There's Room of North Carolina

by BJ, Ph.D.

Note: this post contains spoilers!

All of us bring our unique experiences and perspectives to the book club. We read the same texts differently, although it is funny how often we all dislike the same characters. Sometimes we are just a book club of misanthropes, but since these are not real people, I disparage with abandon. In Anita De Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, I could not decide who I liked least—Jack Martin, a white male artist from the 1970s-1990s, or Nick Fitzsimmons, a white male artist from the 1990s who is just coming of age. Both were entitled, violent characters who despised Latina women even as they fetishized them. My skin crawled each time Martin described “his” Anita, and how “tiny” and “like a doll” she was. Each time Nick expressed a preference for Raquel’s hairstyle (i.e., pulled tightly back away from her face and not touching him or anything else), clothing, or food choices, I flashed back to my college years, when a now (lightly famous) ex-boyfriend kindly suggested I try to dress more like another woman on our campus. He even went to H&M and bought me a few items (which, to my great consternation, I loved) to integrate into my wardrobe. When one of the main characters, Raquel, feels conflicted wearing the clothes Nick purchases (because she “deserves beautiful things), I remembered standing in a parking lot in my new shirt and jacket, feeling both pride and shame. Even though no one knew him as a musician at the time, I was not cool enough to be his display item (I know, you are not surprised he is a musician).

Fear not, reader. He eventually moved to the West Coast and partnered with an effortlessly cool woman who made independent films. I’m confident all her shirts and accessories passed muster. By then, he never had to worry that the Syracuse, New York, hanging off me in the form of too-bright sweaters and bad highlights would somehow flag him as prosaic, or even worse, backwater. I am sorry to say that, like Raquel, it took me a very long time to see his behavior as classist, sexist, controlling, and demeaning. It took that long because I was drawn to the proximity to power that came with my connection to a publicly beloved white man with intergenerational wealth—something I lacked. While I cannot relate to Raquel Toro’s self-discovery arc as a person of color, I see that we both responded to the same myth: that intimacy with a white man offers protection from what threatens or limits us. I expect “the trinity” (racism, classism, and sexism) to form the toxic sludge flowing around and in between individuals in fiction set in America. Gonzalez is so gifted at crafting a story where you know what’s coming, can feel it in your bones, and then it still hits you like a sucker punch when it happens. But I am struck by the ways three of the female characters learn the distance between presence and access.

First, an aside: this story should not feel heavy-handed to any reader, if only because the Anita and Jack arc hews very closely to a real story from the 1980s. In September 1985, New York City-based artist Ana Mendieta fell to her death from a 34^th-floor window in an apartment building, where she lived with her husband Carl Andre, the minimalist on whom the character Jack Martin is based.  Anita understood that her relationship with Jack Martin likely opened doors in the New York art scene, but she also understood that her creativity and perspective were unique and worthy. In the cycle of their relationship, Anita knows that Jack is using his various forms of privilege to try to limit her trajectory and control how much she works by offering expensive gifts and, eventually, marriage. Gonzalez brilliantly depicts the tension between De Monte’s understanding of how that trinity shaped each interaction with Martin, but sometimes “she just wanted to matter to someone.” And isn’t that so deeply relatable? De Monte learns closeness does not necessarily mean intimacy, safety, or being seen. As Gonzalez demonstrates in this story, whiteness does not see; it can be seen, but if mirrored, it could collapse.

Raquel, another Latina woman, gets into Brown University and, after arriving, feels out of place. Despite her hard work and academic success, Raquel understands that socially, there really isn’t room for her. Initially, she tries to fit by shrinking her body. Further into her college career, she befriends a group of women with great social connections but uninteresting personalities. After they verbally assault her over dinner, she seeks out Nick Fitzsimmons, with whom she has a budding relationship. Raquel tumbles deeply into this connection before a shockingly disrespectful act wakes her up to their dynamic, to Nick’s view of her as a display object, a social project, and an emotional safety blanket. Like the “art history girls,” Nick and his mother find ways to accuse Raquel of being a diversity hire, denying her brilliance and perspective. Again, Raquel’s presence at Brown and in a relationship with Nick are not synonymous with access. Raquel and Anita already understand that access is a gallon of water forever circling the drain. There is nothing new here, nothing interesting—just a cache of resources, jobs, and honors bouncing from white person to white person, but the center does not hold.

Simultaneously, Anita and Raquel understand the importance of their artistic perspectives and their raw talent, which, in another context, could garner honors and acclaim as easily as Jack earns and Nick buys them. In the end, Anita and Raquel find each other across the divide of life and death, and in so doing, forge a new path that resists the whiteness of the art world. Satisfyingly, Gonzalez literally frees De Monte from the prison of the Fitzsimmons’ home, where some of her art remained in a drawer after they bought it from Jack Martin to bury her legacy.

The ways that Anita and Raquel come home to themselves in this life and the afterlife made me wish I could vault through time and talk to the college girl I was—a first-generation college student trying to find her way. I would tell her she’s looking for the wrong friends, that she can find a more expansive love, and that she needs to get to work dismantling what has her standing in a parking lot, feeling proud and ashamed.