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Pamela: A Novel
Fiction. "While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood close on her heels.... This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself"--Publishers Weekly.
98 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1999
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234 people want to read
About the author
Pamela Lu
6 books7 followersPamela Lu is the author of Ambient Parking Lot (Kenning Editions, 2011), Pamela: A Novel (Atelos, 1998), and The Private Listener, a chapbook from Corollary Press. Her writing also appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and has been published in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, Chicago Review, Fascicle, and Harper's. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 29, 2018
This book reminded me of the Lewis Carroll poem (from Alice in Wonderland) that begins:
They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.
He sent them word I had not gone
(we know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
This novella is equally playful, especially playing with language, disembodied characters (designated by letters rather than pronouns), and identity. There is also a good helping of nonsense, but nonsense that relates to sense and the way we perceive things (or don’t). But the novel is much more. It is a satire of all sorts of thinking, especially about oneself, but also academic thinking, and all the ways our cultures attempt to see the world. Its own philosophy, if it can be said to have one beyond the ludic, is phenomenology.
What makes this novella (or long prose poem) work is Lu’s perfect ear for prose rhythms, as well as for thought processes. Her ear for language play is only a bit less accomplished. And she is also very good at knowing when to move on, as she does often with little or no transition, and when to stop. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks it sounds good.
They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.
He sent them word I had not gone
(we know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
This novella is equally playful, especially playing with language, disembodied characters (designated by letters rather than pronouns), and identity. There is also a good helping of nonsense, but nonsense that relates to sense and the way we perceive things (or don’t). But the novel is much more. It is a satire of all sorts of thinking, especially about oneself, but also academic thinking, and all the ways our cultures attempt to see the world. Its own philosophy, if it can be said to have one beyond the ludic, is phenomenology.
What makes this novella (or long prose poem) work is Lu’s perfect ear for prose rhythms, as well as for thought processes. Her ear for language play is only a bit less accomplished. And she is also very good at knowing when to move on, as she does often with little or no transition, and when to stop. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks it sounds good.
December 24, 2015
Some lines and passages I jotted down from Pamela: A Novel:
…the way he could not help himself, fidgeting about in his living room full of guests in an attempt to keep from being trapped in his own hospitality.
We were being influenced by all the books we read, but these same books had all been written at least ten years before we discovered them, so that we were always playing catch-up, as all the new ideas expired before us.
The persistent Romantic image of a lone hero impacting the world with his passion hardly applied to us because no matter how passionately we hurled ourselves at it, the world was always prepared to dodge.
For it was possible, as I discovered, to have too much desire.
I was like an author trapped in a place that had no narrative, except for the narrative about the lack of narrative, which was, in effect, about the futility of desire and belief.
The pure unclickability of her experience amazed us, as we struggled to keep up with R in her race to outlive the moment of her own rejection.
What I feared most was perhaps not the difficulty of the proof but the unprovability of the claim, and perhaps not so much the unprovability of the claim as the provability of its paradox.
My mother belonged to that generation of students who believed in art as a barometer of moral character and in history as the great lesson that such characters could learn from. My mother’s idea of a soothing bedtime story was to tell me about how fascists during the Occupation had used some of the great modernist paintings as stepping stones in the rain, or how a madman had walked into a museum one day and stabbed a giant Rembrandt canvas in a dozen places with a dagger, and she narrated all this with an implicit but deliberately overstated outrage for that worst of crimes – as if the impulse toward expression and the impulse toward desecration were two entirely separate things. In my mother’s world a paining always bled from being right, whereas in mine it bled freely as the slightest consequence of its existence or else it had no more blood to give, and none of this had anything to do with being either right or wrong.
