Nudist Familie

Nudist Familie

‘The Nakeds’: A young, broken girl and her nudist family
“The Nakeds,” by Lisa Glatt. (Regan Arts)
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“The naked and the nude,” Robert Graves observed, “stand as wide apart as love from lies.”
That slippery distinction could be the epigraph for Lisa Glatt’s sly new book, “The Nakeds.” Glatt, a poet whose most recent novel was “A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That,” knows just how to peel away the pretensions of modern life. In the sunlight of her prose, everybody looks pink and vulnerable.
As “The Nakeds” begins in 1970, all kinds of things are shattering: a NASA satellite, a toxic marriage, a drinking glass, the bones of a little girl. Asher and Nina Teller are having another vicious argument when their daughter, Hannah, decides she’s had enough and walks to school by herself. Trying to stay off a neighbor’s lawn, Hannah veers into the street just as a young drunk careens by:
“It was a confrontation,” Glatt writes, “the briefest coming-together and breaking-apart, which propelled Hannah into the sky so that she was as far away from her warring parents . . . as possible, in the air, turning over — her two feet not even sharing the earth with them.”
That violent opening fuses several storylines in “The Nakeds,” a sharp, unsettling novel about damaged people limping through life. Young Hannah will spend the next decade enduring a series of orthopedic treatments to rebuild her shattered leg. A toe-to-groin cast with some Frankenstein hardware moves her to the sidelines of adolescence, where she is neither one of the cool injured athletes nor the pitiable handicapped. Suspended in a state of perpetual healing, she’s trapped indoors and inside her head, and Glatt captures her precocious, analytical mind as she strains at playing hopeful year after year, while one doctor after another makes promises and then defects.
To some indecipherable extent, the emotional energy here is autobiographical: Glatt suffered a similar accident when she was a child and spent years in treatment. But much of this novel imagines the wholly fictitious life of the young man who hit Hannah and left her on the road. He’s a good-looking alcoholic so crippled by guilt that he lurks around the hospital and her home. Glatt brings us right into a consciousness fermenting in self-pity: “Alone — even stoned alone or drunk alone — meant alone with his thoughts and his thoughts inevitably turned to the girl.” Unwilling to confess to his crime or seek therapy for his addiction, he grows even more immobile than Hannah.
This psychological drama slides along an electric wire of suspense, but what really charges “The Nakeds” is a weird development in Hannah’s home: Her newly remarried mother and hip, young stepfather want to improve their marriage by being totally honest and open, an admirable if naive goal they pursue by taking off all their clothes. “They turned up the thermostat and moved around the house,” Glatt writes. “Her mom did laundry, scooped the clothes they were not wearing into the washing machine. [Her stepfather] pushed the vacuum in the living room. He sat down at the desk in the den and studied. . . . It was a lot to see. It was more of them than Hannah wanted to see.” Soon, the family is packing up the car and heading off for weekends to a nudist colony.
Not entirely coincidentally, as I was reading “The Nakeds,” I was also enjoying Mark Haskell Smith’s new book, “Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World” (Grove, $25). It’s a breezy survey of the history of “organized nonsexual social nudism,” a phrase that could deflate even the most titillated high school boy. Fortunately, Smith offers lots of funny anecdotes about his first-person research. As you might imagine, the clothing-optional world is not all Adonis and Aphrodite playing volleyball. “Follow the beautiful buttocks in the brochures,” Smith writes, “and she will lead you to a bunch of sun-ravaged retirees sitting around the pool.”
That’s pretty much what Hannah discovers, too, reflecting once again Glatt’s own experience as the child of a nudist. But for Glatt, this too-revealing setting is a perfect arena in which to explore Hannah’s peculiar status as someone who is never nude — who can never be nude. “There was her leg covered up with plaster,” Glatt writes. “She was always hidden. . . . She wasn’t whole, not really. She was a girl in pieces.”
Peculiar as Hannah may feel, though, Glatt implies that each of these characters remains veiled and fragmented. The stepfather insists, “Honesty is important. Getting it all out in the open,” but for all that candor, he’s a self-righteous philanderer, as eager to party as any randy suburbanite in John Updike’s “Couples.” His preaching about the benefits of openness and shame-free pleasure merely cloaks his own betrayals. And the drunk driver who injured Hannah so many years ago is layered in his own lies and self-deceptions.
Glatt’s debut collection of poetry from 1996 was titled “Monsters and Other Lovers,” which is a tempting description of the men in this novel, too. Dressed or undressed, every one of them is a cad. And yet they’re not actually monsters — not Hannah’s hypocritical father, not her creepy stepfather, not even the young alcoholic who wastes his life in pickled remorse. They may be stripped bare in this compelling novel, but they’re never denied their humanity, their urgings to be better, kinder, more honest. If they sometimes look ridiculous in these pages, well, don’t we all?
Ron Charles is the editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles .
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