Eva’s Man (1976), Gayl Jones’s second novel, isn’t notable for scenes or sentences, voices or characters. It’s a serviceable rendering of a lived-in, monochrome world. And that world is sickening. This effect is the novel’s sole distinction. The narrator, Eva, achieves this by recounting her history with men and boys, nearly all of whom are sexual predators.
The structure is fragmentary, chapters and sections only loosely organizing the whole. It mimics the hazy, shifting memory of a reticent, evasive woman becoming unhinged. As such, it isn’t always clear what’s going on, which seems mostly to be the point, and individual pieces lack pith, which likely isn’t. Though Eva veers between various periods of her life within each chapter, basically the novel moves (or oozes) forward: A murder, postmortem genital mutilation, and the abuse, witnessed and experienced, behind her crimes.
Jones has described Eva’s Man as a horror story. She nearly let it go out of print, having second thoughts about the harshness of her depiction of black men. (There was no need to worry. Every lewd remark and nauseating act she writes about could be attributed to certain men of any race. The evidence is a mere Google search away. There was no need to worry about the book.) The pain is painful and so is the pleasure. It’s graphic, without much letup.
I took more than a few breaks: Emerson. Like Seneca, an influence of his, indelible lines, questionable lines, moving lines, and howlers mingle together. And Pokémon. I’ll write the entry for my biographical timeline: “November 2022 – David Alvarado read Balzac and Emerson. On his latest Pokémon adventure, he went with a twelve Pokémon rotation, having demoted his Gumshoos (nicknamed, for reasons unknown to scholars, 'Gooj popolo') to PC limbo.” And movies, some of which gave me pause. In one, an alleged classic from the 40s, The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on an alleged classic by James M. Cain, a man unbothered by moral qualms and blind to any obstacle between him and his desire, or between desire and gratification, steals a kiss from another man’s wife. He has absolutely nothing to recommend him. Yet the viewer is supposed to believe the wife surrenders helplessly to a stranger’s charmless hunger or force of will. Lana Turner. With that guy, among the most unlikely candidates for a smoldering love affair. Talentless homely drifter degenerate lucky to live in an age before background checks. And it’s presented as merely bad behavior, not as ludicrous and creepy. Another horror story. The Criterion Collection actually featured an array of horror movies (of the 80s) in October. One can find more fantastical entries in the genre, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s near-perfect Near Dark or Jack Sholder’s obscure gem The Hidden. And one can also find the porous boundary between horror and crime, or horror and reality, in such movies as George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, which brings to mind examples outside of the 80s, such as Bob Clark’s Black Christmas or a favorite of mine, one of the best crime/horror movies I’ve ever seen, David Fincher’s Zodiac. I once watched it in the Castro Theater, where everyone was shocked into silence, except one man somewhere in the audience, who broke it with a laugh. A sinister laugh. Which brings me back to the novel.
Eva’s Man is a fairly punishing read but not pointlessly so.
