Tall, beautiful and petulant at 14, the title character of Dylan Landis’ edgy first novel, “Rainey Royal,” has no place to go to escape the craziness of her existence.
It’s the early 1970s. Her father Howard, a jazz artist famous enough to headline at New York’s vaunted Village Vanguard, accommodates young musicians who come by for late-night auditions by putting them in with his daughter in her already cramped bedroom. His friend Gordy, a horn player, lives with them in their badly faded Greenwich Village townhouse even though he had a thing with Howard’s wife, who got into a cab at the crack of dawn years ago and never came back.
Howard also is unbothered by Gordy’s ritual of sitting on Rainey’s bed every night, stroking her hair. She can’t stand Gordy, but in the grips of her newfound sexuality, she isn’t sure how she feels about his visitations. Her best friend, Tina, with whom she teases their flustered male teachers at school in what they call “The Private Game,” punishes Howard by egging him on during a sleepover.
An aspiring artist, Rainey turns to the teachings and poetry of Saint Catherine of Bologna, “the patroness of artists, for Chrissake.” In a rare private moment, she locks herself inside a bathroom stall in a coffee shop near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lights a glass pillar candle she decorated for St. Catherine (also the patron saint against temptations), shaves her armpits and applies soap and her mother’s tea-rose oil in the hopes it will make a potential buyer of her work like her.
Well, as acting-out goes, that’s better than smoking cigarettes and taking drugs.
It’s difficult to remember a novel that was more continually on edge than “Rainey Royal,” a series of fraught moments that never seem to let off any psychic steam. A sequel to Landis’ “Normal People Don’t Live Like This,” a 2009 collection of linked stories in which Rainey’s Upper West Side friend Leah was the protagonist, the novel sometimes comes off like the dark side of the giddy 1930s screwball comedy, “You Can’t Take It With You.”
Rainey’s only recourse is to try to get her father, whose answer to her misbehavior is to give her mystery pills he gets from a doctor friend, kicked out of the house. He is only the trustee. She will inherit the place from her grandmother Lala, who “used to float through the townhouse like a distracted queen.” But the fact that Howard is selling its assets, piece by piece — chandeliers, oil paintings, vintage furniture — doesn’t faze Lala. Her husband, a jazz trombonist, went out on tour many years ago, never came back, and now is old and poor in Cincinnati.
“No one moves out of West Tenth Street the normal way,” thinks Rainey, who starts spending her nights elsewhere. Among her havens is the home of an elderly widower Rainey sells on the idea of creating a special memorial for his wife. Using her silks, pearls and other possessions, the young artist creates a unique tapestry, a métier that will become her specialty. Her physical relationship with the old man is as creepy as it curious — she caresses him in bed and kisses him on the lips to stir his memories of his wife. But with an upbringing like hers, there’s little chance her acts of self-discovery are going to even flirt with normalcy.
“Rainey Royal” unfolds chronologically over a 10-year span in 14 titled sections. Landis, who once wrote about interior design for the baiduhai, here writes prose so taut, the scenes so emotionally charged, that the breaks in the action are welcome. And yet, the passage of time is remarkably subtle, marked not by pop culture signposts or events but glimmers of Rainey’s development from a misfit kid in extreme need of attention to a confident young woman in touch with her potential — and, ultimately, her responsibilities to others, including her father.
Her relationships with the spitfire Tina, who actually doesn’t like to be touched, and the insecure Leah, who is desperate for her affection and attention, are beautifully drawn. A scene in which Rainey playfully ruins a scientific experiment involving mice that Leah is conducting for a job captures both Rainey’s fondness for upsetting apple carts and Leah’s willingness to tolerate such misadventures to spend time with her friend.
Ultimately, whatever adjustments Rainey makes as she moves through her adulthood, there is little chance she will ever find herself on life’s straight and narrow. Her quirks are what sets her apart as a person, and what will make her special as an artist.
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“Rainey Royal”
By Dylan Landis, Soho, 247 pages, $25