Rescuing Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden — Steven Moore

Among other, more important things, Cynthia Buchanan’s first and only published novel is a classic example of the fickleness of literary fame. Published in January 1972 by William Morrow & Company, along with a big chunk of it in the venerable North American Review (Winter 1971), this quirky tale of a thirty-year-old virgin named Fortune Dundy—who comes to Los Angeles from the South looking for glamour and romance, finding neither—received rave reviews in all the right places. The pre-publication industry journals came first: in Library Journal, a young Diane Ackerman called it “a brilliant, hysterically funny book,” Publishers Weekly praised this “arresting first novel, written with pungent insight,” and the often curmudgeonly Kirkus described it as “a sad and savage experience which is much too true to be funny which it also, wincingly, is,” and advised readers not to “underestimate the sharpness of Miss Buchanan's talent.” Upon publication, a lovefest ensued: the New Yorker deemed it “a hilarious first novel,” Newsweek described it as “brilliant” and “dazzling,” and in the Nation Catharine R. Stimpson called it “an extravagant tour de force” amid other strong praise. The hip Village Voice dug it (“a wonderful and very funny first novel”) and the square Life magazine compared its fantasizing heroine to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. “This first-class novel is verbally stunning,” said the Saturday Review, “and Fortune’s fate touchingly combines pathos with dignity.” Time magazine’s Martha Duffy wrote, “This fresh, efficient first novel speaks directly [. . . to] the folly of women who define themselves only in terms of men and the tyranny of a culture that penalizes them unless they do so. [. . .] The author has mastered all the sledgehammer nuances of brutalizing speech: the deadening obscenities, the tag lines from talk shows, the dreary threats and boasts.”

In the January 9th issue of the all-important New York Times Book Review, Annie Gottlieb went so far as to compare it favorably to The Bell Jar (1963, but not published in the U.S. until 1971) and Play It as It Lays (1970):

these books form a natural trilogy. In some ways “Maiden” is the best of the three: less calculated, less mercilessly expert than Joan Didion's book, more sure of being a novel than Sylvia Plath's, more various than either—ranging surely through satire and the gentlest of romances to blood sacrifice. All three heroines are women struggling for breath in the smog of commerce and sexism, but only with Fortune do we finally get free of the long‐suffering victim, the martyr. Her heroism is her instinct for life. Inadvertent and ferocious, it drives her upstream to spawn though the stream is full of beer cans and suntan oil bottles and things with teeth. (Note 1)

A reviewer for TV/Radio Mirror agreed with this comparison, claiming, “Cynthia Buchanan has moved right into the big leagues with Joan Didion with this first novel.” Older and popular figures of the day also praised it: on the dustjacket, Gael Greene—then a restaurant critic, later the author of two notorious erotic novels—was quoted as saying “Maiden is an extraordinary original; Fortune Dundy, a mad waif, brilliantly absurd . . . she haunts me.” Esteemed nature and travel writer Edward Hoagland blurbed it “A bursting, inventive book about a girl who has been a virgin too long.” Comedian Lily Tomlin, then starring in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, was an early admirer, optioning film rights before it was even published. After her partner Jane Wagner wrote a screenplay, director Robert Altman read it and offered to produce it (Note 2). In 1973, a year after receiving the novel, dramatist Arthur Miller wrote Buchanan to say, “It’s a fine, horrifying book, like a long tuned string that makes a music one nearly doesn’t hear. But I think I heard it. I imagine it sticking in my mind for a long, long time to come.” 

Shortly after publication, magazine editors began beseeching Buchanan to write articles for them; universities invited her to speak; the Times Book Review engaged her to review Norman Mailer’s Existential Errands (1972). She acquired one of the best literary agents in New York, Lynn Nesbit. There were other film offers, proposed stage adaptations. Foreign rights were sold to England and Italy. The hardback was reprinted, and the first of three different mass-market editions of Maiden appeared in 1973. The following year, critic Earl Rovit, writing for the scholarly journal Contemporary Literature, described its protagonist as “a sort of Huckleberry Finn played by Marilyn Monroe.” Over the years the novel would be taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NYU, UCLA . . . “blah blah blah,” as its impatient narrator frequently says.

