The Talking Room

by Marianne Hauser

A pregnant thirteen-year-old’s apocalyptic vision of the late 20th century

The Talking Room reflects an apocalyptic vision of the late 20th century, seen through the eyes of a pregnant thirteen-year-old who may not be a test tube baby. The Lesbian relationship between the mother J—wild, lost, beautiful—and competent Aunt V, a businesswoman, reveals itself to the reader as “the talking room” becomes the sounding board for the endless fights, endless reconciliations. V’s desperate search for the beloved J through the nights of waterfront bars is lightened by wildly comic excursions reminiscent of our great American humorists. With wit, poetic clarity and compassion, Marianne Hauser explores the paradoxes of our age—need for love yet flight from love, search for self yet self-destruction—a dilemma shared alike by today’s heterosexual and homosexual world. The author’s multifaceted view defies dogma or simplification as her characters draw us into their turbulent and deeply human drama.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Womens

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

In the course of her long career, Marianne Hauser published numerous works of fiction, including Prince Ishmael, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected by The New York Times as one of the year's outstanding books.

She worked as a literary critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, the New Republic, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Sewanee Review. She also was a columnist for Swiss and French periodicals and newspapers, which allowed her to travel throughout North Africa, India, China, Japan, and Hawaii from 1931-1939. She taught at Queens College in New York City from 1966-1978 and at New York University in 1979.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's a crazy book. Not because it's overtly surreal, or embodies psychological instability, or because of intensity, or because fundamentally impossible events take place (though there are shades of all of these, perhaps), but more because it's underwritten in a surging irrationality. Our central dysfunctional lesbian couple form a recognizable, if unstable unit, at least -- the desperately in love and seeking order vs. an alcoholic restlessness and carelessness (though we'll never know exactly the source of her self-immolating sorrow or incompleteness, she's as essentially hidden as Nora Flood). But what drives our narrator, their flippant precocious 13-year-old daughter, who seems to have nearly no desires or concerns or personality besides her place as a listener (through the wall, or to the sloganeering of radio) and a few impulses towards hedonism. All we have are her flutter of words, sardonic and inhuman, blasé where the events would seem to dictate sorrow or discomfit, pursuing half-formed aims without a shred of self-reflection. The effect is dizzying, distancing, guideless. But oddly pleasant? I couldn't figure out at first if I actually liked this lost experiment of the 70s and the original Fiction Collective, but in the end, an uneasy attachment somehow formed itself. By the last page, I had what felt to be actual emotions towards what was taking place, unexpectedly.

The actual events: B narrates the perpetually free-falling romance of J, her mother, and hypocritical real-estate-flipping Aunt V. B's professed interests: the radio, candy, and trysts with thoughtless errand boys. The cycle: drunken, angry (probably terminally depressed) J flies the coop, V mourns or hunts the dive bars of the five boroughs. Various other initials flit in and out -- at last I realized that they're all train lines (even U? That one gave me pause, but yes, it was still on old maps upon my arrival here a decade ago). B is my commute, or barring that Princess Q; while J guided me to north Brooklyn for a screening last night. Uncle D would take me, if desired, back to M's old Bay Ridge stomping grounds. But like everything else here, the satiric targets of this tumult of words and images remains somewhat unfixed, as are we -- without allegiances, without purpose, without even a flicker of something better out there beyond this suffocating malaise that we aren't even really allowed to be properly concerned by amid the constant battering of B's and Hauser's quick and witty wordings, fantastic turns of phrase but all for what besides the constant manic flutter of themselves, ever directing attention on an on around and away from what must at it's distressed but denying heart be a tragedy.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to put this down after the first few pages but I'm glad I stuck with it. Written in a breathless poetry-slam style before there were such things as poetry slams, it is at once maddening, vulgar, disgusting and incredibly amusing. A supposed satire told from the point of view of a nasty pregnant 13-year old about the relationship between her alcoholic mother and her crazy lesbian keeper. I'm not sure what the satire is though...

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this didn't always work for me but it's pretty fun(cool uncle character who looks like hitler, "The genocide we are committing on the seal folk will surely condemn us to a waterless hell-hole forever.") and i don't think anyone's going to write a better book about lesbian relationships as narrated by an obese 13 year old.

