White Wine Book Club: Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas.

The first submission in my series 'White Wine Book Club' where I review the books read under the book club hosted by my friend and perpetual darling, Mrs. Katie Boyce, pairing each with a white wine.

In this first review of a book situated under the camp little cocktail umbrella of “White Wine Book Club”, we delve into the cloying, sugary indulgence of “Birthday Girl” by Penelope Douglas. I must confess from the beginning that this book, much like the sugar-intensive confections it conjures, left me with the split sensation of having enjoyed myself but at the expense of my overall wellness and with the thumping sensation of headache. White Wine Book Club is a space for indulgence in the frivolousness and enjoyment of reading, paired with an appropriate wine and snack which, I feel, pairs perfectly with the book as written; and in this first instance, we will be going sweet, to the point of being injurious to health and circulation of all kinds.

Birthday Girl was, to read, what I might be coaxed into describing as sweet. I do not mean this to suggest that it was a lovely story full of heartwarming moments to be cherished, but rather to mean that reading it had a similar effect on my spirit to eating a bit too much sugary food; like, for example, a large slab of birthday cake. Once I’d taken that first bite, possibly against my better judgement, I was compelled to devour it in a short space of time and to suffer the inevitable discomfort and consequence of the soul. What began as an enterprise motivated by excitement and appetite ultimately ended in a feeling of complex nausea and a mild headache.

I open with my impression of main character Jordan, the heroine of the novel who ultimately ends up in a tempestuous and wildly erotic sex-affair with her boyfriend’s father upon moving into his house during complex financial crisis brought on by her painfully self-indulgent boyfriend. The book is written by turns from two perspectives: Jordan’s perspective, and Pike’s, her boyfriend’s father and ultimate love interest (which I move to suggest is better framed as ‘sex interest’ for the purposes of this review). Jordan’s perspective throughout the novel is the part of the cake that encourages you to keep going, the icing and other elements which keep your taste engaged in spite of the cloying grip of the central fillings. It is through Jordan’s perspective that we see Pike at his best, and therefore I had convinced myself that there would ultimately come a reckoning whereby Pike changed his ways subject to the more sensible and progressive outlook of the better character, tempered by the sane and rational female influence to counter his one-dimensional and flat masculinity with it’s roots in the swamp of diabolical American male culture cultivated by centuries of puritan evangelical free radicalism and wanton capitalist tom-foolery.

But, to gluttonously indulge in a massive slice of cake and hope that you’ll come out the other side feeling rejuvenated and light is a folly and a vain hope; and, as with cake, so too it is with novels. Pike was irredeemable and cloying, his perspective intensely difficult to chew and harder still to digest in the moments after the book had been laid down. As a character, his way of speaking about women of all creeds and modes was awful. From possessive language, posturing about male ownership over women, outbursts of blistering temper in the face of female agency all the way through to disturbing expressions of opinion about women’s dress sense and a disdain of women forced through financial disparity and class inequality to engage in low-impact sex work. There are almost no signs of growth in Pike from start to finish. While he demonstrates some limited malleability, he ultimately remains the same man with the same rigid and binary view of masculine and feminine balance which might be appealing under the heady influence of a sugar-rush but, with a clear head, is ultimately not a condition to be lusted for.

None of this is to say that I was able to, or even compelled to, put down the book; there were plenty of hooks and tantalising aspects, even outside of my vain hope that the novel had a fundamentally deeper undercurrent of social change (fruitless). I confess that in spite of the toxicity of their relationship, I was rooting for Jordan to ultimately lock Pike down. Not in any way because I felt that Pike deserved it, but rather because I felt that Jordan herself ought to pin him down and change his worldview for the sake of the world at large; preferably under a new erotic dimension where she flips their dominance dynamic on it’s head and carries him into a new era of femdom enlightenment to his ultimate education and betterment as a human being.

The age gap is what many people who criticise this story seem to zero in on as the fundamental aspect in bad taste, but to be honest I have to disagree. As someone who ruined my virtue and rode into an uncertain future on a tide of sexual awakening brought on by a man at critical odds with his gender balance (military fighter pilot) and, crucially, fifteen years my senior, I would be a hypocrite if I was to deride Jordan and, indeed, Pike, for this aspect of their relationship; consenting adults are consenting adults and I won’t undermine the importance of informed consent by trying to add magical conditions to that which appease specific moral perspectives on what is or isn’t palatable in other people’s relationships. I do, however, reserve some layer of snobbishness and pride in my personal mythology that my own narrative played out in the pastoral beauty of rural Sweden with a handsome and brooding soldier as opposed to in a lack-lustre suburb of ambiguous middle America with a construction executive of limited renown.