We desperately depended on the spectacle of the large “I,” with all its artifice and white noise, to keep us alive and functional in the world. We sometimes wondered who this “I” really was. Raw speculations placed “I” at the dawn of Western civilization – “I” was the shadow on the far wall of the cave in which we were still living, or it was the cave itself, which had evolved over the years to accommodate us more comfortably, like a second skin that we could never shed or live without. In this sense, “I” (which expanded during times of war or crisis into “we”) was the most ubiquitous, and therefore elusive, self we could imagine: there was no way to find “I” without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves. “Me” was a different matter altogether. It was inherently more objective and hence more honest to talk about “me” than about “I,” because “me” never pretended to be anything other than itself and was perfectly happy with just being talked about. “I,” on the other hand, talked about itself incessantly, all the while acting as though someone else was doing the talking. And our greatest fear was not that “I” would start talking, but that it might someday stop without the speech itself ending, for this would imply that someone else really was doing the talking, or worse yet, that “I” had been someone else all along.
.
…the way he could not help himself, fidgeting about in his living room full of guests in an attempt to keep from being trapped in his own hospitality.
We were being influenced by all the books we read, but these same books had all been written at least ten years before we discovered them, so that we were always playing catch-up, as all the new ideas expired before us.
The persistent Romantic image of a lone hero impacting the world with his passion hardly applied to us because no matter how passionately we hurled ourselves at it, the world was always prepared to dodge.
For it was possible, as I discovered, to have too much desire.
I was like an author trapped in a place that had no narrative, except for the narrative about the lack of narrative, which was, in effect, about the futility of desire and belief.
The pure unclickability of her experience amazed us, as we struggled to keep up with R in her race to outlive the moment of her own rejection.
What I feared most was perhaps not the difficulty of the proof but the unprovability of the claim, and perhaps not so much the unprovability of the claim as the provability of its paradox.
My mother belonged to that generation of students who believed in art as a barometer of moral character and in history as the great lesson that such characters could learn from. My mother’s idea of a soothing bedtime story was to tell me about how fascists during the Occupation had used some of the great modernist paintings as stepping stones in the rain, or how a madman had walked into a museum one day and stabbed a giant Rembrandt canvas in a dozen places with a dagger, and she narrated all this with an implicit but deliberately overstated outrage for that worst of crimes – as if the impulse toward expression and the impulse toward desecration were two entirely separate things. In my mother’s world a paining always bled from being right, whereas in mine it bled freely as the slightest consequence of its existence or else it had no more blood to give, and none of this had anything to do with being either right or wrong.
We desperately depended on the spectacle of the large “I,” with all its artifice and white noise, to keep us alive and functional in the world. We sometimes wondered who this “I” really was. Raw speculations placed “I” at the dawn of Western civilization – “I” was the shadow on the far wall of the cave in which we were still living, or it was the cave itself, which had evolved over the years to accommodate us more comfortably, like a second skin that we could never shed or live without. In this sense, “I” (which expanded during times of war or crisis into “we”) was the most ubiquitous, and therefore elusive, self we could imagine: there was no way to find “I” without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves. “Me” was a different matter altogether. It was inherently more objective and hence more honest to talk about “me” than about “I,” because “me” never pretended to be anything other than itself and was perfectly happy with just being talked about. “I,” on the other hand, talked about itself incessantly, all the while acting as though someone else was doing the talking. And our greatest fear was not that “I” would start talking, but that it might someday stop without the speech itself ending, for this would imply that someone else really was doing the talking, or worse yet, that “I” had been someone else all along.
.
September 21, 2010
I read this book a while back and decided to reread it recently for no apparent reason. A quite wry, funny memoir (?) of a time when cultural politics and critical theory collided in such a way as to make daily experiences seem unreal and individuals feel superfluous to their own situations. I recognize the alienation depicted here, and the note of pathos underlying the passages on friendship make me think of the truism that comedy is the therapeutic B-side to tragedy. I don't know why this book gets categorized as poetry, though. A strange, at times mind-altering read. One wonders, will Lu ever write another book?
