Trickle-Down Timeline

ris Mazza wants to remind her readers that the 80s cannot simply be summed up by things like Vh1’s series I Love the 80s.  In the introduction to her book Trickle-Down Timeline she explains that the 80s were not simply the glitz and glamor of a generation gone wild with hair bands, Back to the Future, and side ponytails.  “For some people,” she writes, “the surplus and glut [of the 80s] were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn’t be a ‘me-generation’ if they didn’t know who they were or where they were going.  They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up” (1).

Mazza stays true to her objective of telling a story about the 80s that isn’t often publicized throughout the book.  She does so largely by focusing on the stories of couples who are having problems in their relationships.  The book stays true to Mazza’s reputable style of focusing uncompromisingly on sexuality, which I enjoyed.

The book is organized in a very linear fashion.  It is a collection of short stories that opens with “Trickle-Down Timeline”, a linearly structured piece that provides cultural details, statistics about American life (like the mean household income), and quotes (often from politicians) from each year in the 80s successively.  The piece is stark, and is meant to show the way Reagan’s politics were often incredibly problematic (the book has a clearly liberal bent—something to keep in mind if you’re a conservative reader).  Cultural trends are highlighted, like the development of popular slogans of common brands.  As a reader who only lived through a part of the 80s, it was interesting in many ways just to read these facts and quotes that I wasn’t privy to.  This piece also serves the purpose of grounding the reader in the world in which the rest of the book takes place.  Mazza wants the reader to understand the economic, political, and cultural world in which her characters are living.

The book moves on from this story to a series of short stories, one for each year of the 80s.  I found the stories from 1981, 1987, and 1989 to be the most moving and poignant, though they were all fantastic.  1981’s story, “Disguised as Suicide” is about Jan, a young beauty queen who decides to be a doctor’s assistant.  The story focuses in on an evening in which the hospital at which she works, for some reason, receives a ton of patients from failed suicide attempts.  Jan faces the stream of suicidal patients with the same veneer as should would a panel of judges at a pageant for the majority of the evening, until, due to being ignored by doctors and patients alike, she begins to crack, and the story ends with a bizarrely macabre and intriguing twist.  The language in this story is incredibly vivid, and even now I find it difficult to get the image of Jan and her many colored suits, or the woman with cat scratches all over her face out of my head.  The story is a twisted tour de force.  1987’s story, “Our Time is Up” features a group of women in a codependency self-help group.  The story focuses on a woman named Barb, and is written in two parts.  The pages are divided down the middle, with the happenings of the meeting on one side and Barb’s own private thoughts on the other.  I loved to see this written this way, because so often when one is in a meeting of any kind there are two worlds that simultaneously exist very clearly, the world of the meeting and the world of the individual in the meeting.  This story highlighted this beautifully.  Finally, 1989’s story featured Nan, a woman whose entire life revolves around dog-showing.  She lives alone and spends most of her time with her Shetland sheep dog Mariah, though she has interesting problems with her neighbors.  The story is written in this fantastic way that makes it seem like Nan’s entire world is constantly tipping on the edge of disaster, even though it often isn’t.  The language Mazza uses to tell this story is amazingly compelling.  I couldn’t put this story down.  Nan’s struggles with her neighbors and their retarded daughter grow as the story progresses, and you don’t know what is going to happen until the very end.

The book fits Mazza’s purpose in writing it:  we are presented with a world in which people are disillusioned, poor, struggling, and lonely.  There is not a single couple in the book whose relationship is not dysfunctional, which seems ok because that’s the point of the book.  Yet at the same time, there was a point, perhaps around 1986, when I started to feel exhausted while reading.  My exhaustion was not caused by the writing being dull or the stories being bland, because neither of these things is true of the book; rather, my exhaustion was caused by simply feeling tired of reading yet another story in which the couple is falling out of love, or fighting, or someone is feeling crushed by their own life.  It was only a momentary slump I felt, and perhaps Mazza intended for the reader to feel that way, but it was a bit of a struggle to face as a reader.

Overall, though, I thought the book was eye-opening, domestically gritty, and powerful, and I’d recommend it to anyone.  If you’re looking for a solid, strongly written creative examination of a time period like the 80s, this book will blow you away.