But, the substantial part of my critique is the deeply unhealthy implication of male ownership over women, their bodies and their choices; and going a step further, the misguided and embarrassingly puritan sense that a man is in any way ‘helpful’ for interceding in a woman’s choice over what to do with her own body or dress sense. What Birthday Girl seems to do is to carry the dynamic of dominance and authority uncomfortably far from the confines of the bedroom and integrates it in jarring, disconsolate ways into the daily lives of the two characters central to the narrative. Instead of letting Pike be ‘Daddy’ in the bedroom and a gentleman of depth and progress in all circumstances otherwise, Douglas pushes the boundaries by carrying that sexual dynamic into a more protracted and drawn out “slow burn”. Does this create a delicious and intoxicating tension akin to what a birthday cake instills when it’s compelling you to sink your teeth into the main event? Yes it does. Does it also contribute to a narrative experience that exhausts the reader and leaves them crashed-out and in a puddle of regret? Yes, that too.

Don’t get me wrong, I did find the intense eroticism of the story compelling, more so than I ought to have. I was expecting to be somewhat repulsed by the heterosexual depictions of sex, excoriating in their detail; however, turns out that bodies are pretty much universal when you apply a little bit of creative interpretation and I confess to finding myself breathless and flustered while doing the hoovering one particular Sunday afternoon when I was carried through one of those first sex scenes after the slow, edging build up until that point (I was listening via audiobook, for clarity, and am not dextrous enough to be doing the hoovering while balancing a paperback). But again, like a sugary cake, one loses themselves in a moment of sugary indulgence which we vaguely know is bad for us but which pushes through due to unbridled greed or lust as applicable, until the moment is consumed and we are again left with the shame and regret of wondering why we got so into that for a brief moment. I would take a moment to particularly reference one scene involving a loofah which was particularly harrowing on reflection.

I am being candid in that I did not find this book particularly recommendable from the vantage that it ended on an ultimately discordant note and offered no hope of redemption for the evils of man, but I would be wrong if I was to say that there was no part of the book I found charming. In fact, one thing I think Douglas does very well is to create a backdrop for her story to play out within that really captures something; a vignette of a suburban life in an uninspiring part of America. It doesn’t drip with the saccharine syrup of the usual American fetishisation of suburban narrative, but instead leaves a picture of a life, a community that captures futility, bleakness and struggle in equal measure with community spirit, neighbourliness, and work ethic. The characters and their motivations frustrated me, but the stage on which they played their part was charming; there could be a real story in the background somewhere, maybe something about the fascinating background life of Jordan’s sister and her work in the strip-club; or in the seemingly flattened out lives of the other women written into the novel as scenery who, ultimately, must carry the most compelling stories of eking out a life under the yoke of an oppressive gender binary that hangs over the narrative like a fog.

All things considered, this was an enjoyable read in the sense that it held my attention and kept me enthralled during the ‘chewing’, but once I’d swallowed the narrative it became clear to me that it was difficult to digest and was going to leave me irritated, over indulged, and a little sick.

And so, to the pairing. It will come as no surprise that, for a snack, I am pairing this one with a bit of birthday cake; however, I do have a very specific kind in mind, which first crossed the threshold of my lips in the primary school ‘milk bar’, consisting of a simple square of sponge topped with sugary white icing and sprinkles in all colours, a feast so visually compelling that I would rather lose control of myself in the devouring of it and subsequently be left with the fulsome ache of regret.

For the wine, we need to match equal sweetness with the vivaciousness and effervescence captured by Douglas’s skilful crafting of an environment. Therefore, I am going to delve into the archive of my experience and recommend a wine which is now, tragically, lost to the ages (but fear not, as I will share a tip to achieve the same effect). The Cogno Brothers winery at Cobbity, on the same street where I grew up in the rural wine country outside Sydney, produced a sweet sparkling wine which they badged ‘deluxe cuvée’. Now closed, I cannot verify the wine exactly or tee any up for import for our next feral meeting, but I have delectable memories of the wine being sweet, far sweeter than any other sparkling wine (of quality) that I have ever tasted, with a smoothness that went over altogether too easily.

Drinking this wine was like reading Birthday girl insofar as it would leave one with a headache if over imbibed on the hottest of summer’s days (one specific and enchanting Christmas comes to mind), but the pleasure of the actual drinking of it and the taste left on the tongue cannot be overstated. To achieve the same effect, purchase a base prosecco of reasonable quality and mix in a generous spoonful of honey to each glass you drink and you will have a more than passible facsimile of what I am pitching.

And there you have it, an insight into my feelings on the somewhat disruptive and unambiguously horny narrative by undoubtedly disturbed writer Penelope Douglas, paired with a cake conjured from the trough of my deepest memory and a wine no longer to be had on the market but which can be resurrected with a spot of honey. Drink responsibly and remember the evils of patriarchy are not to be indulged, even in moderation.