Anyu Ching

There is scarcely anything debuting about Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom except for the fact that this half-movie, half-musical, half-dance-routine, half-half-and-half, is somehow McDonnell’s first novel. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two previous short story collections, McDonnell comes out swinging—or, perhaps more accurately, stepping one-and, two-and—with this dazzling spectre of a book wherein all previously mentioned halves melt and meld together to form one multi-coloured, multihyphenate, multigenerational disco ball that may, or may not, smack you right in the face.

We open on an archival print of a woman—the woman in this instance being Ingrid Bergman—in tears. And throughout Lonesome Ballroom, similar images depicting women in various stages of laughter, grief, or madness bookend the five different movements of McDonnell’s cacophony. The conductor of this discordant orchestra is none other than Betty (aka “Why are you crying, Betty?” or “Betty, what are you doing here?”), a heroine who puts the heroin in, well, whatever she’s having at the moment. Usually an Old Fashioned, but lately it’s been looking more like a breakdown.

So what if I was living through a non-era that would be deemed a dark age a few years
hence? So what if mine was a generation that would never merit a name, the one whose
anti-war parents had started a war that would never end? So what if explosives I could
see but never hear traced their way across the same screen traipsed across by spring-
breaking coeds seconds later, words like “liberated” and “peaches” stitched across each
velour ass?

Through a series of flashbacks, montages, close-ups, jump cuts, and insert-other-film-terminology-here, Betty sings dances hurtles through the story of her life, which is also the story of her mother and her mother’s mother, in search for an answer to the question, “What are you doing here?” or at least, “Why are you crying?”

We chase Betty like an owner to an unleashed, unchipped, unwavering animal as she recants recounts Hollywood’s Golden Age and her grandmother Betty’s lilting domesticity, second-wave feminism and her mother Violet’s patriarchal ambition. We chase her through childhood, car crashes, dorm rooms, Boyfriends A to H, empty art galleries, her roaring twenties, Girlfriend E, multiple Tuesdays, cigarette smoke, the front porch of her parents’ house where she meets and eventually marries the literal boy-next-door and it would’ve been a total cliché except in this self-described movie musical Betty runs over his dog hence, another car crash.

We chase her into the past, the future, the present (which, really, is just an encroachment of the past and the future). The fact that Lonesome Ballroom is able to maintain any sort of narrative structure at all is a testament to McDonnell’s brilliant command of the “sung bellowed” (struck through) written word as well as our collective consciousness which enables us to recognize—and thus sympathize with—the plight of the messy, modern woman.

How’d she get here, of all places? She is youngish, for whatever that’s worth, undevoted
to any mission, undergoing no perilous days, enduring nary a trial. She is no man’s son,
just Violet’s daughter, Betty F.’s granddaughter, some other unrecorded mother’s great-
great-not-so-great-granddaughter. Sorry, but our heroine is me, Betty Block, née Bird.
And this is my epic of passivity.

McDonnell’s writing is fearless. And the resulting novel? Absolutely fearsome. Lonesome Ballroom seizes the now by the throat, flipping it on its head to become the now what? McDonnell distils ordinary sentiments (i.e. what happened to me is “because of what happened to” (struck through) you) down to their most lucid forms (i.e. what happened to me is because of what happened to you), presenting them to us in a kind of fever dream where we are forced to watch the truth unfold in Technicolor before it fades to black and we are left to careen wildly into—as Betty calls it—the radical nothing.