“A story’s best when convincing the reader it could happen no other way,” Girtle, the narrator of Mice 1961, says. She has little to no faith that she can accomplish this. Although the novel starts matter-of-factly, with her narrating how sisters Jody and Mice are walking down the sidewalk, she quickly becomes anxious and paranoid, certain that some otherworldly force will rip it from her hands and, what, do something different? Deny Girtle her artistic representation, even though it seems she’s nervous to hold it anyway?
“The story itself with its claws would grub at the central girl, I believed, and I was right,” she continues. “It would indoctrinate her and tamp her down when her pursuits were not on point. The story, possessing the upper hand, would keep her miserably sanitized.” Later, she thinks, “although to describe is to contaminate, I began my try.”
That’s one way to kick off the storyline of the electric and janky Mice 1961, Stacey Levine’s novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (recently re-issued by Ecco)—with a housekeeper as a narrator, unsure of her abilities to keep it under control. At least it gets it out of the way quickly, so we know we’re set up for… not failure, but maybe a continuous question of what we read here is real (or real as can be). It’s a strange technique that offers a kink in the framework of the book, returned to often when Girtle anticipates a “helper,” a rogue assailant that’s out to format the story differently. Just like Girtle, we’re expecting someone else to pull the rug out from under us.
Though she narrates the novel, Girtle isn’t a huge presence—the focus is on the two sisters as they plan to attend the annual spring party in Reef Way, a Miami suburb, in the titular year. Girtle, fresh off a bus from home, offered mild cleaning capabilities in the girls home, and her nonphysical contract is renewed whenever Jody allows her to stay for a couple more weeks. watches and narrates from corners, bushes, and anywhere else she can hide to dissolve herself and let the sisters speak for themselves, which they can heartily do. They’re connected (orphaned by their mother, Candy) but absurdly different. Jody, a bit older, is attempting to teach Mice the rules of civility and politeness.
It’s a hard task. Mice is awkward and pale, would much rather fix old radios than socialize, and is bullied by a local gang of high schoolers (they call her Popcorn Head, Milk Face, Whitewalls) whom she usually avoids. The sisters are complicated and foreign to each other, richly developed and jumping off the page; their voices cry out in familial absurdity. Mice breathes quick and light; Jody heavy and slow. Often Mice fights against Jody’s demands: “What if life could be flexible Jody? What if we didn’t have to think about something in a certain way?” Of course, she doesn’t listen. Mice perpetually annoys her like a new puppy she has to train. “You have more or less caused economic damage around here,” Jody tells her once.
Jody forces Mice to attend the party, because she’s trying to set her up with a job at the bookmobile, and Jody knows the owner will be there, too. Mice, of course, doesn’t want to go, and it’s a stroke of luck she runs into the teenagers earlier that day and so is forced to flee by jumping into a well. Now late for the party, the teens run away to get ready, and Mice remains there.
“Face it,” Girtle says, “neighbors’ thoughts were pungent and everywhere.” This is to prepare us for the party, held at a bakery that hosts a wide array of cousins, hostesses, umbrella importers, and librarians. For the next 100 pages, we’re immersed in the idle gossip of these Miamians; a beatnik DJ gets frustrated that no one at the party likes his Charles Mingus records (“Whill you shut up?” he scolds someone. “Some of these compositions were written for a film.”); a young girl is praised for writing a letter to the editor that gets printed in a local magazine (“Trudie’s an attractive enough young lady and with a trim enough waistline that she actually could succeed as a writer in the public eye,” someone quips.); someone asks an asinine question as to whether you can freeze cheese, and Jody frets about where Mice could be.
For these pages, Mice is still stuck in a well and sorely missing from the banal chatter of the neighbors. Such a strong voice is replaced with about a dozen weaker ones, and no doubt the story suffers following the loss of her, even if Levine’s conversations are tactful and elegant, with the party’s theatrics tipping into the absurd (someone continually drops platters, from bread rolls to spaghetti pots). I missed Mice as one would miss their funny friend at a party—one whose absence makes the whole thing dull. (At times, I was looking around the story, trying to spot her, just as I’d do in real life.) Girtle is trying to soak up it all, like a diligent surveillance camera, but there’s too many streams of information, and people break off into too many separate rooms, for her to get a hold on the situation. “I had to admit: not every word in the story was mine to know.”
Eventually, Mice arrives, just in time to strike up a conversation with a socialite whose brother offers her a job keeping her company while he’s at work. Jody is furious—this isn’t the life she imagined for her sister—but the socialite is working her charms on Mice. “For years I thought the world was a sad and dingy place,” she tells her. “But then I realized it was me. Do you ever mistake the world for yourself?” Who knows whether this was meant to get through to Mice, or to Jody, or even to Girtle, who is still fretting about when the story’s helper will arrive.
Her anxiety about the whole thing is in ordinance with the failure to depict anything concretely; it’s not just a Girtle problem. Any novel—or story to a friend—will leave out details and exaggerate others. Just as she wrote, any story is contaminated. Though the external helper remains on her mind, she’s curiously okay with any discrepancies that come from her. Whether the helper eventually comes doesn’t really matter, as she’s secure in what she can do, trying to hold onto what she knows before someone can snatch it. As much as it is about otherness, Mice 1961 is about freedom—Jody’s control over Mice, Mice’s reluctance to assimilate, Girtle’s escape from her home just to become second fiddle to two bickering sisters. Freedom, Levine suggests, looks different for everyone. All one has to do is to hold onto it long enough before it gets taken from your grip.
Mice 1961 is out now.
