A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity
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A modern floating world: Whitney Otto's beauties set adrift
INTERVIEW BY ELLEN KANNER
Love is the great connection. It links one person to another, creating something larger than itself. It links the past with the present in Whitney Otto's new, wonderfully named novel A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity.
The book's title comes from a 17th century Japanese wood block print depicting ukiyo or the Floating World -- in which one lives only in the moment, drifting through life as though carried by water. Though it's centuries old, Otto finds the Floating World entirely modern. She's been there herself. "You're hanging out with your friends, in a job not a career. You know this isn't what you should be doing, but it's so pleasant to be doing nothing," says the novelist whose works include How to Make an American Quilt and The Passion Dream Book. Otto set A Collection of Beauties not in ancient Japan but in San Francisco in the 1980s, with an ensemble cast all in their transitional 20s. She links the old and modern Floating Worlds by starting each of the book's 12 chapters with a ukiyo print and the story behind each work. Every one concerns love, just as important to Japanese artists like Utamaro and Yoshitoshi as it is to Otto. "Love is the lodestar by which we steer our lives -- particularly when we're young," says the author, speaking from her home in Portland, Oregon. Your 20s are "kind of exhilarating love years, even as they can also be the heartbreak years. You may not have wisdom, but love is huge. It ends up determining a lot of decisions." Otto, 45, found it easy to tap into the self she was 20 years ago. "I don't think there's anything in the book directly lifted from my own life, I just remember what all that felt like. Everyone has, more or less, the same love experiences at that age." Her characters are awash in the joy and madness and terror that's all part of love, even if they're pretending otherwise. In the beginning, characters like Jelly, the book's aloof beauty, explain away their feelings. "No one pines for anyone. All arrangements and previous arrangements are far too casual to provoke unhappiness or longing. When it is accepted that all things have a course to run, then it is very easy to like each other tremendously." Jelly and her friends may be floating, but they're not slackers. They're not tattooed, they pay the rent, they go to work, much like Otto herself, who after college worked as a bookkeeper in a dentist's office. "I wanted to show the bookkeepers, construction workers, secretaries. They went to college, they're not idiots. These people are necessary, but they're taken for granted and not rewarded. They're invisible." Being invisible has its drawbacks, but you can also get away with a lot. "When I think about my 20s, it was really fun. I was flying under the radar. I didn't have to go home and pretend I wasn't high to my parents," says Otto, who makes drugs as much a fact for her characters as it was for her. "When you don't have any money, drugs become a diversion for middle-class kids," she recalls. "If I'd had the money to travel, I don't think I'd ever have smoked pot or taken mushrooms. But drugs make everything kind of entertaining. Here I was living in this crummy little place, thinking, I can't believe I, Whitney Otto, am living here. But when you smoke pot, it becomes theater." As one of the novel's characters observes, "The best thing about drugs . . . is the rituals attached: the procurement, the taste, the etiquette. . . . It is almost tribal: it can almost make you feel like you belong." Belonging becomes increasingly important to these characters who begin the novel just drifting, never thinking about tomorrow. The problem with the Floating World, says Otto, is "no one is tethered to anything. You're not attached, you're in temp jobs, house sitting or renting empty apartments, not marrying, not being faithful to your friends. You're up to betrayal. You can't count on things." Though the characters try to float along, by the novel's end even Jelly is humbled by love and loss and the intense feelings they provoke. She wonders, "Why is it that love and jealousy push us to such extremes of logic, leading us so far afield that logic is no longer logic? So extreme that all thoughts defy what is known of human behavior." "I wanted the concerns of the characters to become deeper, more profound. I wanted the arc of a novel emotionally and thematically," says Otto. If love is the emotional core of the book, ukiyo is its theme. After completing The Passion Dream Book in 1996, Otto attended a ukiyo exhibit "even though wood block prints weren't my favorite," she says. "It's very mannered, there isn't a lot to grasp onto. It's one of those art forms where something has to force you to take a good look. Suddenly I found it really appealing. I thought, this will be my next book." Art, be it quilting in America, painting in Europe or wood block prints in Japan, has been featured in all of Otto's novels. She explores the creative process but wraps it up in readable books. "I like accessible novels of ideas. My all-time favorite novel, Lolita, is all about ideas, but it's got it all -- plot, characters, it's very American -- and it's pure filth," she says with a laugh. In order to get a sense of the Floating World the Japanese artists portrayed, Otto immersed herself in Japanese art, even traveling to Japan. "I'm always frustrated by my own limits of my time and intellect. I want to go and know more, I'm so aware of what I don't know," she says. "There's not enough time and resources to pursue every avenue you want to go down." At first, Otto did not know how she would combine modern love and ancient art, but she likes to take chances. "I was a game girl," she says about her 20-something self. She still is, and perhaps one of the most compelling parts of Otto's book is the juxtaposition of the chilly formality of Japanese ukiyo with warm-blooded modern characters made too vulnerable, too human by love. "Everything I write seems to be about love and betrayal and friendship and connection and the leap of faith love requires," says Otto. "It's one of the most extraordinary and complex elements of life."
Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.
Author photo by John Riley.
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