This country is still dominated by Vaudeville. The reminder popped up again, as I was going through some old files to do cleanup and ran across some comments I had recorded after I finally got around to reading Joe Klein’s Primary Colors. Convenient racial, sexual, and regional stereotypes populate Klein’s cartoonish ‘southern’ landscape.  Even among its other rigidities, however, the novel's rather old-fashioned misogyny stands out, particularly in the way Klein details the physical imperfections of women around the nation.

Here is a very young girl from an African-American blue-collar family in Arkansas, portrayed as loyal supporters of the Stantons (Clintons):

            Loretta was their daughter, the sort of girl who was destined for obesity -- you could see it coming in her upper arms, her thighs -- but, for the moment, deeply, adolescently luscious.  (Chapter II)

 Here is his description of a friend of the prospective First Lady's:

            Richard [Carville] would have despised her even if she weren't dowdy and awful, even if she didn't always wear power suits and running shoes and Gloria Steinem aviators, even if she wasn't always rousting around in her purse for her compact, fussing with her hair, pulling out lipstick and applying it in the most ridiculous manner, squeezing her puckered lips around it, rolling it around once, twice, then saying -- always -- "There!" (Chapter III)

Here is the overweight lesbian hired by the novel's southern-governor main character to do oppo research (sure):

            Olivia Holden was wearing, I swear, a tan down vest, an orange-and-green tie-dyed muumuu and an Aussie outback hat.  She was enormous, with fierce, piercing blue eyes, hair turning gray, skin that was waxy pale and translucent in a sickly way. (Chapter IV)

That "hair turning gray" seems to be the clincher; here is a description of a woman in a Miami retirement home:

            He was about to reach down for it, but a woman with orange hair and absurd breasts that spilled from a peasant blouse got there first.  She smiled at him naughtily, then hooked her arm through his and pulled him toward her, nuzzling her chest provocatively against his ribs.  He succumbed to this . . . remaining there as she took his face in her hands, stared at him dreamily and kissed him full on the lips, leaving a hideous tangerine smear. (Chapter VI)

This is probably the most offensive description of the lot, except perhaps for that of the fourteen-year-old girl, quoted above. Not that my own mother is in a Jewish old folks’ home, but this passage does remind me that when my mother was young and pretty, she would never have dated Klein.

Here is his description of the mother of the woman he loves:

            Her mother was dressed like a Gypsy, or perhaps the "sale" rack (why is this word in quotation marks?) at a secondhand folk costume store.  She wore a high-necked, embroidered -- red and black on white cotton -- Russian-style narodniki blouse; a floor-length black Indian skirt with elaborate creweled flowers in horizontal bands, and a multicolored Andean (or perhaps African) bandanna, which covered her head.  I thought for a moment that she might be a recent chemotherapy patient,

            [now that's a real hoot]

            but stray wisps of gray snuck out at her ears -- this head covering was a fashion statement. She was wearing dangly Mexican silver and turquoise earrings.  The immediate effect was . too much. (Chapter VII)

            Probably as offensive as the descriptions themselves is the fact that Mr. Klein tries to sanitize his narrative voice by making his narrator an educated, sensitive black guy. (Sure.)

            Doesn’t work. The narrator is like some unfortunate woman's blind date in a nightmare: his own appearance may not be a sign from on high that the global War of Eugenics has been won, but he still has a hypercritical eye for flaws in potential sex objects. And Klein's female characters are all described thus:  their clothes come first, their physique second, and a few selected facial features come last if at all. We've got a long way to go, baby.

            Since the nation's capital is hardly known as a fashion capital, perhaps it is not surprising that the journalistic confines of Washington, DC -- which, for insecurities, pettiness, and competition over nothing, is a lot like living in a giant English Department – received Klein’s novel as insiderish sophistication.

            The giveaway here is what Klein envisions when he wants to say something nice about a woman. For all those pundits who thought "Anonymous" might be Karl Lagerfeld, here, in all earnestness, is the woman the narrator loves, dressed up:

             . . . it was the first time I ever saw Daisy in a skirt. It was a kilt, to be precise, of a heathery plaid -- and much shorter than the kilts I remembered from school; she was also wearing a black blazer, a sky-blue turtleneck  . . . (GAG), dangly enamel earrings, black stockings -- and heels. She looked spectacular. (Chapter VII) 

To address this in the pseudo-southern vernacular Mr. Klein seems to appreciate:

Listen. Joe honey. Let me tell you a couple of things. One, even when a woman is really dressed up -- I mean, even if she is loaded for bear -- number one, she does not wear danglebob earrings with a blazer and turtleneck. She also probably does not wear "sky-blue" with a heathery plaid. I trust those "black stockings" are actually opaque tights, under a kilt. And she most certainly does not wear high heels with a kilt, unless she's trying to outdo Courtney Love in Preppywhore as Kinderwhore, which one hopes has no vogue except in the comics. I am not saying this to be critical, Joe, bless your heart, but there’s a difference between retro and totally dork-ay. There’s also a difference between using vulgar stereotypes about people you don’t know or people who lacked your opportunities, and having some genuine class.