That Pulitzer finalist nobody knew
In Stacey Levine's dark horse novel, Mice 1961, being American means being alone, together.
There’s no shortage of social events on Reef Way, a made-up street in the fictional community of West Horn, set in the fragrant, fruit-burdened swamp of outer Miami. On Fridays, Sal over at the Crescent Tender Bakery makes turnovers. There’s Dog Derby Day (whatever that is), gator races in the summer, rose-growing contests in the spring, weekend cake sales at the bandshell, and backyard cookouts with steamed clams “writhing” over the flame.
The bakery hosts both a winter and a spring social, complete with poetry recitals and a dance floor. Neighbors—old Phenice, the widow Cissy, and a few others—can be found most evenings rocking on the porch of Parrots Grocery. Young people go to The Zot once a week for band night.
And yet, no one seems particularly well socialized in Mice 1961, the uncanny novel by Stacey Levine that unfolds over a single day in that fateful, symbolically loaded year at the height of the Cold War. Even when the characters are ostensibly interacting, they talk at and past each other, often free-associating—or dissociating—in spiraling streams of non sequiturs. On the rare occasions they do see or acknowledge others, it’s usually to bully people over petty signifiers of in-group status.
In May, the Pulitzer Prize announced its fiction finalists: the eventual winner—Percival Everett’s acclaimed Huckleberry Finn adaptation, James—plus novels by a New York Times bestseller, a previous Pulitzer finalist, and this one, by a little-known author, published by a tiny Oregon press. The question of how and why it ended up in such illustrious company had the book world so aflutter that I found myself discussing it with a stranger in line at a wedding bar in New Orleans.
I won’t speculate on how the book found its way into the hands of whichever judge chose to champion it. But as for the why, well, the prize’s remit is loosely defined as recognizing books “dealing with American life.” And if you look at recent winners, you’ll see a pattern: books that balance absurd humor and formal experimentation to home in on uniquely American quirks and neuroses: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s harrowing yet hilarious immigration epic The Sympathizer, for instance, or Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, a slapstick retelling of an encounter between East Coast Jews and their Israeli counterparts.
In that sense, Mice 1961 certainly “deals with American life.” If anything, it reads like a simulation of some idyllic mid-century Americana, where something’s just off enough to make you realize how weird this country is. That off-kilter quality stems largely from how futile it seems to form ties in West Horn’s culture of self-absorbed, distrusting, atomized individuals—where the social fabric feels as fake as the astroturf beneath it.
The story follows Jody and Mice, sisters of about twenty, in the hours leading up to a party neither wants to attend. Their mother died “somewhat in the middle of things” the year before, Levine writes, and the girls live in a kind of feral Grey Gardens setup with their maid—an escaped mental patient named Girtle—who doesn’t cook or clean. Girtle narrates the novel mostly from her “place” behind the couch. She speaks only a few lines aloud and is rarely noticed by others.
Mice, the younger sister, is stalked by a gang of teenage stock characters because of her albinism and a condition that causes her eyeballs to shake behind her dark glasses. Still, she’s often spotted running, roaming, racing, hurtling, scrabbling, and skittering down the boulevard—to borrow some of Levine’s many restless verbs. When threatened, Mice scampers into crawl spaces, runoff canals, wells, and other strange geographic features to hide from bullies and the South Florida sun.
Jody, so high-strung she seems on the verge of combustion, worries herself sick over Mice. But Mice—who’s more than a little touched in the head—responds to her sister’s efforts with nonstop, idiosyncratic inquiries. Even while being chased and spit upon by marauding teenagers, she’s fixated on getting her questions about the nature of things answered. Among them:
“Why’s the freezer so dark? Are all freezers dark?”
“Why doesn’t the floor just open up and swallow me whole?”
“Jo? Did you say ‘I can’t stand it’ because a minute ago I said I couldn’t stand the soup? Did my words influence your words?”
Such deep-sounding questions recur throughout the book—sometimes from Mice or the narrator, other times from neighbors who aren’t so much talking as filling the humid air. In one scene on the porch of Parrots Grocery, they debate whether life is long or short. The exchange recalls the rustic philosophizing of bored villagers in a Chekhov play, but delivered in old-timey expressions that, I’m pretty sure, the author made up:
Cissy: “Our life is over fast. Isn’t it? It passes fast.”
Twing: “It seems to pass fast. That’s ’cause yer mind gets thin. It can’t hold all a’ life’s happenings in th’ memory anymore.”
Cissy: “Who said that?”
Twing: “I say it. There’s too much t’remember and there’s less events to look forward to when yer older.”
Cissy: “And life ends faster than a dog at a bone.”
Twing: “Nope. Life goes slow.”
The sense of being desperately alone, together, culminates at the Crescent Tender Bakery’s spring social—a circus-like finale where bizarre interjections ping-pong in a crescendo of nonsense. There’s an argument spanning 30 pages about the virtue of having a so-called “soft” name, and how to distinguish soft names from hard. One character declares out of nowhere that “Brenda Jo Moates” is a soft-seeming name. Another asks what that even means. The first responds, “You must hear them to know them,” which draws a crowd of opinionated onlookers.
Phil Rizzuto? Not quite soft. Josh Brausch: yes. Gerry Sage is “a wonderfully soft name.” Paul Mees is “disqualified” because the name Paul is “a contaminated sample. Is there any Paul on this earth who’s not full of trouble and mess?”
Heads turn when a handsome out-of-towner with a military buzz cut strolls into the bakery. He walks up to Mice—who’s standing by a wall, “crawling her hand along the texture of its stone”—and starts hitting on her. “How ’bout takin’ off those dark glasses honey? I’d like t’see yer eyes,” he says; she responds by asking about the three-dial “pilot’s watch” on his wrist. He sours when her incessant questions blow his cover as a fighter pilot who, we learn, is in town for a top-secret “operation”—presumably the doomed Bay of Pigs Invasion, which indeed took place in spring 1961.
As a rock ’n’ roll band plays in the next room, beside a potluck table piled with such delicacies as plain gelatin, hot salami, potato boats, milk, and “blue water” (a diluted mixture of “briefly heated blueberries”), the interloper turns violent. Girtle, the invisible maid, saves Mice by rolling a barrel of baking yeast at him. Mice runs off and disappears into a cornfield, presumably for good.
Set in this cartoonish time and place, and filled with bizarro visions of nascent South Florida suburbia, Levine’s rendering of our national culture isn’t exactly sinister—or even damning. It’s just straight-up surreal. Sure, lots of places can be described as weird, lonely, and hollow at their core. But few belie that reality with such an elaborate charade of neighborliness, set against a cheerful backdrop of swaying palm trees and slow sunsets. And that, my friend, is as American as apple pie.
Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine
Verse Chorus Press
2024