By Trevor Butterworth

Published in The Washington Post's Book World
August 17, 2003

A GIRL COULD STAND UP
By Leslie Marshall

Halfway through the first page of A Girl Could Stand Up, Elray Mayhew's exertions made me want to lie down. First, she turns invisible, which is okay. I can handle that. But then, in quick succession, she disappears, evanesces, falls "in with the ions that ricochet from wall to wall" and de-atomizes "into a sweet mist of selflessness" before attaining "a fine high orbit of mock omniscience."

Wow. I always say there's nothing like omniscience to mock an author. How, for instance, does one evanesce if already invisible? And if an atomizer produces mist, wouldn't adding the prefix "de" reverse the process (unless, of course, you happen to be armed with a deatomizer from "Men in Black")?

Now I am not so stubborn as to be incapable of accepting that the moon in Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics contains rich, clotted milk (if you reach into the crevices) or that John Irving's Owen Meany is an instrument of God. And I am only too happy to surf the shallow waves of literal seas or walk on magic-realist waters. But trying to follow Elray as she set about writing a letter left me reeling.

And that is a shame, because once past its wholly ludicrous and largely irrelevant prologue, A Girl Could Stand Up turns out to be relatively free of mystification. Yes, Marshall continues to stumble over ideas; but she has the good sense to keep them from getting in the way of an otherwise engaging, genre-blending read -- part bildungsroman, part domestic comedy, part memoir.

As with Irving, Marshall's spiritual godfather, the comedy emerges from the grotesque. On a birthday trip to Glen Echo amusement park (the entire novel is set in Washington, D.C.), 6-year-old Elray insists that her parents take her on the Tunnel of Love. Though Elray is warned that she won't like it, this is "her day to call the shots." And so, carried by a leaky gondola through hills alive with the mechanical sounds of mooing cows and a yodeling Heidi, her parents drift toward their appointed end under the light of a silvery moon. Left physically scarred by the accident in a manner that proves as telekinetic as the mark of Voldemort on Harry Potter, little orphan Elray becomes the ward of two uncles, one of whom is more comfortable in the guise of an aunt. But unlike Owen Meany, who embarks on a journey to self-destruction after inadvertently killing his best friend's mother with a foul ball, Elray takes a more sensible approach to having led her parents to their death: She gets over it. Not that her path isn't strewn with spiritual obstacles. A preoccupation with the morbid drives her to explore the deepest crypts of the National Cathedral, play dead in a makeshift coffin and, in quite the most exciting passage in the book, foolishly treat the Potomac as her Hellespont.

The deft pacing of these episodes, with litigation against the amusement park (a process thankfully more amusing than it sounds), carries the story toward a natural climax -- which, unfortunately, is not observed. Marshall has a gift for vivid narrative action, but she loves her unorthodox family too much not to ensure that each member is saved, even though it means meandering past the dramatic arc she has expertly created.

Naturally, such elaborately happy endings enjoy a large constituency, but I resent being hit over the head with a happy stick. And with the exception of Elray, I found it hard to care very much about a troupe of wacky stage extras whose wackiness is no more than thumbnail deep. Unless played purely for humor (think P.G. Wodehouse), the heavy hand of eccentricity or the bizarre works best when it reaches into the unknown and grabs onto a big idea (or several big ideas): art's triumph over communism in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita or the post-1950s moral failings of America in Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Yet Marshall, who has an aptitude for comedy, steps back from her Queer as Folk meets the Brady Bunch material as if too much laughter would be cruel. And as a result, motive and action in A Girl Could Stand Up are borne by nothing more momentous than the notions that "unconventional families can be loving families" and that "life is worth living." For a beach read, that may be just enough; for those who enjoy the life-affirming messages of popular magazines, this may be the novel for you. But I couldn't help thinking that Marshall has enough talent as a storyteller to aim much higher -- just as long as she stays clear of the "fine high orbit of mock omniscience."