But after this flurry of attention, Buchanan and her novel faded from view. She continued to write novels, and enjoyed the advice and support of people like publisher Robert Gottlieb (no relation to Annie above), with whom she corresponded for years. Novelist William Gaddis was another admirer and supporter, going so far as to recommend her twice for Guggenheim Fellowships, and consoling her by letter when she failed to get one. (She and Gaddis exchanged nearly two dozen letters and postcards between 1977 and 1984; five of his appear in The Letters of William Gaddis). In the summer of 1999, Maiden resurfaced as a trade paperback from Morrow’s Quill line, with an exuberant blurb from Tomlin on the front cover: “I love Maiden so much I can’t even do it justice! . . . All generations . . . will find Maiden more universal today than ever. An American classic, it’s wonderful.” It also elicited a spirited review from Leonard Gill in the Memphis Flyer, who called it an “exceedingly sharp, smart, still-fresh, still-funny satire that in 27 years has not lost one bit of its sizable bite.” He goes on to compare it to the bestseller by Helen Fielding: “And if fans thought Bridget Jones's Diary was an immaculately conceived blueprint for their own late-century hang-ups, you have Fortune's 30-year-old virginity to thank.” But the Quill edition soon went out of print, and Buchanan’s admirers eventually dwindled to die-hard fans praising it on Amazon or Goodreads.

How did that happen to an “American classic,” as good if not better than The Bell Jar and Play It as It Lays in opinion of some? You would think Maiden would be catnip for feminist literary scholars, but I couldn’t find anything after 1978, when Josephine Hendin devoted a few insightful, laudatory pages to it in Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (Oxford University Press). (Note 3) It could be that the topicality of the novel, which made it so fresh and appealing in 1972, soon faded, rendering it a period piece. (Then again, what previously published novel doesn’t eventually become one?) Maiden was one the first literary novels to dramatize/satirize the subculture of swinging singles, or “swingles.” (Note 4) Adults-only apartment complexes catering to sexually liberated singles and divorced people began popping up in the early Sixties in big cities, were sensationalized in men’s magazines and exploitative films (For Singles Only), sanitized and satirized in television comedies (Love, American Style; The Doris Day Show), but had petered out by 1977, according to an article published that year in the New York Times entitled “Fading of the Singles-Only Scene.” That was a premature evaluation—a sleazy magazine called Singles persisted into the Eighties—but the bloom was off the rose.

Writing about this subculture in a deeply informed essay entitled “Swingsites for Singles” (Places Journal, October 2014: https://placesjournal.org/article/swingsites-for-singles/?cn-reloaded=1), urban studies professor Matthew G. Lasner devotes his opening pages to Maiden, describing the novel as more of a parody of the swinging singles scene than an accurate account: “we might say Buchanan ripped her story from the headlines: born in Arizona, she wrote the novel while living in Spain. She had never visited a singles complex.” He’s wrong about that (and she was raised, not born in Arizona): she had indeed seen such complexes in Los Angeles, where her father lived, and heard about others across the country. Buchanan explained: “If you want to know the truth: in Madrid on my Fulbright I was every day at the American library under the embassy, reading all the new books and magazines. And I got the idea for Maiden reading a Time magazine essay about the ‘boom’ in the singles population of the U.S. At the same time computers came in with these hilarious computer dating formats . . . so I just combined the ideas and EXAGGERATED everything” (email 6 January 2025). Since she didn’t actually live in a singles complex, the novel could be described as a phony fiction about a phony woman duped by a phony culture selling what Lasner calls “the promise of sex, love, and companionship.” Needless to say, such phoniness, and such phony promises, are as active today as they were fifty years ago—even more so in our internet culture—which is one reason why Maiden is no period piece. It is less a realistic novel than a daringly innovative postmodern invention, written by a woman when experimental fiction was mostly a boy’s club. (Note 5)

Back cover author’s photo (by Norman Mosallem). Thanking Buchanan for sending the novel to him, William Gaddis wrote to say he hoped “to see you again (having of course by then read Maiden), if only to confirm your right arm which I can’t find in that stunning dust jacket photograph, very disturbing” (17 August 1977).

