Before I start my review of Alther’s debut triumphant novel, let me put a list of novels with the same theme together with their publication date and some commentaries. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. (1973)Kinflicks by Lisa Alther. (1975)The World According to Garp by John Irving. (1978)Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong. (1984)I have come up this list for the sole purpose of pointing and clarifying some things about these books because each entry –if you’ve read them all— will make you associate one from the other. Not that I accuse some particular writer of copying some ideas from others work. Kinflicks is a funny, insightful, perceptive, sad, and a moving read. It presents some of the most original wisdom about life and death in fiction. If John Irving’s Garp is obsessed with the safety of his own family, and having the realization of no way to protect them from the harsh reality, irony and madness of life, Kinflicks talks about and illustrates how cruel, unfair and unpredictable life is. From the start of the novel, it gives me the sense that I am once again to read a novel from my favorite author, John Irving. I am about to praise the novel as a female-Garp, however, learning of its publication that Kinflicks precedes Garp, I suddenly dropped the idea. Garp is much powerful in its entirety that I also wouldn’t dare calling Garp the male-Ginny. I might also call Alther as an informative writer, and her fascination with encyclopedias’ is obvious in which it is a good thing with the unavailability of the internet at the time. Kinflicks tells the story of of a 27 year-old heroine named Virginia ‘Ginny’ Babcock. The novel is separated in two parts; the first is narrated in Ginny’s point of view in the past while the alternating chapters are narrated in third-person. Ginny’s voice talks about her coming-of-age journey, her struggles to take hold of her future, and desperately tries to join in everything that comes her way. These parts –Ginny’s submissions— may somehow irritate the reader, but in my opinion, I understand her actions for I got to see the part where she’s trying to live a life without the influenced of her parents while unconsciously trying to shape things around her with the prejudices and bias she learns from her family. Her adventures remind me of Erica Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing from her novel Fear of Flying. The feeling to take control on things without shame, to grasp without reluctance and to decide without being guilty afterwards. To stand about your choices no matter the consequences. Ginny’s past and Isadora on ‘Fear’ are both narrated by the heroine.On the other hand, the part where it is narrated in third-person which talks of the present makes me remember another of Jong’s novel, Parachutes and Kisses –also narrated in third-person’s point of view— being the third novel and continuing Isadora’s adventure and finally her being a mother. Just like Isadora, Ginny is now in the stage of motherhood or struggling to be. In Jong’s novel in which spirituality and death plays a big part; Ginny comes home to take care of her sick mother. Ending with the understanding of their actions from the past and though they might not admit it, a final act of understanding and acceptance for their deeper selves. I’m also not blind by the fact that some might notice Ginny as lacking in character, that she doesn’t learn something grand in the end. However, I find this to be interesting, and since Ginny is still trying to live her life (again) in the end, there is a possibility that someday she is more than just a lost soul. I just hope the author writes a sequel about her. I don’t really know what’s happening to my reading list, it is as if it is lined after my own life. Having suffered some recent tragedy makes my vision while reading be crystallized with tears, and moments unknown to me, I’d suddenly stomped my feet like a hammer on the arm rest for no apparent reason while tears continuously flows down my cheeks, not that I want to stop myself from crying but I guess to bring back what was lost. There are times at the end I want to hurl away the novel for making me cry like a baby.I’ve given the novel a higher rating but before doing it, I’ve pondered on some questions why I should. I’ll try to ask you those. Will you give a novel a higher rating that makes you remember something depressing? Makes you cry because you can relate into it? A novel which makes you sad? I’ve tried not to answer those because if I do, this will be poorly rated. I just consider of how wonderfully written it is, how the author manages to construct it beautifully, how the author’s ability to make it believable and how she carefully illustrates the many guises of life. And finally, convincing the reader how life, though we may not all accept it, is harsh and cruel than reality. It is hard to tell what it’s really all about and narrating of some of its superlatives may not give justice on how a good story Kinflicks is. You just have to read it, but be careful. Opening Sentence: My family always has been into death.Ending Sentence: She left the cabin, to go where she had no idea.
