A Novel About California’s Pluckiest Virgin Is Getting A Second Chance

Names, the heroine of Cynthia Buchanan’s 1972 debut novel, Maiden, thinks to herself, “are so vital.” And with a name like Fortune, you’d have to try your luck in California. Although she prefers Fortunée: she calls this a “higher-type pronunciation,” though this also marks it as a maiden name. She’s never gotten lucky. At 30, Fortune is still a virgin, “and her virginity had burrowed in.” “Would life forget about her?” runs her inner monologue, “Overlook her? Pass her by? Misdial? Anxiety became a lifestyle.” Perhaps, as Fortune later comes to believe, names are “not all they’re cracked up to be.” In the tour-de-force of an opening chapter, Fortune emerges as a post-modern pastiche of a girl; we know little about her background, other than that she’s poorly educated, from somewhere in the South, and has a brother and a small handful of romantic disappointments whose impact she tries to suppress. She’s papered over the void of her virginity and her background like a teenager decorating a bedroom wall. She is a woman putting herself together from the spare parts of mass culture, a collage of magazine clippings, ’50s movie stars, and dating how-to guides, trying to form herself into someone a man might want—and the book itself is composed of, among other things, an advertisement for a dating service, a reality show audition transcript, court documents, and personal ads. It’s an allegory for America, its manufactured, impossible dreams, its naivete and excess, its delusional self-mythologizing. On publication, the New York Times grouped Maiden with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays, calling the three "a natural trilogy," and going so far as to suggest that Maiden might be "the best of the three." The novel’s precise, time-stamped detail may explain why it faded from view while Play It as It Lays and The Bell Jar became modern classics (though all three feature some attitudes and language that now reads as offensively outdated). But Maiden’s specific concerns are also what make it feel, if not exactly timely, like a premonition or a warning. “Language,” for instance, “haunted [Fortune]. The advertised word … the ‘you’ in advertising, the impossible ‘you’ spoke to her.” Fortune is, like many a chick-lit heroine, constantly in search of a job and a boyfriend, but Buchanan is keenly aware of the lonely logic of commodification that links her two pursuits. Now being reissued by Hagfish, and read in a contemporary context, Maiden looks just as much like a funhouse mirror for our own times as it is an artifact of its own, presaging the dating apps, the endless scroll, the conspicuous consumption and pastiched personalities of our era, as it does a reflection of its own.

Read it at Defector ↗

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