The storyline is fairly simple, though the presentation is anything but. Maiden is set mostly in the Los Angeles area at the fag end of the Sixties; internal evidence points to 1969–70. We are informed by an indeterminate, shape-shifting narrator—which in itself is one of the field-markings of pomo fiction—that Fortune Dundy has arrived in L.A. by bus for one purpose: “she was looking for a man.” To achieve that goal, she reinvents herself with what the narrator calls grande dame manners and a misterioso personality; she studies actresses from the 1950s, advertisements, fashion catalogs, dating advice brochures, and the Angelenas around her:

She watched the California women . . . for a clue. Teenagers born of sea-form and shower stalls, barefoot, in a hurry, their eyes bright with youth or drugs . . . nubilia on its way to where? (Note 6) Where are you going? Where are those women going? Back to the sea? Screen tests? Cheerleading practice? Devil worship? "College-'n-Career"-age girls passed in bright cotton, long steps. In suede fringe, in fringed hair, in huge helmets of electrified hair, dirty girls, beautiful girls passed. Fortune studied The Divorced Look . . . its Plexiglas glamour and ivory hair . . . it adjusted huge pale sunglasses behind windows of air-conditioned Thunderbirds . . . and there were cocktail waitresses who followed their Beverly-hillock breasts, shopping at noon in charm bracelets. (19–20) (Note 7)

Tragicomically failing at her own attempts to find a man while staying in a motel, she responds to a brochure for a singles complex called Villa Dionysus, “Where the Scene Gets Together!”, replicated on pages 21–22. Buchanan may never have visited such a place, but she surely saw some advertisements, for her brochure apes the language of ads reproduced in Lasner’s essay. He also notes, as no one in the novel does, the smutty implications of the initials VD.

There, Fortune becomes roommates with a hectic divorcée named Beverly Besqueth (“Bisquit”)—cattily described in Duffy’s Time review as “a grim little trollop”—who is in a kinky relationship with loutish Milo Cambell, a neighboring Dionysid, as they are called. Fortune soon falls for a standoffish dentist named Samuel “Skip” Fritchey, Bisquit’s ex, who also lives at Villa Dionysus. Thereafter, the novel alternates between Fortune’s comic attempts to attract him, further dating disasters (one with a person named Rusty who turns out to be a lesbian), and her part-time jobs, which she always euphemizes: demonstrating cake-decorating guns in a Westwood mall (“Professional Designer, Pastry”), cold-calling prospects for Gym ’n Train (“public relations” for “California’s foremost figure control and body center”), and finally peddling cosmetics door-to-door for House of Circe (“one of the major firms on the West Coast”). 

These shenanigans are presumably what some reviewers found hilarious, but others, like the aforementioned Earl Rovit, noted “the bleak loneliness and undignified despair that is at the core of the advertising dazzle of institutionalized hedonism.” Reviewing it for the Washington Post, novelist and critic Julian Moynahan likewise lamented “the tawdry sustaining illusions of the Villa, which are a mixture of California youth cult and the broader American cult of sex-without-tenderness” (both quoted by Lasner). The novel darkens as it progresses to a truly shocking, unexpected conclusion, in which Fortune suddenly abandons her contrived, civilized veneer and regresses to a savage holding a bloody African spear. (“Unexpected” but carefully foreshadowed, as one discovers during a second reading.)