January 11, 2025
'For C wrote with all the awful clarity and slenderness of someone who had grown up Asian in Indiana, the memory of anger and that daily experience of coming home single to watch the double of his face peel away from itself in the mirror now sublimated into a stunning command of the English language that manifested itself as poetry, or a series of eloquent, articulate stabs at reality.' (17)
'Our existence was modeled after a moving target, and all the productions of mass culture were devoted to safely pinning down this target, in order to produce the illusion that no one was in fact shooting, or, if they were, that they were all shooting in the same direction. Our silence and invisibility was of the utmost importance to the state of the nation because the very suggestion of us challenged and undermined the simplicity of narrative on which the national identity depended.' (29)
'Moreover, this particular feeling could be aroused by any collection of events, however unrelated or seemingly incoherent, so that it was not unreasonable for my first, albeit lasting, insight into the nature of Greek tragedy to come while waiting in a barbecue shop in Little Saigon on a rainy day and humming a little Streisand tune to myself, though it was not really a Streisand song but her version of a famous show tune which was itself loaded with sentiment and irony from the past sixty years, fear of which I had experienced but which I remembered nonetheless, just as I remembered, down to its exact tonal frequency, the wail of Andromache in the pounded Trojan dust 1500 years ago as the butcher's knife sliced through a slab of roasted pork above my head.' (32)
'In this sense, the history of our lives was always the history of something else.' (33)
'In the case of the waving wheat field, identity was total, in the sense that it was totally erased, obliterated by the hypnotic motion of countless wheat stalks swaying to and fro as one, like a gloved hand beckoning, or like millions of heads nodding in agreement to the same proposition, to a single declaration that covered and totalized the ground on which it was made. And so I too feared the onslaught of totalizing narratives like the fascist state system or the Cultural Revolution, or even examples less immediately life-threatening like the narrative of “career establishment” or the story of “poetry as personal expression”.' (38)
'If life was the ultimate composition over which we had no control, then we wanted it to compose the reality we were actually living—that is, we wanted life to be real the way that reality was alive, irrevocably alive in its ability to perform and master all the gestures of life before we could possibly claim them for ourselves.' (48)
‘As a result, I could hardly read my story without at least on some level reading myself into it. This gave me the sensations of both joy and terror, since I longed to enter my story and become a part of it, as long as I did not have to be the main character. I would have liked to have been a minor character, introduced for the sake of comic relief and free to survey the drama from the sidelines, or I would have liked to have been the setting, the mood, even the hidden inspiration for the plot, but was instead fated to stand at the center of my story as its primary protagonist.’ (58)
'For latecomers like R and me, it seemed as though the examination had been postponed indefinitely, and the question of our admission to the living suspended like aircraft over the interminable stretch of ocean between continents. It terrified R to think that she could step on a plane and arrive, some dozens of hours later, more or less rearticulated in another tongue such as French; and it terrified her even more to realize that she could climb back on board and return home in English, with the foreign aspect of her neatly folded up within and hidden from view. Each time she nervously awaited the return of herself, and each time the experience startled her, as if all major parts of her had made their own separate landings into the narrative of R and threatened to go undocumented in the short passage allotted to them.' (96)
'Our existence was modeled after a moving target, and all the productions of mass culture were devoted to safely pinning down this target, in order to produce the illusion that no one was in fact shooting, or, if they were, that they were all shooting in the same direction. Our silence and invisibility was of the utmost importance to the state of the nation because the very suggestion of us challenged and undermined the simplicity of narrative on which the national identity depended.' (29)
'Moreover, this particular feeling could be aroused by any collection of events, however unrelated or seemingly incoherent, so that it was not unreasonable for my first, albeit lasting, insight into the nature of Greek tragedy to come while waiting in a barbecue shop in Little Saigon on a rainy day and humming a little Streisand tune to myself, though it was not really a Streisand song but her version of a famous show tune which was itself loaded with sentiment and irony from the past sixty years, fear of which I had experienced but which I remembered nonetheless, just as I remembered, down to its exact tonal frequency, the wail of Andromache in the pounded Trojan dust 1500 years ago as the butcher's knife sliced through a slab of roasted pork above my head.' (32)