Phew, I'm glad that's over. Lisa Alther's first novel, Kinflicks, must have been a daring enterprise in its time (1976), especially for a female writer. All that sex in enormous quantities and varieties. Flouting of every imaginable social convention from female stereotypes to the value of education. No firm resolution at the end (whoops, maybe I shouldn't have let that one slip?), and she deserves congratulations for her courage. However, interesting and energetic as much of the book is, I found it too overdone and structurally flawed to admire.Virginia Babcock Bliss has just left her husband and little girl--actually been exiled from her house at gunpoint, said gun being brandished by her spouse. Her mother, from whom she and her siblings have been long-estranged, is hospitalized with a mysterious blood ailment that appears life-threatening. Her domineering father died a year or so earlier. Shouldn't that be enough crises to fill a book. Yet, the overwhelming volume of the story line is backstory. We get a chronological tale of Virginia's life, mainly beginning in high school. She's had to return to her small Tennessee home town to check in with her ill mother. In the course of cruising around town, she meets old high school friends and lovers, and we get trite post high-school comic caricatures of the dumb jock and his glitzy wife. We're treated to the story of her sexual awakening, her rebellion against her parents, her insistence on attending a college her father doesn't want. All of this is told in the first person.Occasionally, we read about Virginia's visits to her mother. That part's in third person. We meet her doctor--a competent guy with no bedside manner--and watch Virginia spar with him over the state of her mother's health and the prognosis that never seems to come. From time to time, we check in with the mother herself. That's narrated in third person as well, with no break or modulation to prepare us for the switch from Virginia to mom's POV. It's like not just a musical change of key, but a musical change of song. Jolting.Eventually, after meandering through years of manic-depressive events, many of them seemingly, to this reader, concocted by Alther for effect rather than growing organically from an artistic center, Virginia's backstory gets to her marriage and the reason for the breakup. That involves an interminable account of her consorting with a schizophrenic army deserter who has some the notion that through bizarre rituals of meditation, self-discipline, LSD trips, and a weird act of simultaneous abstinence/coitus, one can achieve, well, one is never sure what. Virginia's always been drawn to philosophy--explanations about the nature of the universe--so I suppose it's in character for her to fall for all this guy's project. However, it's about 100 pages too long and tedious.During all this, Virginia seems only vaguely interested in the child she left behind. One would think the girl would be often on her mind, but she seldom is. One of Virginia's characteristics is fierce attachment (ideas, people) followed by total rejection, so maybe that's explainable, too. But I don't find it believable even in terms of the book, which is the pudding wherein lies the real proof.Anyhow, I found the whole project of Kinflicks rather tiring and not particularly satisfying. I guess Alther went on to write a number of other well-accepted novels. I hope she improved.
What do You think about Kinflicks (1999)?
A book of high-feminist ideals, of a sharply observed sixties - sharp in the sense of acerbic, I think - and of an epic character's life-spanning proportions. I read this in my late teens/early twenties, picking it up for the blurb on the back, and despite myself at the time, loved it. It was at once incredibly easy to read and yet full of ideas I hadn't really given due and proper consideration. My mother raised me to be a feminist, in the sense of a believer in equality, but I hadn't really thought about it until this book. And maybe my young self did use some of the ideas from this book as a way to impress women, but eventually those ideas stuck in a way that went beyond mere lip-service. As someone who always felt I was born out-of-time, and feeling I should really have been a teenager in the 60's, I loved this book. In particular, Ginny's time at a commune - highlighting some of the hypocrisies of the so-called 'love generation' and their limited interpretations of equality - as well as her time at Berkeley studying Philosophy lead me to grow my hair long and study Philosophy, all the while trying to espouse an idealist egalitarian philosophy of my own. I fully intend re-reading this, just as soon as I can get it out of storage in the home of a woman I should have treated a whole lot better than I did. I don't remember all the details, but I loved the wit, warmth and fierce intelligence of Lisa Alther and of the book.
—Brodysatva
Never heard anyone talk about this book and I can't figure WHY NOT when everyone knows about books like Rubyfruit Jungle which isn't 10% of the book Kinflicks is. Intense and personal without being sentimental or trite . . . shows the complexity and diversity one woman can experience. I have a hard time remembering all the details, but I do remember being depressed by it and at the same time feeling extremely fond of it and attached to it, maybe because women are never portrayed this way and it really rang true.
—Trixie Fontaine
There are many reasons the current direction of the publishing industry is a shame, but one of the biggest is that it means fewer of sprawling, epic novels will be published (unless, of course, they are written by someone like Tom Wolfe, which is an even bigger shame.) As a result, a novel like Kinflicks would probably never be published today. Kinflicks reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books, Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, in that it is a coming-of-age novel that not only addresses the life of its protagonist, but that it also addresses Big Ideas and Big Institutions with more than a hint of irreverence. Maugham had his go at the 19th century Parisian art world; Alther takes her run at everything from small-town teenage life in the 1960s to separatist-feminist commune life and the sphere of domesticity in the 1970s. Nothing is off-limits. Everything is game for satire.(Mind you, just because she rips on the whole proto-MWMF deal does not mean Alther is not a feminist. On the contrary, I sometimes felt like I was being walloped about the head with her politics, which are straight-up second-wave. I actually thought it was pretty awesome, but I can see how others would be turned off by that. Ditto for her frank discussion of sex. There is no fading to black. There is, however, a glow-in-the-dark condom and an unfortunate incident with some handcuffs.) Which reminds me, this book also called to mind another writer I enjoy, John Irving, and probably more specifically, The World According to Garp. It's more than just the second-wave milieu in which the novels are set, but also how people are killed or maimed in some pretty grotesque ways or the way every person or place is given a full backstory, complete with obsessions, tics, disfigurements, bizarre relationships, and so on. Plus, Irving also writes novels that have scope, that cross decades and generations, that tell the stories of people's lives, which is exactly what Alther does here.(God, now I am sad for bygone literary eras. How annoying is that.)I would say that anyone who enjoys John Irving and who has a fascination with second-wave feminism (like me!) would enjoy reading this book. I know I loved it, and I am glad I heard about it, because knowing that I could have gone my entire life without reading this book makes me very sad indeed.
—Caitlin Constantine
