Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

There are times, Miss Porch thought, in life when one might be walking towards oneself. Either the child towards the other way around. Either way it was a passing confrontation, not recognizable until it was over.

Elizabeth Jolley's Foxybaby begins with the protagonist, novelist Alma Porch, driving into a parked bus and being rammed, in turn, by a pair of cars behind her. She's arrived in a remote section of the Australian bush to teach a summer drama class to overweight women as part of the "Better Body Through the Arts Program." Her class, such as it is, involves filming a "treatment" of her novel-in-progress, Foxybaby, about a man desperately trying to save his daughter and her child from a life of heroin addiction. But the school is a strange place, and she is trapped there. The bus, it seems, has been placed there by Miles, the school handyman who will sell any object that's not nailed down to anyone, and who provides himself with additional income by cooking succulent midnight dinners for the starving dieters. The whole place is run by a strange woman named Miss Peycroft, who has her own ideas about how Foxybaby ought to go, and among the portly matrons of the Better Body Through the Arts Program sexual energies, lesbian and otherwise, are fiercely bubbling.

What are we supposed of Foxybaby, the novel-within-the-novel, and its treatment? It seems to be a lurid and humorless melodrama set to "rock and disco" (which doesn't stop Miss Peycroft from pulling out her cello). Is it the regular kind of bad, or is it the Elizabeth Jolley kind of good? Good or bad, the participants throw themselves wholeheartedly into the creation of the treatment, and at each night's reflective "symposium," they overflow with suggestions about how to tweak or enliven the script. Thematic connections between the novel and the scenario of the "true" novel seem scant, but not to the participants: at the novel's climax, the regally jovial Mrs Viggars, who plays the part of the father Steadman, has decided to adopt the ragged, pregnant girl who plays the daughter Sandy. The two novels, the one within and the one without, share a kind of exaggerated tone and style, but not much else, and yet the matrons seem to find ways of relating to it; perhaps this is the novel's ultimate point about the power of fiction. At the end, in the novel's most surreal scene, when the class is gathered on a field trip to the beach to film the final section of the treatment, Mrs Viggars points out a trio of figures that Miss Porch can barely see at first, walking along the sand: Steadman, Sandy, and Foxybaby, having emerged from fiction into real life.

Jolley is such a strange writer. Foxybaby turned out to be one of my very favorite kinds of books, one that seems either like a work of genius or a bizarre failure. I enjoyed the ragtag group of matronly participants, from Mrs Viggars to the annoyingly grandmotherly Jonquil Castle (insane names here) to the prim and vicious Miss Harrow, who recruits Miss Porch for what she thinks will either be a feast or an orgy, but which turns out to be an art exhibit. The wild pieces I thought would never come together eventually did, or at least they felt they did; I even found myself moved, ultimately, by the melodrama of Foxybaby. Maybe that's the point of the novel, in the end, that novels don't have to make sense, and sometimes it's better that they don't, or to hover somewhere outside of sense. They just have to move you.