'In this sense, the history of our lives was always the history of something else.' (33)
'In the case of the waving wheat field, identity was total, in the sense that it was totally erased, obliterated by the hypnotic motion of countless wheat stalks swaying to and fro as one, like a gloved hand beckoning, or like millions of heads nodding in agreement to the same proposition, to a single declaration that covered and totalized the ground on which it was made. And so I too feared the onslaught of totalizing narratives like the fascist state system or the Cultural Revolution, or even examples less immediately life-threatening like the narrative of “career establishment” or the story of “poetry as personal expression”.' (38)
'If life was the ultimate composition over which we had no control, then we wanted it to compose the reality we were actually living—that is, we wanted life to be real the way that reality was alive, irrevocably alive in its ability to perform and master all the gestures of life before we could possibly claim them for ourselves.' (48)
‘As a result, I could hardly read my story without at least on some level reading myself into it. This gave me the sensations of both joy and terror, since I longed to enter my story and become a part of it, as long as I did not have to be the main character. I would have liked to have been a minor character, introduced for the sake of comic relief and free to survey the drama from the sidelines, or I would have liked to have been the setting, the mood, even the hidden inspiration for the plot, but was instead fated to stand at the center of my story as its primary protagonist.’ (58)
'For latecomers like R and me, it seemed as though the examination had been postponed indefinitely, and the question of our admission to the living suspended like aircraft over the interminable stretch of ocean between continents. It terrified R to think that she could step on a plane and arrive, some dozens of hours later, more or less rearticulated in another tongue such as French; and it terrified her even more to realize that she could climb back on board and return home in English, with the foreign aspect of her neatly folded up within and hidden from view. Each time she nervously awaited the return of herself, and each time the experience startled her, as if all major parts of her had made their own separate landings into the narrative of R and threatened to go undocumented in the short passage allotted to them.' (96)
October 1, 2023
‘The world seemed always unbelievable because it never quite happened, at least not in the way we expected it to, and at least not in the way we expected it to happen to us. We lived in a realm where the world was just barely possible, while also being the only possibility; we could hardly believe in a world which continued, day after day with relentless regularity, to rise and set on its own flaws and contradictions without anguish, and yet we had to accept it, for it was the only available world in which we could choose not to believe.’
‘It became natural and even expected for me to limp gracefully through the alleys of Chinatown with C in search of Vietnamese noodle soup, and later to hobble, step by step, up the steep staircase of a city bookstore to the second floor, where C had already begun the difficult, ponderous task of perusing modern poetry. The symbolism of this plight invigorated us, as we struggled over the years to interrogate ourselves and each other against the very texts that had never meant to define us.’
‘It became natural and even expected for me to limp gracefully through the alleys of Chinatown with C in search of Vietnamese noodle soup, and later to hobble, step by step, up the steep staircase of a city bookstore to the second floor, where C had already begun the difficult, ponderous task of perusing modern poetry. The symbolism of this plight invigorated us, as we struggled over the years to interrogate ourselves and each other against the very texts that had never meant to define us.’
January 19, 2025
not as fun as ambient parking lot to me (which i just have a personally affinity for, thinking about a kind of self-important artistry and being dated to blogosphere screeds for musicians), but it’s incredible to see the origins of that style fully present here—playfully oblique, a skeptical yet existential self-consciousness (a kind of lyric “I” that almost wants to escape itself while acutely absorbing someone else), cerebrally meandering
July 18, 2019
A different and fun way of reading --where the main characters all have one letter to their name. My favorite about this book is the constant discussion of women's sexuality, personality, and appearance that brings another fresh approach to writing.
December 17, 2023
A journey through Pamela's friendships. The use of "I" and first letters for names was so smart. Loved the language, it was a bit of a hard read to get through.
March 8, 2025
felt like a long long breath 💨🌬️🏃🏻♀️➡️ had been awhile since I read something like this. forgot how much I love this style of writing.
