Rose of No Man’s Land
by Michelle Tea
MacAdam/Cage. 306 pages, $22.
“YES, ABSOLUTELY, this was the greatest day of my life,” declares Trisha Driscoll, the fourteen-year-old outer suburbanite narrator of Michelle Tea’s latest whirlwind street-girl adventure, Rose of No Man’s Land. During her nonstop killer of a day, Trisha starts and gets fired from her very first job, encounters a creepy, drug-dealing kiddie pornographer, smokes cigarettes and gets high for the first time, loses her virginity to another girl in the handicapped stall of a Chinese restaurant’s bathroom, goes diving for coins in that restaurant’s enormous fountain, and even buys herself a real, symbolic tattoo to mark the entire occasion. Like Holden Caulfield many years ago, Tea’s young lesbian protagonist comes of age in a single long, blissful, dangerous night. However, this coming-of-age story—also like Holden’s—could only belong to Trisha’s own generation.
While previous Michelle Tea books such as Valencia (2000) and Rent Girl (2004) have earned her a rabid following among the college set, Rose of No Man’s Land takes the bold and risky step of aiming for an even younger audience. In past years Tea has been a featured speaker at events like the Youth Pride Rally at the Massachusetts State House; clearly, she’s seized upon an opportunity to reach out to younger people through her writing as well. The result is an offbeat romantic tale of two teenage girls in the tradition of Nancy Garden’s 1982 classic Annie on My Mind. Or, more accurately, Rose of No Man’s Land—packed as it is with Tea’s trademark grit, adrenaline, and clear-headed sociocultural observations—is like Annie on My Mind on speed. Some may worry that the book irresponsibly presents teenage drug use too casually or enticingly, especially when the drug in question is crystal meth. “I felt just deranged with what were the best and the worst feelings I ever felt, duking it out inside my body,” Trisha explains, after inhaling her first hit. Still, Tea is always honest about the conflicts brought on by Trisha’s experiences at the hands of the novel’s title figure, the tantalizing, poisonous Rose. It is Rose who provides the vehicle for Trisha’s sexual awakening, and Rose who emerges as one of the most unforgettable characters in recent memory. With a supermodel wannabe’s catwalk swagger, Rose struts into Trisha’s workplace, a trashy strip-mall clothing store named Ohmigod!, to the beat of (what else?) Sheena Easton’s “Strut” blaring over the loudspeakers. Then she steals a black, rose-shaped pin as a prelude to stealing Trisha’s heart. Tea has already foreshadowed the lesbian plot turn through Trisha’s commentary on the deadbeat boyfriend of her couch-bound, hypochondriac, yet well-intentioned mom: “I think I’d like to opt out of the whole man-woman thing if possible. And it does seem possible, right now, when I’m mostly just a kid, but I know at some point the kid is going to melt right off my body, and then what? I’m a woman? It’s too overwhelming to think about.” Beyond a multitude of hometown Massachusetts colloquialisms and some semi-arcane pop-culture references that might be lost on the novel’s younger (or older) readers, Tea dazzles us not only with her stream of linguistic invention—Trisha’s manic cadences seem much simpler to craft than they actually are—but also with moments of imagistic insight. For instance, when Rose and Trisha break into a prehistoric jungle-themed miniature golf course near Revere Beach in the middle of the night, Trisha describes with quirky precision the floodlit face of a Plexiglas hippopotamus, whose “goofy mouth was wide and filled with round teeth.” Watching Rose slide down a dinosaur’s neck, she sees “not a drooling tittie-girl but a chick who looks like a witchy Viking straddling a giant lizard,” tripping the line into a youthful feminist terrain that echoes Trisha’s earlier questions about gender roles and womanhood. As Michelle Tea continues to mark her territory as one of today’s most important voices in lesbian writing, she’s also constructing new realities in which young people can find ways of re-imagining their own lives. Jason Roush is author of After Hours, a collection of poems.
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