American Romances: Essays

This collection of mordant, poignant and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry and incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.”

The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers in order to be accepted into the community has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: There’s a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to all of our seamy, lurid cultural voyeurism. Whose stories are ours to tell and whose are not? Despite the collection’s mostly playful and entertaining tone, what’s being discussed quite seriously are the ways in which America has tried and failed to craft and tell its own story.

Fully embracing the theory of the literary Romance as a place where the probable opens up into the impossible, Brown lets her imagination run wild and envisions unlikely meetings and fantastical connections that span the course of America’s cultural history: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne intersect as representatives of west coast hedonism and east coast Puritanism; Gertrude Stein presides over a same-sex religious movement; John Wayne and Shane stand in for the author’s father who may or may not have been JFK’s wing man during the Cuban Missile Crisis; a mad Finnish-American painter turns Seattle’s Hooverville into heaven; H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man reveals his/her secret sex life.