But it’s not so much the story as the way the story is told that is intriguingly postmodern. Though narrated in the third person, it is so closely focalized on Fortune that it goes beyond free indirect discourse to suggest that she is in some sense the narrator, resulting in a schizophrenic text about a schizophrenic woman—a brilliant fusion of form and content. Such unfortunates can be delusional, subject to hallucinations, display disorganized thinking and speech, and engage in bizarre behavior—all of which are apparent from the stunning opening chapter, which almost reads like a psychological evaluation of Fortune—or Fortunée, as she prefers to be called. (Schizophrenia sometimes overlaps with dissociative identity disorder, the split personality syndrome; “Fortunée” is the alter ego Fortune Dundy has assembled from magazines and pop culture to find a man in Los Angeles.) The narrator is often harsh, harping upon her phoniness: “She had no idea how false she was,” we’re told on the second page, and later we hear of her love of false eyelashes, the humiliating wardrobe malfunction that ensued after she stuffed Kleenex falsies into her swimsuit at a pool party, and the fall (false hairpiece) she buys after she is forced to cut her hair short for the cake-decorating job, which accrues symbolic value. 

The most bizarre manifestation of all this is her relationship with none other than Bert Parks (1914–92), the longtime host of the Miss America pageant. Chapter 1 concludes with the revelation that Fortune often drifted into imagined conversations with him: 

He lurked in her vapors. "Bert" stood for any emcee, any interrogator, any reporter, any judge or juryman, any person or thing whose sole interest was her. Whose sole purpose was to examine her, discover, present her, and venerate her. "Bert" meant the way things should be. "Bert" was the voice of her playful, high-strung narcissism.

Chapter 2 takes the form of Fortunée’s imagined interview with Parks during the swimsuit portion of the pageant, as funny as it is cringey. Thereafter, Fortune addresses him forty-five times over the course of the short novel, always as part of the narrative and not set off by quotation marks, collapsing the distinction between first and third person, and reminding us that the narrator warned us on the very first page “she was a little crazed.” Hendin correctly calls the emcee/lawyer/judge Fortune’s “superego.” This is what may have reminded some reviewers of The Bell Jar and Play It as It Lays, though Fortune is much livelier than the suicidally depressed Esther Greenwood or the near-catatonic Maria Wyeth. (I haven’t read all of Maiden’s reviews, and wonder if anyone added the protagonist of Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife [1967].)

Bert Parks in 1971 with Miss America Phyllis George, apparently wearing a fall.

The Miss America transcript and the Villa Dionysus brochure are only two of many documentary and typographical features of the novel, additional earmarks of postmodern fiction of the time such as James Merrill’s The (Diblos) Notebook (1965), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (both 1968) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973). As in those, the variety of formats, fonts, point sizes, images, and typographical devices add to Maiden’s ludic quality. In addition to the aforementioned two, there is an ad for a dating service called DataMate and their questionnaire (13–14); bulletin-board notices (22, 112); some sleazy classified ads from the Los Angeles Free Press (50–51); a few letters written by Fortune (15, 52–55), including her application letter—indented and set in a smaller point-size—to appear on a Dating Game knock-off called PAIR-OFF! (110–12), and her italicized studio audience interview on that show (113–15); a block quotation from Villa Dionysus’ Grapevine newsletter (83); two calligrams, one in the shape of a heart (generated from the DateMate questionnaire), the other a cross (145, 209); a courtroom transcript featuring the omnipresent Bert Parks (186–89); a five-stanza song crooned by the dentist (191–92); the bizarre text of a large, anonymous postcard, set like poetry (204-5); and the conclusion of the imaginary Miss America interview from the beginning (207–8), bookending the novel in an aesthetically pleasing way. 

The letters are especially interesting, for they give Fortune the opportunity to speak in propria persona, free from the narrator’s judgmental remarks, but only confirming them. In her first letter, responding to DataMate’s questionnaire about her previous sexual experience, she skirts the issue with an ungrammatical, unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness defense of her moral principles. The second letter, submitted to the lovelorn column of Grapevine and signed “The Lady in Lavender” (mauve is her signature color), narrates her first encounter with the dentist, and is written in the same grade-school style. (The sardonic editor rejects it, writing back: “Your letter was too long to run, although it was quite a work of art. But here’s a tip: get hip” [59].) The third letter is her true pièce de résistance, a rambling, barely punctuated request to appear on the dating game show. She is rejected for being “six years over the age limit,” but is invited to participate in the studio audience portion of the show, which results in one of the funniest episodes in the novel. It’s obvious from all three letters that she is poorly educated and came to L.A. from the sticks. Throughout the novel she mangles phrases—“Happy as punch” instead of “Pleased as Punch”; “moving around the bush”—and places quotation marks around  phrases that she seems only recently to have learned (such as “get it all together”). She thinks a bookie is someone who likes to read books. During the studio audience episode, she looks into the camera to say hello to “my brother Clagg in Fayetteville,” which recalls Lulamae Barnes’ transformation into Holly Golightly in the big city after leaving behind brother Fred in Texas. 

