your point of view \u2013 to tell the stories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a few very specific choices they both made. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1161,1159,36,866,327,161,1058],"class_list":["post-8293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-books","tag-2019-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-contemporary-literature","tag-feminist-literature","tag-highly-recommended","tag-novels","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8294,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293\/revisions\/8294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}