The colourist

Reading "La colorista" makes it clear why David Foster Wallace described its author, Susan Daitch, as one of the most intelligent writers in the United States. The book, which is now available in Italy thanks to Claudia Durastanti’s translation three and a half decades after its original publication, contains all the postmodern elements that also characterise Wallace’s own works. First and foremost, there is History, which always and only peeks through in the background like an indistinct and somewhat annoying noise that disrupts the protagonists’ mundane lives. The character most involved in events linked to reality is the co-protagonist Eamonn, the flatmate of the protagonist and narrator, Julie. Eamonn is, in fact, a photographer of Irish origin, enlisted by a certain Freddie Driscoll to work on several photo-essays concerning Northern Irish activists imprisoned by London on terrorism charges and a mysterious ship laden with weapons named after an ancient female pirate. The characters’ professional activities are equally postmodern, revolving around the definition and representation of reality: while Eamonn hopes, through his photographs, to capture life and document it (and indeed he sells many photo features to newspapers, though he remains dissatisfied with this limitation), Julie and her friend and colleague Laurel are working on a comic strip series about the galactic superheroine Electra, whom they would like to portray as a woman in control of her own choices, whilst their boss, the childish Mr Loonan, insists she must merely pander to base male instincts. When the series ends, both try to reinvent it and breathe new life into it, but give up when they realise that their real lives constantly tend to overlap with that of their heroine. Both thus end up forging works of art by copying them from paintings and drawings in museums. The characters’ professional failures—mirroring their lives of financial insecurity and fear of adulthood—highlight the difficulty of art retaining meaning in the consumerist, capitalist world of 1990s New York. The final postmodernist detail encapsulates the story within a sort of meta-narrative, thanks to the chosen style and perspective. The narrator, Julie, recounts her life and those of the people around her as if they were live fragments of a vast film unfolding before their eyes. A film, however, which she, like everyone else, can only watch, with no hope of actively intervening. Three decades on, the text can therefore be appreciated as a product of its time, one that captivates by compelling the reader to reflect on reality without deluding them into thinking they are part of it, as in a fairy tale.

    

Susan Daitch
, "La colorista
Safarà", 288 pp., €19.50