Regardless whether Buchanan meant to evoke Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her novel is filled with what postmodern theorists call intertextuality: allusions, parodies, echoes, and references to older books, films, operas, and other artworks to deepen and broaden the scope of a literary work, to put it “in dialogue” with previous literature. For example, Villa Dionysus and its resident Dionysids obviously allude to the Greek god and his Bacchantes, as memorably portrayed in Euripides’ Bacchae, just as the House of Circe takes its name from the sorceress of the Odyssey; in both cases, they represent a deflating parody of Classical literature, another postmodern strategy, as in John Barth’s Chimera, which came out the same year as Maiden. (Note 8)

Fortune doesn’t much care for the Bible—“the Bible is too bossy is my opinion” she wrote in the DataMate questionnaire—but when forced for health-code reasons to cut her hair short for the Deco-Cake job, she mentions the Samson and Delilah story. To compensate, she buys a “new Dynel hairpiece; it was a long, corn-colored fall brighter than doll’s hair” (76), which figures in a few scenes thereafter. During a sexually tense encounter with the dentist later, she evokes Samson again (along with the “bossiness” of the Bible), after which he takes a knife from her purse and cuts the fall off. During the same scene she shows him the miniature Tom Thumb Bible a customer once gave her—“It is just the Twenty-third Psalm and six verses from Proverbs,” she explains—and he quotes a few lines from it. After this edgy episode, the narrator observes, “In the light . . . without the hairpiece, how naked, how ordinary she looked to the public eye. But the fall could burn in hell. And her own hair could just sit there on her head . . . a sparse garden of blighted corn” (143), reprising the corn image from earlier with the very biblical word “blight.” But there’s more: earlier, when Fortune spotted the dentist, the narrator conveys her excitement by way of another biblical reference: “There across the field—a mile! a millennium! on the horizon, like lightning or the Song of Solomon—came the dentist” (92), another deflation of a classic text, and so cleverly executed by the author. The Bible is also probably the source for Fortune’s misunderstanding of the word “maiden”; as she tells her roommate and her boyfriend after they’ve watched her televised appearance on PAIR-OFF!, she thinks the word merely describes “a person [who] is single and not married,” which is indeed is how it’s used in the King James version. They rudely enlighten her, and then are astounded to learn she is still a virgin at age thirty (coincidentally Buchanan’s age the year she published her maiden effort). Even before that revelation, they suspected sex would clear up her obvious problems: “Still, there’s nothing wrong with you that a good balling wouldn’t set straight,” Milo prescribes, and offers to cure her himself.

Curiously, no explanation is ever given for her virginal status: we’re told in the opening chapter she had had “one or two scrubby boyfriends” back home, but apparently she was prudish, and subsequently men’s “interest in her amounted to very little.” It’s not that she is unattractive: She is admiringly described as “willowy” by a horny Dionysid, and in her letter application to appear on PAIR-OFF! she boasts that, when younger, she attracted the attention of a pimp scouting a state fair—the naif doesn’t realize that’s what he was doing, but the reader does—and how a bus driver once kept staring at her in his rearview mirror.

