Molly Notkin

Arc

The novel gives Molly Notkin almost no life of her own and then uses her as a major source for everyone else's; her arc is an argument about evidence. Her own attested life fits in five texture events: the M.I.T. film-theory program where she was Joelle's upperclassman (1, 4), the tormented biweekly love of an erection-neurotic Pabst scholar (2), the Orals passed in a Karl Marx costume (5), and a brownstone co-op inherited from Joelle (3) — which happens to be the apartment where JOI shot the final cartridge, so that the book's most talkative theorist of the Entertainment literally lives inside its set and never treats that as remarkable. Everything else she is, she is as a source: the party where her costume holds forth about Marx while her best friend freebases to the edge of death in her blue-lacquered bathroom (6) — Notkin the film scholar missing the scene playing one room away — and then the technical interview (8), where she "sings like a canary" and delivers the single richest cache of Joelle / JOI / Avril lore in the novel.

The timeline's discipline is to hold that cache at arm's length, because the book does. Every load-bearing item is hearsay with the chain shown: the Death-Mother content of the Entertainment, which she has only from Joelle, who performed in it and never saw it (9); the acid-Thanksgiving origin of the veil, "no kind of metaphor or ruse" by her oath but secondhand by construction, standing unresolved against the novel's competing hints that the face under the veil may be unmarred (11); the mother's garbage-disposal suicide (12); the sobriety condition and her sole-source flourish, the widow's planted Wild Turkey bottle (13); and at the chain's far end "Avril as Death... very possibly Death incarnate" — Notkin reporting Joelle's impression, triple hearsay, garnished with her own glosses (10). Even her hardest "fact," the real name Lucille Duquette (15), exists nowhere else in the novel to check. She resolves none of the cruxes she feeds; the file's whole shape is that ruling.

What rescues her from being a mere unreliability exhibit is the one place her testimony bends, and which way. She tells the lamp everything about the dead and the past — family catastrophe, sexual history, her own theories cited to Deleuze (14) — but on the single question that could touch the living Joelle, her whereabouts, she swears "far, very far away" (15), having stood in the WYYY studio weeks earlier describing the same facility as "only half a house" in the local low-rent metro (7). The contradiction is cited as written, and the economical reading is recorded as a reading: the canary lies in exactly one direction, shielding her friend. It rhymes with what Joelle saw in her from the start — the whiskers and costumes as "veiled veils," sororal twins in concealment (1) — a woman who will perform any amount of disclosure so long as the one covered thing stays covered. The range leaves her there: A.B.D., interrogated, loyal in the only clause that counted, her testimony feeding three of the book's standing cruxes and settling none.