Book Review: Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

A Fair Trade Book

Book Title: Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

Author: Florence King

Date: 1989

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

ISBN: 0-312-02646-3

Length: 198 pages

Quote: "This book is about my nerves and the lumberyard."

In the real world, more readers know Florence King than know me. In cyberspace, I may get the privilege of introducing some of you to this older writer for the first time, so perhaps the simplest way is to say that her books of comic essays shift back and forth between book reviews, memoirs, and rants as casually as my book reviews do. Actually, they're where I learned this style. If you can stand my book reviews you'll like hers.

In the real world, a lot of people use "King" as a family name. If they're of British or German origins it means that their ancestors were not royalty, but had some sort of business that claimed royal patronage. If they're not of British or German origins, who knows. I wouldn't use a screen name that any of my known relatives was using, so you know that, in the real world, this author is not a close relative of mine.

Can we try a less self-promotional tack? Most people in the United States have already read some of Florence King's work, and don't know it. That's because her career has included a lot of hack work, including fictional "confessions," romances, pornography, but also parts of the American Heritage Dictionary. When writing mainstream sarcastic comedy she entertained fellow Virginians (yes, she is one, although she went to a college in Mississippi that still tries to claim her as a Mississippi writer) by adopting a hard-bitten blue-collar tone, saying the sort of things real garbage collectors would be ashamed to say to a dignified older woman like herself. Don't be deceived--she is a Real Intellectual.

I don't mean merely words that activate family-filter software, although each of King's books contains a few choice examples of how to use those. I mean the cynicism, the attitude of "Man is a sinful being, so never trust anyone but me and thee, and I'm not too sure about thee," for which our extravagances of courtesy and hospitality are meant to compensate. Most of us try to avoid expressing the feeling that anyone is stupid, dishonest, or selfish...even that Northerners are, if they happen to be present. Most of us were told, in childhood, that behaving like proper Virginia ladies and gentlemen meant giving other people credit for being ladies and gentlemen too, even if we knew they weren't, so they could have an opportunity to act like ladies and gentlemen. Florence King, born too late to attract much attention by breaking the taboos against blasphemy and obscenity, shocked her audience by breaking taboos against overtly uncharitable thoughts instead. She created a "Misanthrope" persona who despises everybody and wants them to know it. Readers don't believe that anyone is quite that mean ("my longstanding affinity for Good King Herod" has not, after all, led to any charges of real-world child abuse), but her writing as The Misanthrope has undoubtedly discouraged people from sending King the sillier kind of hate mail.

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye is the book that explains The Misanthrope's feelings most clearly. It came after a novel in memoir form, a sociological-literary study of "men," one of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasp Where Is Thy Sting), and one of Southern Ladies & Gentlemen, written from a Misanthrope point of view; this was the book about being a misanthrope in the 1980s. King laments the break-up of the old stereotype of "the spinster," makes mean remarks about children and the people who have them, ridicules President Reagan as "Mr. Paradigm," lambastes people who smile and utter pleasantries, and explains "Why I Am a Royalist."

It's a scream. What effects it's had on readers is hard to say. Both left-wingers and right-wingers enjoyed King's books; her barbs are too evenly distributed for either side to be able to claim her as their own. If we accept at face value her claim to be "slightly to the right of Baby Doc," doesn't that push her around, full circle, back to the left? She was, after all, "pro-gay" when that position was too daring and revolutionary for the liberal left...

Forgetting about "wings" and reading King as a fellow introvert works for me. The Misanthrope does not, after all, hate people in the way Baby Doc, or Timothy McVeigh, or Mullah Omar hated people. She hates people getting too close. The serious thrust of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, to the extent that there is one, is that lowering our standards of achievement for the sake of other people's hypothetical self-esteem isn't doing anything for either our or their self-respect. She advocates more respect for other people's ability to live up to high standards, in place of the disrespect for self and others that makes phony "friendliness" a social requirement for people who aren't friends.

"Why are Americans the Newfoundland puppies of the New World? Our obsession with friendliness began when the first settlers wondered 'Are the natives friendly?' and shortly found themselves looking at stoic Indian faces. The natives were friendly, at least at first, but they didn't look it. Unsmiling faces have struck terror in the American heart ever since...The aloof warmth that makes life so pleasant in socially confident countries is not available to us."

Aloof warmth is such a key concept. Introverts who'd give our shirts to strangers may be reluctant to give the time of day to neighbors, because we've learned that the cost of returning even one little smile to a yappy extrovert is listening to confidential medical information blared forth in public places.

How accurate is it to read Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye as simply a witty plea for high standards and dignified manners? Well, it is comedy, so all bets are off. Let's just say that this book works as a kind of preliminary to an Introvert Manifesto. Plus comic diversions about French neoclassical verse drama, the Age of Therapy, Amy Carter, Franklin D. Roosevelt, organ transplants, bad novels, and possible psychosocial reasons why a barmaid King met in South Carolina didn't know how to make a martini.

To buy it as a Fair Trade Book, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address below, and we'll send $1 per book to Florence King or a charity of her choice (which I'm guessing would be the National Review). Four hardcover or six to eight paperback books of this size would fit in a package and if you chose, e.g., He, Southern Ladies & Gentlemen, and When Sisterhood Was in Flower, King or her charity would get $4; if you added With Charity Toward None, Wasp Where Is Thy Sting, Lump It or Leave It, and Stet, King or her charity would get $8.