There are far more references to movies and TV shows than to books, not surprising in the singles subculture depicted here. Early on, we’re told that Fortune’s “airs drew on the cinema, on the 1950’s, on Loretta Young, on Ann Blyth, [Bette Davis is later added] on the mannered billowing too, from fiction—Blanche DuBois, Jean Brodie” (2). Though it’s possible Fortune had read Tennessee Williams and Muriel Spark, I suspect she’s referring to the movie versions of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Needless to say, those ladies are tragically unhip models for a swinging single of the Sixties. On her first date in Los Angeles, Fortune is taken “to a movie, Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni, where Marcello drove a race car and Faye climbed the cyclone fence to tell him she was interested” (16)—A Place for Lovers (1968), then and now regarded as one of the worst films ever made. At her first job she is attracted to a man who sets up her booth because he “had the same breathless immediacy . . . the same magic Robert Preston had in The Music Man” (74), as out-of-date as those Fifties film stars. One night Fortune and her roommate watch Till the End of Time on television (a 1946 war movie starring Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum), and later an unwanted suitor asks her “Ever see The Alamo? Or Mission to Atlantis? Or Peril of the Pearl?” (the first came out in 1960, but the other two are fictious). No one in Maiden watches art films or anything requiring subtitles. The more sophisticated dentist tunes into an episode of The Dick Cavett Show, which is followed by “a movie with Ernest Borgnine.”

The most significant movie reference occurs in Chapter 15, the creepiest, tensest chapter in the novel. After stalking the dentist (and making a fool of herself in perhaps the funniest moment in the novel), Fortune decides to confront him after hours:

She caught him at his office, in his stocking feet.

He was at the back, past the chairs and glinting instruments. He sat at a desk with his feet up, and he was reading a book. The Night of the Generals. He wore a white smock stained with watery blood—was it blood? (130)

This novel by Hans Hellmut Kirst was published in German in 1962, and translated into English the following year. But Maiden’s first readers undoubtedly knew it from the 1967 film version starring Peter O’Toole, which Halliwell’s Film Guide summarizes: “A German intelligence agent tracks down a Nazi general who started killing prostitutes in Warsaw during World War II” (2006 ed.). The dentist’s aloof demeanor, repeated references to his “cold steel utensils,” Fortune’s nervousness, and the sado-masochistic pas de deux that follows all develop from that opening reference to the lurid movie, which sets the tone. This is the chapter in which the dentist cuts off her hair, and quotes an unsettling verse while he “flittered through the tiny pages” of her Tom Thumb Bible: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5—which contradicts her summary of its limited contents; perhaps he is reciting from memory). After she leaves, still virgo intacta, Fortune walks down to the shore, then to a pier: “Huge coins of light stretched on down the pier . . . ending in darkness and the sounds of the ocean . . . which were hard to distinguish from a film track” (143). Note the light/darkness images from the gospel verse, and the film metaphor. Brilliant.

“Now that, Miss D., was a jack-ass thing to do,” Bert chides at the end of the episode.

“Oh well, Bert, never mind,” Fortune responds, followed by an astonishing, hallucinatory, steam-of-conscious passage that has to be read to be believed (143–45).

Later, the dentist playfully calls her Captain Blood (196, 209), again probably a reference to the 1935 swashbuckling pirate movie than to the 1922 novel by Rafael Sabatini. He has no idea how appropriate that tag will become.

There is a wide variety of songs mentioned in the novel, ranging from gospel tunes and old standards (“Blue Moon” appears a half-dozen times) to early rock ’n’ roll and pop songs heard on the radio in 1969–70. Some interesting examples are those by Bob Dylan: the novel’s epigraph is taken from his peerless “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and represents Fortune’s idealized view of herself as a misterioso—which certainly describes Dylan’s lady, but not her. In the main text, his “Lay Lady Lay” is heard a few times (32, 175), and that’s all Fortune represents to most of the men she encounters: a lay. The only mention of hippies in the novel alludes to Dylan’s first big hit: from the coast highway Fortune glimpses “a Volkswagen full of hippies blowing in the wind and their babies, parked to look out at the sea . . .” (184). 