May 1, 2011
Pamela, the author, and "I", the narrator, and I (me) share the same Asian American female identity, the childhood in Southern California, and the subsequent move to Berkeley and the Bay Area. But our writing styles completely differ. Her prose is dreamy whereas mine is concrete, she deals with big ideas whereas I like the details, she's complex and I'm pretty simple. There isn't a linear plot or narrative. It's mainly descriptions of feelings and short snippets of conversations and scenes. She seemed interested in excavating the relationships between herself and her group of smart, artistic, minimally employed, perpetually adrift, 20 something year old friends. They actually kind of reminded me of hipsters when they talked about parodying the 80's through a 90's lens.
The po-mo discussions got tedious after a while. The questioning of authenticity was rehashed over and over, so much so that I began to question whether or not she was fucking with me. I was a little tired of it and of the talk about sign/signified, object/subject, "there/here", parody versus "realness", etc. I ain't in anthro theory anymore and there isn't "anthro girl" sitting in front of me to keep me awake. On page 43 she writes "And the nagging question that remained was how long this parodic commentary could stay useful or entertaining". I asked myself that same question. So I don't know if I actually "enjoyed" this read but I did kind of "get it".
The po-mo discussions got tedious after a while. The questioning of authenticity was rehashed over and over, so much so that I began to question whether or not she was fucking with me. I was a little tired of it and of the talk about sign/signified, object/subject, "there/here", parody versus "realness", etc. I ain't in anthro theory anymore and there isn't "anthro girl" sitting in front of me to keep me awake. On page 43 she writes "And the nagging question that remained was how long this parodic commentary could stay useful or entertaining". I asked myself that same question. So I don't know if I actually "enjoyed" this read but I did kind of "get it".
June 28, 2007
Best impulse purchase from Moe's ever. I imagine it would be pretty hard to find this in print. Where is Pamela Lu now? What is she doing? I kind of want to be her. Okay, for a second when I read her biography (the real reason I purchased the book--literary-minded Asian-American female who attended Berkeley--in addition to the kickass first few pages), I thought I *was* her. Or she was me. The feeling actually intensified as I continued reading the novellette (that connotes something different from novella, right?), which is full of incredibly clever and acute observations, and very articulate. I'm not really sure where it ended up, or why it ended where it did (it's pretty slim), but it's all about the voice and style.
Read
July 28, 2016I later found out that this book is actually considered a poem. That must be why I didn't like it. Enough with the characters being named only by their initials! And what's with the lack of scene? Only summary and abstractions. Pretty unreadable. I could hardly get through it.
PS: I don't mean that I can't appreciate a good poem. But if I'm going to read poetry, I'd like to know that ahead of time before I start expecting fiction elements and get frustrated when they aren't there.
PS: I don't mean that I can't appreciate a good poem. But if I'm going to read poetry, I'd like to know that ahead of time before I start expecting fiction elements and get frustrated when they aren't there.
January 8, 2010
I found the writing tedious, as much as the concept. The protagonists A-Z identity crisis weaves itself into an indulgent labyrinth of (rather clever) redefinitions of language and themes.
Although I fully understood the perspective of the author -- what lost me was the perhaps self absorbed-ness (or maybe dissociation) of the protagonist in her/his perpetual introspection.
Although I fully understood the perspective of the author -- what lost me was the perhaps self absorbed-ness (or maybe dissociation) of the protagonist in her/his perpetual introspection.
February 18, 2016
I read this quickly for class and would re-visit to really get down with the author's concepts, philosophies and ideas. The experimental form worked for this piece and I look forward to reading more of Pamela's works!
February 29, 2008
super interesting treatment of characters' identity and gender. I loved it.
June 23, 2010
Recommended to me by Ellen, the poet. I confess that I needed a tutor at first, but after that I thought it was great.
November 5, 2008
Lost patience with this book ... gave it a second chance ... realized identity is fluid. Nuff said.
November 5, 2008
I'm glad this was a short read.
September 30, 2016
I'm becoming a fan of Atelos
Want to read
January 28, 2009I never got to read this before it was due back at the library. :(
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews