Naturally, I Was Smitten - Sex~Kitten.net

The book is rather like a roadside accident: dark & creepy, and you probably shouldn't be staring at it like that.

The book portends to be a "feminist battle cry" & "a suckerpunch in the gut of patriarchy", and it certainly could be, but you probably shouldn't be looking at it like that.

In the novel we follow the lives of three women, three fallen women, and the assorted & distorted individuals in their lives ~ well, not all of the individuals in their lives. Some of the most prominent figures, such as live-in lovers, are strangely absent. Which adds to the level of disorientation.

The three women, Helen, Carmen & Freida, are, how can I put this succinctly if not delicately... As men would say, they are Head Cases. They careen about, flail, and wax on & on in interior monologues which would, to most men, make these women the ones to be avoided. Or used. Or saved. And the choices the men make are largely why we the readers are to careen & flail about as we discover what snaps & breaks these women.

You are at once touched by the brilliance and clarity of the narrator, clinging to her (though nameless and genderless, I think of the narrator as Guth) voice for stability. Her lucid depictions of things not normally so clear and crisp is the white (poetic and stark) sheet backdrop for the muck-minds of the main characters. When the narrator describes such things as sticky soul threads & the spiritual lives of bullets, you believe them as more than possible; they are truths. Even if they are more fantastic sounding than the delusional thought processes of our falling females. Or is it that the author has done such a great job of creating imbalance with her characters that the narrator seems, by comparison, more godlike and wise. Someone you ought to trust...

But maybe you shouldn't? This, of course, only makes you wonder about yourself... Are you more sane, or less sane, than these women? Perhaps, as you find yourself nodding and silently screaming, "Yes!" as you're reading, you find yourself wondering if you are equally as sane as these women...

Which does not bode well. Really.

Each character is, in my opinion, not so much 'fallen' as 'falling'. Which is to say they are staggering, drifting, clawing, or otherwise in motion; but in a reactionary way. Something has tipped the scales, set them off balance, and this is the result. However, these women are not as wise in control of their reactions, their lives, as you'd hope ~ or like to think you are of your own.

None of these characters, these women, are weak. At least not in the traditional sense that they are push-overs or doormats for the feet of others. If they are in fact doormats, for others or their own dirtied feet, it is because they put themselves there. Even if they were pushed they put themselves on the ledge or trusted the wrong person (including themselves). And for the most part, like you or I, they know it.

What they do, or don't do, about it is something else entirely.

You may not have had such dramatic losses, great addictions, weird neighbors, strange histories, or murdered anyone; but the character of each woman, what they survive & what they don't, is somehow the collective female experience. All of our experiences are similarly grand in that we have those moments or decades in which we struggle with our realities, hate our bodies, alienate others, choose fight, choose flight, act destructive, become convinced of what others deny, deny what we know, alienate ourselves, and in general wonder how and why we got here. Perhaps even more than we wonder what we are going to do about it.

Dark & creepy stuff.

Made only more dark and creepy by the fact that at the end of the book you have reached a "So what?"

So what, I asked myself, am I supposed to do with all this, this... this stuff? The pain, the fear, the truths, the "thousands of eyeballs, all liquid, all dying" ~ the lives of these women, real or not, what do they mean?

Guth doesn't tell us.

There are no neat 30-minute sit-com wrap-ups, no epiphanies-turned-morality-lessons ~ not even the narrator tells you what to do with all of this. It just is. Or was. Or maybe it wasn't... This is, after all, supposed to be fiction.

Dark & creepy fiction.

In fact, it reminds me much of J Eric Miller ~ and his works. Dark and creepy, with a lingering aftertaste of... of, hell-if-I-know-I-just-don't-want-to-live-that-way. Which should be good enough, should be the "what" I get for reading it, but somehow I'm left with worry...

What if I am Helen, or Carmen? What if you are Freida? What then?

What we do, or don't do, about it is something Guth forces you to think about.

Which means you'll need to read the book; and I highly recommend that you do.

Title: Three Fallen Women
Author: Amy Guth
Publisher: So New Media; First edition (October 2, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0977815145
ISBN-13: 978-0977815142