Alienation with a smile

“The thought that nothing was behind all the names we depend on made me feel naked and want to hide.” So says the narrator of “The Amazon,” who, like many of Mary Woronov’s direly alienated, almost unwillingly resilient protagonists, finds the business of living an episodic chore of pulling off people’s masks, at the same time unmasking herself. Woronov has an instinctive mistrust of the pursuit of pleasure in which her characters disastrously indulge themselves, and any comfort zone they arrive at is short-lived, swiftly made toxic by the simple Sartrean truth that “hell is other people.” She would no doubt add, hell is also us.

“Blind Love” is as startling as Woronov’s other novels and story collections (“Snake,” “Niagara,” “Wake for the Angels”) and the fictionalized memoirs of her years as a Warhol Factory familiar, “Swimming Underground,” a bricolage of superbly succinct, chilling tales, some connected by recurring characters and narrative continuities, others free-standing, none lacking the copious black humor that undermines her characters’ occasional attempts at self-pity. She is a sly, wise writer whose wisdom is hard won, entirely her own. She’s allergic to received ideas, and fashions in fiction, and she can defiantly look dread and disappointment straight in their crooked eyes and find the perfect, usually ghastly detail in any human landscape: “His mom was a Catholic martyr and his dad was an extremely entertaining bastard.” It is the kind of loaded sentence that this writer of stabbing wit and a frank, withering view of other human beings tosses off in quantity on every page.

Two writers who come to mind when I embark on one of Woronov’s deadpan prose journeys are Beth Nugent, author of “Live Girls,” and Rudolph Wurlitzer, who wrote “Nog, Quake, and Flats.” They have received the same shabby treatment by the literary establishment as Woronov has, for reasons as mysterious to me as the hyperinflation of square-chinned, crypto-polymathic male impersonators of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

“Blind Love” is clearly not a novel, but it is a picaresque narrative whose continuities and discontinuities resemble an especially adroit experimental film. “Jack, Part One” relates a loveless but sexually expedient affair the narrator and Jack enjoy, if that is the word, at a relatively early age. Jack becomes a successful writer, and “Jack, Part Two” picks up a few years later when his second book has flopped, he’s become an alcoholic failure and he reencounters our heroine. (She’s still pole-dancing for a living.) Jack tries to bamboozle her into a three-way with a younger male friend, but he intends to simply watch, claiming he’s become impotent. In one of Woronov’s signature twists, even that turns out to be a lie.

Destiny, the hapless female of “The Amazon,” who has abandoned her dying husband on a canoe in the jungle and is somehow making her way to Florida, meets up with a carny entertainer called the Alligator Man while hitchhiking. Soon she is performing in a circus as the Electric Girl. From a neighboring trailer comes a seemingly neglected waif whose only friend is a pet rat named Mr. Wizard. Destiny has the inspiration to dress Mr. Wizard in doll clothes and launch the waif, Elsie, in her own act, the Rat Girl. Elsie’s mother, Estelle, is a true carny freak, “a tattooed woman whose body was getting too shapeless to show off the sexy skin cartoons of animals and lovers, and she had to resort to old carnival stand-ups like piercing her tongue with a hook and using it to lift a bucketful of sand.” When Estelle and her slimy boyfriend start packing up their trailer to leave, Destiny is determined to take Elsie.

But the repulsive Estelle, like the rest of Woronov’s menagerie, turns the tale upside down when Destiny confronts her: “ ‘My daughter is going to school, not to Paris to become the Rat Girl. She can read and write. She writes little stories about the Carnival, and I think she is talented,’ ” Estelle tells Destiny, who is surprised. “As ugly as Estelle’s flesh was her voice was beautiful. There wasn’t a trace of anger in it. It was clear and deep as the water of a lake in the early morning, and it was the last thing I expected out of the avalanche of the face in front of me.”

Only a handful of the 22 stories in this collection depict this particular species of grotesquerie; many deal with the more quotidian yet no less curdled flavor of daily living in Los Angeles. There are female friendships full of subtle poisonings that turn out to be acts of generosity; exasperated trophy wives attempting affairs with more or less the wrong people; the desperation of a male movie star who accuses his ex-conquests of being prostitutes when they ask for cab fare; a townie girl who takes off to Vegas with the local mobster (who ends up treating her quite nicely). This book never ceases to upend the expectations its stories taunt and tease us with and show us dimensions of a grandly variegated cast of human types who turn out not to be types at all. Woronov’s talent is large and shockingly different from that of almost any writer at work today. *