Where my Zeldas at?

She doesn't just bob her hair, drink dubious gin and horrify her parents: Flappers have feelings too! Janet Flanner's THE CUBICAL CITY is the only flapper problem novel I have ever read, and the fact that it wasn't successful at its time doesn't surprise me considering how it is both arch and melancholy.

A longtime writer for the New Yorker, in her life Flanner palled around with the Lost Generation as a correspondent in Paris, took many a lover of either gender and once tried to stop Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal from fighting. 1926's THE CUBICAL CITY was her only novel, written in medias res, and it disappeared till being revived in the '70s (from whence my yellowed mass-market copy dates).

I couldn't help reading it more as an artifact than a novel on its own, but in that state I found it fascinating. Flanner's writing lacks the punch of a Parker, and most of the fun her heroine Delia Poole has takes places offstage so to speak. We know Delia, a successful illustrator and a great beauty, is always out on the town, but we join her (literally and figuratively) in the wee hours when the doubts take over. She considers but rejects a marriage proposal from a nice boy who wants her to move to the Philippines for him; she attempts to help her parents after her father is cut out of his own business; she watches her Jewish boss (whose portrayal w.r.t. his appetite for success and his fear of going back to the tenements was just this side of offensive) stake his fortune on a project she feels is ridiculous.

These scenes are punctuated by Forsteresque, almost aphoristic statements that comment on the action. Early in the book, Delia and Paul (the nice boy) have just spent the night together and he exclaims how he can't wait to tell his mother that he met her. Delia's actual response is "Tell her if you wish," but then:

"Love did not unite people once they were out from the privacy of the alcove retreat where for long hours two individuals seemed honestly to share ideas and theories, the members of the mind seeming like members of the body over which agreement was part of passion, contact with streets, hose fronts, pedestrians, public lights, disengaged the individual brains again as actively as it disengaged lips and knees and if indeed no struggle resulted, there came at any rate a feeling of isolation which nurtured either generosity or retreat."

The undercurrent of isolation in Delia's life leads her to continually question why she makes the choices she does, but we don't like our flappers to think. I'm sure Hemingway would have hated this book with all its messy feelings, none of which are in Jake Barnes' pants. But I took her seriously, even if no one in her own time did. There are elements of GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT and THE BELL JAR in here as well as its contemporary, MRS. DALLOWAY; if you're interested in those books it's worth digging around for a copy.