American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee Review

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American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee ReviewThere are so many excellent and thoughtful Amazon reviews of this book that there is little to add. I will just make some comments on the writing and structure - the Eng Lit major stuff. This is a truly first-rate and very disturbing work, very skillfully modulated. It's a horror story of about as psychotic a mother as could be and the devastation she created in her abuse and exploitation of her children. The known murders she committed seem just part of her detachment from anything or anyone outside her anger, viciousness, ambition and just sheer perversion. As a tale of showbiz, poverty and struggle, the tragic triangle of Rose, June and Gypsy is compelling. It's far more, though, the tale of how Gypsy built her invented self and turned her prodigious talent from just getting by to a public persona that was glamorous but fragile; she never escaped the binds of her mother or worked through the fractured relationships with her sister, the child star of the family. The story of her life is complex and enriched by the context of New York post-World War I, vaudeville and burlesque, and the ever-existing links between way out showbiz personalities, crime bosses, and hustlers.
What makes the book work as well as it does is the very fine line Ms Abbott treads in her exposition - stray just a little and it would lose credibility and impact. It doesn't glamorize or trivialize the world of vaudeville. The figures that are usually made larger-than-life or caricatures come across as real - the (in)famous Minsky brothers, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Fanny Brice, Mike Todd, Otto Preminger and many others. The backdrop setting gives body to the struggles, fights, deals and machinations that surrounded mama Rose and makes Gypsy's work and life come alive, to the extent that, as other Amazon reviews note, you really wish at an emotional level that somehow she and June could have had a chance and that the almost inexorable damage, physical as well as mental, could have been ended. The consequences of the damage dominate her later years where the egocentric courage, disguises and ambition become more and more amoral and almost indifferent.
It takes a superior writer to make all this balanced, convincing, vivid and fair in presentation and judgment. Ms Abbott never lets the writing get in the way of the story. It is this that gives the story its resonance. She avoids psychoanalytic guesswork - much of Gypsy and just about all of Rose is beyond understanding. It avoids the sensational, moralistic judgments or efforts to push some very good stories too far. The book has no melodramatic flourishes about a life and society of melodrama. It's very restrained but at the same time empathic - a masterly balancing of tone and content. The narrative technique of moving between her early life, (relative) old age and days of public glory is initially a little disorienting but seems to me to have been a good choice. Gipsy's life is very much a jigsaw of pieces and a linear biography would not have captured the complexity of her many selves. The writing is unobtrusive, with deft sketches and clarity of presentation and pacing. There are some striking phrases that are quite haunting. One I recall talks of how Rose has so much control over Gypsy since she knew too much about the mechanics of her self-creation - "where all the damaged parts were stashed, the lovely lies they invented together to fill in the gaps."
I think this is a book that will stay with me. I found it disturbing and very sad. Poor child - how could she ever have become whole?
American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee Overview

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