[Jon Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The talking room is about a pregnant 13 year old being raised by lesbian parents. Narrated by the girl the story takes place in New York City, during the years of blight and neglect. The smell of urine and polluted water pulses through its pages. This is not a novel celebrating queer life. It has no agenda. It is vulgar, hilarious and brilliant. Her prose is precise and concrete, full of sensual detail, such that I felt like I was living and breathing the air of its rooms and walking down the streets.
The characters are mostly identified by a single initial, and Hauser uses this device in a most Joycean manner. B, the narrator, lives with her Aunt V, and her biological mother (there is some suggestion early on that she might be a test tube baby), J. The father of her unborn child is O. There are also Uncle D and another named lesbian couple, Q and T. But V and J, and their unending marital warfare, dominate the book.
B lies in bed listening to her transistor radio and the raging fights, discussions, tantrums, and torrid sex of V and J in the room below hers. Half-heard phrases float through her mind, mingling with dreams, memories, reveries and fantasies. B is one obstreperous, horny, mean young woman. She is in full revolt against her parents and her vitriol is especially reserved for Aunt V.
Aunt V is a successful business woman, buying and renovating brownstones, but is obsessed with J, who is a promiscuous, bisexual alcoholic who despises V, but is totally dependent on her. V wants a child and cannot have one, so she pesters J into getting pregnant. Much of the first part of the novel is taken up with their struggle to either get in-vitro fertilization (a technology that existed but had not been successful when the novel was published, the first test tube baby was born in 1978), the traditional turkey baster, or the old fashioned way: pick up sailors in dives and fuck them in alleyways. J prefers option 3, and V in desperate fits of jealousy and rage roams sailor bars in search of her lost lover. These encounters are described by B in the most wonderful, filthy detail. All of the sex in the book is like this. Hauser is an exuberant defiler. To call B and this novel ‘transgressive’ is to rob if of its pungency. It is a dick in the eye, an assault, with humor, on propriety and lies of every kind. Writing like this by a man would be celebrated. But this novel, one of the few Hauser titles in print, is utterly lost and forgotten. One of the most enjoyable, ironic, and resonant battles in the book is that waged by Aunt V against B’s weight: B is fat, and likes being fat. She wants to eat, a lot. She is furious that V is trying to control her diet. Her weight conveniently covers up her pregnancy, but that is not why she is heavy, no. She likes to eat as much as she likes to fuck. And she is certain she will be forced to have an abortion.
J is an explosion of invective and violence. She gets drunk, blacks out, smashes furniture, spews curses, beats V up. She is virtually indifferent to her daughter B. Like Robin in Nightwood, J is uncontrollable, and given to alcoholic wandering. She disappears towards the end of the book, and the last chapters are devoted to V’s pathetic search for her. At one point she brings in another J, but this J, also a drunk, promiscuous bisexual, is loquacious, and non-violent. V is reduced to begging her to hit her but she won’t. It isn’t nice. In a rage V kicks her out.
This is foremost a novel of voice and consciousness. B sees more than a single narrator can see, or hears more, as her narrative drifts through time. There is a strong surreal dimension to the work, but it is overwhelmingly realistic in feel, as genuine realism must include the irrational, beyond time and space dimensions of reality, the subjective experience of a mind and body in the world. That a woman in her 60’s should choose a 13 year old for narrator, and set a book entirely within the subculture of gay NY in the 70’s is just amazing. And outrageous. I pray, PRAY that Hauser will be discovered, as Dawn Powell was in the 90's. Her obscurity is not so much an insult to Hauser as to intelligent readers of fiction.

[Keshia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Talking Room is perhaps one of the most surreal works I have ever read. It tells the story of V and J and B, three female characters living in a world that is so intricately intertwined they have almost no choice but to drive each other insane. Auntie V is the business-like, no nonsense, rather neurotic woman who somehow holds everything together financially. J is the lost spirit alcoholic who may or may not be unfaithful to V. And B, who is their possible test tube daughter, who is thirteen and pregnant and narrates the entire story. The entire narrative skips around, from segments of B's connection to these two women's lives both before and after her conception. And even calling it a "narrative" seems almost wrong, it reads instead like rough, grammarless, slammed out poetry. In this way of writing, the reader is intimately connected to B psychologically, and in turn feels the deep running roots of her connection to both V and J. Overall is it a thrilling ride through the emotional highs and lows of these women, with the reader hardly knowing what is truth and what is not. Overall it feels like reading something wild.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a review that praised this book, so I thought I'd give it a try. It just didn't do it for me.