The Good Old Days in The Good Mother
Our sense of the avant-garde has certainly been confused by the retrotrendy, and the cutting edge in all the arts has been blunted by the pillaging of the recent past. We are surrounded by Elvis Presley songs piped into supermarkets, books about Niagara Falls as icon, and slick, urban restaurants that look like roadside diners. Garter belts and suspenders are back, and Calvin Klein's jeans ads look like stills from Rebel Without a Cause; even the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent production of The Merry Wives of Windsor was done in 1950s style, complete with yellowed programs advertising console TVs. There is in all of this marketing of our youth something arch, campy, half-parodic. "Nihilistic nostalgia," as it has been called,1 uses the emotional power of the cherished object while desecrating it; it tugs at our heartstrings while it spits in our eye. Nihilistic nostalga can be more than ultra-chic Downtown style. Consider the nostalgia and simultaneous ironizing of nostalgia inherent in Twyla Tharp's dances Nine Sinatra Songs, in Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in Audrey Flack's paintings of tear-bespangled Madonnas and dew-bespangled roses, in Robert Venturi's "decorated sheds," just to construct a preliminary list. The disturbing ambivalence and ambiguitv of tone is found as well in Sue Miller's novel The Good Mother. Anna,