Finally, there’s “fragmentation,” which appears on every checklist of postmodern techniques, and which operates on both stylistic and thematic levels in Maiden, another clever melding of form and content. The plotting is fairly linear and chronological, but it eschews smooth continuity for fragmented episodes; it doesn’t flow, it flutters. Unlike mainstream novels, with their complete, grammatically correct sentences, Buchanan’s text contains hundreds of sentence fragments, as in this paragraph on page 4:

Jobs! The past! Helter-skelter stints that left her panting like a rabbit! Dreaming and waiting for busses, watching, forgetting . . . Finesse in the world of business, this was one of her ideas. To be a crackerjack, glib sort of person. With sparkle. Sparkle was marketable. Employers knew this! But a person had to wait and watch and, most of all, improve. She studied the hidden secrets in the backs of magazines, panting over the promises. And always she sensed the lovestruck man. He read over her shoulder. He neither breathed nor moved; he just skimmed the print.

As above, Buchanan often uses ellipses to reduce her sentences to fragments, as below

She was flaming . . . could have bitten his hand off. What would he do if her mouth opened the size of a bear trap and came down, CROMPCH, upon his arm? What a cannibal she could be . . . if he would let her. The jeopardy, his closeness intense as radar . . . his rhythm of speaking, of movement . . . his originality in gesturing . . . his perversity—all these things were fumes, dreams, they smothered her, stifled her. (139)

Fortune and/or the narrator often use “blah blah blah” (comparable to Seinfeld’s “Yadda yadda yadda”), fragmenting and ellipsing their sentences to get to the point: 

The music, the tense, female droning seeping blah blah blah from Biscuit's mouth . . . Fortune nearly missed the story for watching her mouth squirm and flex its story . . . a fascinating mouth, there was utter femaleness in it all. But she did not miss the story, no. It warmed her. It grounded her, welcomed her . . . and the man, this Campbell! Knew about a uterus! She loved Biscuit for being the sort of woman Milo would love; she loved Milo for loving Biscuit. Blah blah blah . . . how nice! (24)

Such grammatical fragmentation mirrors the social fragmentation of the time. Whatever unity the United States may have had at the end of the Fifties was blown into fragments by the end of the Sixties: the country was torn apart by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the movements for women’s and gay rights, the splintering of the population into dozens of subcultures and radical groups, the abandonment of grand, master narratives for modest, localized ones, blah blah blah . . . you know the story. And to tell that story, postmodernists and the New Journalists felt compelled to deploy new techniques to accurately represent the new, fragmented America of the early 1970s, which has become even less united since then

The original appeal of Maiden may have been its sensationalist subject matter, but it is Buchanan’s sensational artistry that makes it worthwhile to rescue this Maiden from the distress of obscurity. 

NOTES

1 Adding icing to the cake, she feels there has not been “so fine a satirist as Cynthia Buchanan since the Firesign Theater did ‘Beat the Reaper.’ Or since [Evelyn Waugh’s] The Loved One.”

2 Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (NY: Knopf, 2009), 296.

3 She adds further literary comparisons, calling Fortune a “female Don Quixote,” describing Buchanan’s style “as sharp and distinctively American as Flannery O’Connor’s or Nathanael West’s,” and associating Maiden with the black humor genre of the Sixties. 

4 “Cinderella of the Swingles” is the title of a Life interview with Buchanan (7 April 1972), which included this doctored photo of the author (by Henry Groskinsky):

5 England was a little better in this regard, opening the club to women writers such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Eva Figes, and Ann Quin. 

6 I don’t know where Buchanan found “nubilia,” but there is an 1809 novel by William Mudford that could serve as an alternate title for hers: Nubilia in Search of a Husband, Including Sketches of Modern Society, and Interspersed with Moral and Literary Disquisitions.

7 All quotations are from the Morrow hardback of 1972. For reasons of her own, Buchanan censored the 1999 Quill Books edition by using asterisks for some (but not all) obscenities, such as f*** and pl****** (for “plugging,” an old slang gerund for f******). 

8 Stories of naïve provincials who go to the big city have been around since the 17th century (e.g. Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules). Buchanan was especially inspired by James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy (1965) (email 7 January 2025).

***

Steven Moore is the author/editor of several books and essays on modern literature, along with the two-volume survey The Novel: An Alternative History. He recently edited the first modern edition of The Adventures of Lady Egeria, an anonymous Elizabethan horror novel (https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/the-adventures-of-lady-egeria).