Ordinary People

When we first meet Ursie Koderer, the engaging heroine of Jaimy Gordon’s wildly inventive new novel, she is spending another season at an Outward Boundish camp for girls where her mother and stepfather have happily unloaded her. Ursie is a loner with social yearnings, intelligent, quirky, terrifyingly quick. She is Jewish and lesbian, the Jewish less arguable than the lesbianism, except in her own mind. Both make her feel set apart, freakish; she always refers to herself as an asterisk, which, like the unpronounceable name of God, stands for the equally unpronounceable name of what she thinks of as her “otherness.”

A sexual innocent, she is given to massive schoolgirl “crushes” into which she throws herself heart and soul. When one of them goes bad, Ursie mutilates herself, just a little, by cutting her arms with a penknife.

Promptly packed off to a private sanitarium by parents much happier to foot the bills than to take their daughter home, Ursie becomes part of a clique: adolescent patients with privileges. Meanwhile, insisting that she is not particularly clinically disturbed, given the setting, she goes on strike, refusing for more than a year to talk to her expensive analyst.

Everything changes when Madame Zuk, a new staff member, appears. She is beautiful, glamorous, middle-aged and Slavic, from one of the smaller SSRs of the old USSR, bearing a mysterious past. In short, something of an asterisk herself. Ursie is smitten with the crush to end all crushes. And miracle! Madame Zuk is intrigued by her. Desire to find out whatever she can about the beloved even induces Ursie to open up at last to her analyst, who is Madame Zuk’s colleague and mentor.

Eventually, under madcap conditions that verge on magical realism, Ursie and Madame Zuk flee the asylum together on a boat Madame Zuk has somehow acquired. They head off, southward and also upward, into a new maturity for Ursie and some unnamed new adventure for Madame Zuk.

What this emphatically is not is another damp, whining coming-of-age story. How easily it could have been (dysfunctional family, mixed-up neglected child, self-abuse, hospitalization, rescue by enlightened older person and analyst, etc.) only throws into stark relief the magnitude of Gordon’s accomplishment. For all its massive sympathy for the tangled young woman at its center, the novel crackles with exuberance and wit and Gordon’s most jaw-dropping gift--language.

You can start with the title, “Bogeywoman,” Ursie’s at once proud and disparaging name for herself. A scary person, sure. But also suggesting “boy-girl woman” and her lesbianism; “boggywoman” (she is an expert woodsman and tracker); even “buggy woman” (no explanation needed). While it is specific and descriptive, the language--ornate, slangy, full of private puns--is also itself clearly meant to stand as a metaphor for Ursie’s perceived “otherness.”

Still, if language is “Bogeywoman’s” greatest pleasure, it paradoxically also is the book’s major weakness. Gordon can’t seem to stop; there are times when the three-ring word circus gets unpleasantly self-conscious, as though Gordon were more interested in making you read the language than the book and as though she prefers whiz-bang verbal flashiness to the plodding demands of character development.

Perhaps inevitably, a whiff of the academic clings, like cigarette smoke in a wool sweater, to a book as “written” as this one. You can’t help noticing, then counting, the influences brought to bear. James Joyce, it goes without saying. Then, Ursie is surely another pint-sized mahatma of precocious sensitivity in a direct line from Holden Caulfield. The swampy boat trip at the end brings up associations with Huckleberry Finn on the raft with Jim, a top name in outsiderhood. Ursula even shares some of her perky pluck with the Japanese animated heroes of the ‘60s, like Astroboy. And Gordon, who teaches at Western Michigan University, has studded “Bogeywoman” with enough literary quotations and references to make it impossible not to think of the Slavic love object in “Death in Venice” as a forerunner of Madame Zuk.

The back cover of “Bogeywoman” identifies it as “Fiction/Lesbian Literature.” This ghettoizing is really too bad, as it will probably keep more people away than it will attract a specific clientele. As for the lesbianism, anyone who plucks this book off the shelf for that reason is bound to be disappointed. “Bogeywoman” is as much about the specifics of lesbianism as “Swann’s Way” is about the specifics of baking.