More Mennonites, eh?

The Mennonite in a little black dress is Rhoda Janzen, a Ph.D., poet, author, professor of English and creative writing. She is a young woman who portrays herself to me in this memoir as obviously supremely intelligent, a me generation intellectual snob, well read and travelled, and spectacularly stupid! Surely I am not unkind in that assessment for she repeatedly asserts her “idiocy” when analyzing her personal relationships. Rhoda Janzen’s memoir of going home to mommy in California Mennonite Brethren country is highly praised by critics in some of the online literary reviews. It is described as a touching and humorous confession of sorts. One such review coupled with my own village theocracy childhood roused my curiosity sufficiently to order it from the local library.

One reviewer, a feminist writer, said she “literally laughed out loud” while reading it. While I found descriptions of some of the communal ways of her parents reminiscent and worthy of a chuckle I did not consider the whole a book of humour. Her preacher father (at one point she calls him “the Mennonite pope”) and especially her mother, welcomed her home uncritically for a year-long stay to recover from surgery, accident and a second broken marriage to the same guy. She is abundantly grateful but to me she displays certain condescension and a sense that she feels her strict childhood is somehow to blame for her adult problems.

I found myself feeling sorry for the girl’s plight as she reached for her mid-forties. I respected her thoughtful analysis of religion and her apparent ambivalence about it after her time at home. Yet from my old man’s perspective I felt negatively about Ms. Janzen’s story and the way it was written after I finished the book. It must be the generational thing. After all, her parents married ten years after my wife and I did and Ms. Janzen is some five years younger than our trucker/biker son.

The deployment of extremely boorish language of the four letter street and toilet variety on the one hand and the use on the other hand of excessively scholarly words rarely seen or heard by us ordinary horde of readers added little to the story. I got the impression that she and her intellectual peers commonly used what I have for some time thought of as a sort of childishly smart-ass method of expression in social gatherings and cocktail parties. Apparently her much older and very handsome bi-sexual, bi-polar and brilliant husband was particularly adept at entertaining gatherings in that genre. Perhaps that is why she fell in love with him on their first date. In the end, although he had been generally depressed, abusive, and expensive to keep through fifteen years of marriage, Ms. Janzen, it seems still “loved” him and was less upset by his years of abusiveness than by the fact that he left her for a guy named Bob from Gay.com.

Janzen completes the memoir by what I considered a serious analysis of the faith and traditions of her family and Mennonite friends in California. After the kind reception she always has with them she professes to understand and appreciate their simpler approach to life. She even hints at a return to those ways. Yet at the same time she has begun “dating” another guy from that group who had also left the Mennonite fold, is her intellectual equal, tall enough for her, but this time he is seventeen years younger than she and admittedly not someone she would take home for dinner. I think she is still a crazy mixed-up kid!

To learn a little more about Janzen and Mennonite in a little black dress, you may wish to read the Andrea Sachs Q & A interview with Janzen at http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/ .