Carole Maso: Dancing on a Literary Edge

Even before Carole Maso begins to read, it is impossible not to pay attention.

She wears a dazzling pink and gold shawl, a diaphanous blue and yellow dress, brilliant red lipstick on her sensuous mouth. Her pale hair shines almost silver.

When she reads, all becomes clear. She is the living embodiment of her prose--a two-hour explosion of verbal heat, light and color.

“That was a very visceral experience,” says a slightly stunned Matthew Krout, a recent UCLA graduate, as he waits in line to buy Maso’s book after the reading, one of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series hosted by KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt at the Pacific Design Center.

“I feel like I have to be in shape for this,” says Lisi Rona, a Los Angeles poet. “She’s very fresh.”

Such are the excited reactions Maso has been getting on her 10-city tour to promote her latest novel, “The American Woman in a Chinese Hat,” and to read from “Bay of Angels,” a work in progress. Her readings have also inspired love letters and post-reading propositions, Maso says.

Carole Maso may not have the name recognition of Danielle Steel--she says she’d hate that kind of fame--but among literati, she is on the cutting edge. Critics say she epitomizes all that is great about American literature today--and all that is wrong with major American publishers.

They ignore her.

This is nothing new, of course. Raymond Carver struggled in obscurity for years before being hailed as a master of the minimalist form--although he is perhaps more widely known as the inspiration behind the film “Short Cuts.”

Maso may well be the next Carver. Published by small literary presses, she is gaining a reputation for reshaping language and form in unique, beautiful, experimental yet totally readable ways.

In 1993, she received a $50,000 fellowship from the Los Angeles-based Lannan Foundation, which honors “writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for outstanding future work.” Her novels “Ghost Dance,” “The Art Lover,” “AVA” and now “The American Woman in the Chinese Hat” have received lavish praise from reviewers and writers in every genre.

“Moving and wonderful, and highly readable,” says Stephen Koch, author of the nonfiction book “Double Lives” and chairman of the graduate writing division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York, which recently hired Maso as a faculty member. He added that she’s a dynamic teacher.

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Despite such plaudits, Maso is not widely known. But many writers say “The American Woman in the Chinese Hat” may introduce her work to a much wider readership, including the very loyal audience of gay and bisexual readers.

Although Maso’s earlier works contained gay characters, this is her first novel to focus on the erotic life of a bisexual woman. The strong turnout for her other Los Angeles reading--in the Lesbian Writers Series sponsored by A Different Light in West Hollywood--was proof of an audience hungry for good, literary explorations of their lives.

Set in the south of France, “The American Woman” concerns a beautiful writer, Catherine, recovering from her breakup with her lesbian lover of many years and the death of her older brother from AIDS. She numbs her pain with one brief erotic encounter after another, mostly with women, until she meets a man, Lucien, whom she senses to be her match in beauty, pain and emptiness.

Or so it seems. For this book works on many levels. Most importantly, Maso tracks with horrifying authenticity the downward spiral of Catherine’s depression, pulling you in, like Carver, with prose that is terse, musical and hypnotic.

In an interview, Maso calls “The American Woman” her most accessible and her most autobiographical book yet.

“I feel this was mirroring a very dark and bleak time in my life, and that I had no other way to get by, except to try to speak about this,” she says in the same clear, lilting voice that wraps seductively around the mind at readings.

She started writing the novel in France in 1988 on a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. But depression made it increasingly difficult for her to work.

Not only was she grieving the death from AIDS of a close friend, Gary Falk--the model for characters in “The Art Lover” and “The American Woman”--she was also, like her heroine, breaking up with her longtime companion, Helen Lang, a financial analyst for the Legal Aid Society in New York.

The problem was monogamy: Lang was for it; Maso wasn’t. The two, who met at Vassar, have since reunited, and Maso says their relationship is now a central stable element in her life.

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Like her heroine, she’s sexually attracted to men, but she prefers women and identifies herself as a lesbian. Only once did she briefly consider a conventional heterosexual marriage-and-children route, until the man she was seeing told her that he wasn’t sure he could handle the fact that she was the better writer.

“Ever since then, I’ve never been seduced toward that kind of life,” she says.

The bottom line on every decision is, “Will it help my work?” she says. “My work keeps me well, keeps me whole.”

Like many great writers, from Virginia Woolf to Ernest Hemingway, Maso suffers from an inherited manic depression. When she feels well, there’s a kind of electrical charge “surging through the brain. It’s a mysterious thing, which you have to harness, of course, but it is there, and it is what I work off.”

The downside of the illness challenges her to write about the barely describable experiences of madness and death. In France, even at her worst, she forced herself daily to jot things down in her notebook, to record how it felt.

But sometimes what emerges is very joyous, like “AVA,” stylistically her most daring book, about a woman who has lived life to the hilt and is now dying. The book recounts her thoughts on the last day of her life--disconnected, repetitive, randomly forming into patterns and then drifting away, as thoughts do. Maso wrote it after she had recovered from her experience in France.

“When you’re at a place of that much darkness, the light is blinding when you come back,” Maso says.

Happiness and despair have alternated throughout her 38 years. Growing up in Wyckoff, N.J., the oldest of five children, Maso was always considered gifted by her parents, and they gave her the sense that she could “do anything. It was the greatest thing I got from them,” she says.

On the downside, there have been the years of unwanted but life-sustaining jobs, such as waitressing, that bought Maso time to write. She hit bottom on the way home in New York one night when a mugger threw down her bag of tips in disgust because it wasn’t “real money.”

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What left her most bitter, though, were editors who told her repeatedly to rewrite her work in a traditional narrative format. One wanted her to take everything out of her first book, “Ghost Dance,” except the mother-daughter relationship--deleting about three-quarters of the book. “Mother-daughter was hot” that year, she says wryly.

In interviews and essays, and in her role as fiction editor for the highly regarded Kenyon Review, Maso has blasted everyone involved in mainstream publishing--from corporations in it only for the money to “whorish” writers who contour their styles to match the market.

Yet Maso’s starving-in-the-garret years are over, at least temporarily. The Lannan money enabled Maso and Lang to buy a house--a 150-year-old, three bedroom Colonial on 3 1/2 acres near Hudson, N.Y. It’s a far cry from the tiny Greenwich Village apartment they share with their cats, Fauve and Coco.

The money also brought new creative freedom, Maso says. And that’s evident in the ecstatic style of her novel in progress, “Bay of Angels,” which focuses on Aunt Sophie, a character from “AVA,” just before she’s shot at the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. Another bleak theme, but the prose glows and pulses with life in what sounds like a cross between poetry and the Bible’s Book of Revelations.

Maso considers her talent a gift from somewhere outside her control.

“I feel very humble in the face of this thing that I do,” she says. “That’s what it’s about for me. It’s not about money. It’s not about any kind of notoriety. And that’s so nice--to be free.”