Mona Simpson is one of the only contemporary novelists to nail the working mother species and to give a voice to the voiceless Filipina, the indispensable yet invisible Nanny. My Hollywood should be required reading for mothers, fathers, and anybody interested in the triangular relationships between children, their caretakers, and their harrowed and harassed parents. My Hollywood manages, ever so lightly, no heavy-handedness there, to give voice to the working mother's struggle--always wanting two things at once--and to the voiceless caregivers (in this case the beautifully-drawn Lola). Simpson's has mastered double narration. On one hand, we read about Claire the musician, the new mother, the woman seeking a room of her own with a crib in the corner. On the other, Lola, the Filipina nanny, sending her pennies back home, building an autonomous life for the children she has left behind and never sees. How many women like Claire do we know, still shaking off the residue of romance, self-destructive perfectionists, who make a profession out of being so hard on themselves? This novel is a must read for practitioners and theorists of the American work ethic, and how it coalesces with the myth of the perfect mother. Work is everywhere in Simpson's characters' lives--of course in husband-Paul's infernal Hollywood schedule, but also in Claire's consciousness that each minute that passes with "nothing" to show for is pure loss: (I'd blown half my time... I was a dandelion blown). What a brilliant portrait of modern time (Time had once been public, in a clock tower on a town square; everyone saw the same hour and minutes. When watches were invented...people could carry around their own time).
I'm sure that some day anthropologists will use Simpson's novel to talk about the strange historical moment when the female body is violently desexualized for the sake of the child. Her breast pumps are the symbols of a new female frontier; pumping milk, rather than oil, becomes a frantic devotional ritual. And this same pumping, when viewed from Lola's (the gloriously portrayed nanny, speaking in her own voice) point of view, reveals the tragic and preposterous aspect of sacrifice. To Lola, the near-ascetic quality of that "natural" act of breastfeeding becomes unnatural, painful, and excruciatingly lonely. Caring little for the health benefits of mother's milk, Lola observes with disbelief that formula "it is like poison to them," Simpson's formula-phobic Americans.
Virginia Woolf would have loved this novel. Claire craves a room of her own, admits that she would have so much preferred being the father than the mother. Reading My Hollywood, I kept marveling at the enormous service Simpson does by ventriloquizing the thousand voiceless house help, many working without a fixed schedule, without health care, invisible elves giving love to the children of ease, fame, and neurosis.
Another remarkable component of the book is the disposable quality of these nannies. The Lolas of the world, at one time so essential to the lonely mothers, so nurturing toward Hollywood's semi-orphaned children, suddenly become pariahs when they cannot provide the children with what Bourdieu calls academic or social distinction. Obstacles to the kid's linguistic/social advancement, these women are eventually given the sack (or the chop as Simpson puts it). The twist here is that as soon as a nanny is dismissed, it is the mother who must wave goodbye to her world, to her freedom. It is she who sacrifices the only warmth of the household for the child's future success. All kinds of divorces loom in My Hollywood, but Simpson's triumph is to present us with an entirely new kind of sentimental bereavement. Not just the disintegration of couples, the drying up of sexual passion, but the divorce between employers and employees, mothers of blood and mothers of sweat.
I hope everybody reads about Simpson's Lola and how that it is her time that give us, modern working mothers, our careers, identities, and dignity. Simpson could have made us cry, but instead she chills us. Watch for the treatment of depression in the novel. How rare it is that Prozac is prescribed to the Filipina and not the Emma Bovary doppelganger. Why does it seem so odd, as though the rich and educated have a metaphysical monopoly on anti-depressants, to witness Lola's slow descent into melancholy?
What an amazing commentary on what career means to "us" and to "them." Simpson reveals brilliantly how by the end of the novel, Lola has been contaminated by powerful American symbiosis of identity and career. Early on, Claire asks Lola what she had wanted to be. Lola is mystified. And then (what a great touch), when she goes back home to the Philippines, she is stunned that "[n]o one asks my job." She suddenly realizes that the currency of power and recognition is fundamentally different in her two distinct homes. The invisible sacrifices she has made to enable her kids' economic freedom (My children they'll never have to go anywhere. They can stay home. That is what I did for my life...) are just that--invisible.
Simpson's novel rips brilliantly into "our" working generation's undoubtedly unromantic, but prevalent adultery--not men stealing other men's wives or wives stealing husbands-- but babysitters and nannies being coveted and seduced by other parents. No longer after bimbos or Prince Charming, parents are ogling the nanny as ultimate commodity. The Lolas of Simpson's world are the great triangulated investments, the perfect and covetable reflections of success.
Also watch out for Simpson's satirical genius: UCLA babysitters refusing to wash dishes. Claire lying about money and hiding her receipts from Barney's. You will howl at the terrible Gelfond family, their twins, and the fabulous Nanny-contract (only matched in literature by Balzac's Marriage Contract). And the fantastically moving ode to ironing. Five stars!
