Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home.

T. Braun, Connie

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home. By Rhoda Janzen. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 2009. $22.

Rhoda Janzen, a professor of English literature, teacher of creative writing and notable poet, has turned her pen to personal narrative in mennonite in a little black dress: a memoir of going home. She opens her story with self-admonition: "[T]he year I turned forty-three was the year I realized I should never have taken my Mennonite roots for granted" (1). Employing the tone and technique of wit and stereotype, Janzen identifies herself as a Mennonite to fashion her memoir's satirical texture--one that has proven to hold widespread appeal. The reader will no doubt identify with Janzen when she lances the tension between tradition and acculturation that many in contemporary culture face. Within the narrative is Janzen's nuanced writing from the site of her disenfranchisement in the Christian church. In this manner, she also speaks for an ever-expanding demographic within our society. Even more than this, the overarching theme that emerges from this memoir has a universal appeal. No matter how independent, successful, beautiful or intelligent we strive to be or have become, we bear an indelible desire to belong somewhere and to be unconditionally loved. As Janzen's memoir bears out, if that love arises from family, we find it all the more affirming.

The narrative assumes its starting point when Janzen's husband--with whom she has built an upscale life complete with its lake house, ultramodern decor and "no children"--has "left [her] for a guy he met on Gay.com" (12). Driving home one night from a board meeting, post her abandonment and still recovering from a hysterectomy, she is struck by a drunk driver. Broken, on so many levels, Janzen realizes that even if she has meticulously ordered her life and achieved her goals, financial and professional, she is ultimately not in control of circumstance. She wonders, "Under circumstances like these, what was a forty-three-year-old gal to do?"

Janzen's story is about how she "went home to the Mennonites" (15). The memoir's title is a clever wordplay. The book's jacket, a bonnet, hung from the up-curl of the "e" in the word "Mennonite," may seem to suggest that the author/protagonist stems from an Old Order ethno-religious way of life wherein bonnets and black dresses are still the markers of identity. But Janzen's family, traditional as it may be, and whose "God is a guy" (7), is not of the horse-and-buggy ilk. As most readers of this journal will know, the Mennonite identity is not homogenous, spanning instead a spectrum from closed community to fully acculturated citizens, also implied by the little black cocktail dress on the book cover. However, within this expansive category of identity there are idiosyncratic ineradicable markers--food, language, traditions--which Janzen treats with her sharply-honed humor. Vignettes about borscht ("it's important to note that at some point in the last century Mennonite hausfraus began to substitute Campbell's tomato soup for beets," 112); Low German ("There's a Low German proverb ... Ji jileada, ji vikeada; the more educated a person is, the more warped," 57); and the Mennonite work ethic as well as why Mennonites don't dance ("you could dance until the cows came home, but you'd never have anything to show for your dancing. In fact, it was precisely this lazy shiftless revelry that was the problem with the native Russian Peasants," 133) are hilarious to the insider. Her descriptions of family members will likely resonate with anyone who hails from a traditional background with its far-reaching, entangled family ties (Rhoda's father, Si Janzen, "once the head of the North American Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States, is the Mennonite equivalent of the Pope, but in plaid shorts, and black dress socks pulled up snugly along the calf" (2), and her mother Mary suggests that she date her cousin, thinking it would be fine since Rhoda "can't have kids anyway" (20).

As Janzen seeks healing among her parents and siblings she weaves a tapestry of reminiscences about her upbringing in a Mennonite household and church family together with her experiences of recovery--physically, emotionally and, in a manner, even spiritually. The assortment of people in Janzen's memoir read like characters in a best-selling Anne Lamott novel that centers on themes of community and acceptance--and come to think of it, her side-splitting, often irreverent voicing also brings to mind Lamott's work in memoir. Like Lamott in her early memoirs, Janzen is not reticent about accentuating her narrative voice with expletives, and she, too, writes candidly about sex, body parts and bodily functions, religion and faith, usually within the same chapter.

Both writers depict the strange amalgam that is the sacred and profane. Indeed, it seems that the characterization of Janzen's mother as forthright and unrefined, yet a model of Christian faith, is a representation of this. In a chapter titled after a hymn, "The Trump Shall Sound," Janzen bluntly discusses her mother's "hortatory flatulence." In this episode about her flatulent (as in gassy) mother--a dear woman who delivers Zwieback and homemade jam to feeble seniors--Janzen weaves in reflections about virtue. She wonders if her mother "would be so nice if she hadn't been raised in a simple community, innocent and underexposed" (175). Considering her own circumstances, she concludes that "virtue isn't a condition of character--it's an elevated action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness" (175). Her moments of self-exploration are held together by the few thematic threads that run, albeit loosely, throughout it. For example, "What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life challenges" (176). Janzen's musings are echoes of Lamott's who writes, "[h]ope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

Clearly, Janzen responds to her life's challenges with humor, and with gratitude, in particular for her mother, whom she acknowledges as her hero, and her sister Hannah, "who was born with a mature sobriety that I have never achieved" (81). Also interspersed between the laugh-out-loud sections of the narrative are introspections about those traditional values and virtues imbedded in the ostensible rigidity of the Mennonite lifestyle that Janzen had rejected on her way to a life in academia and outside of the church. She refers specifically to a fundamentalist view of women's roles, homosexuality, abortion and the "narrowness" of salvation.

In this memoir, Janzen revisits her earlier assumptions about the incongruity of faith and intellectual pursuits; but Janzen has yet to make distinctions between faith, tradition and organized religion. Her mother's homespun wisdom offers insight, serving as another of the memoir's thematic statements. After an argument with her brothers about women's roles, Janzen questions her mother about her brothers' choices to stay rooted in the Mennonite lifestyle of marrying young, having a large family and staying active in church. Her mother replies, "Oh, they'll mellow over time. When you're young faith is a matter of rules. What you should and shouldn't do. That kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship--with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community" (136). Janzen later observes, in a segment about Mennonites and dancing, how her brother Aaron, "who has never danced a step in his life," watches his daughter's ballet recital. For Janzen, that moment speaks volumes about "this man, prepared to go without a second car so that his daughter could ripple like water" (145). The reader recognizes, alongside the writer, that both her mother's declaration and her brother's action are the outworking of unconditional love, profoundly more meaningful than religious mores.

mennonite in a little black dress is an entertaining read as Janzen, a scholar, cuts loose. Humor is its strength; even so, at times it seems to act as a form of avoidance from any lingering consideration of the larger issues such as worldview and life's ambiguity that are at the memoir's core. It also overshadows the glimmers of Janzen's poetic voice. As well, Janzen's first-person address, a rhetorical device that implies intimacy, at times offers mere gossip rather than confidences (she and Hannah "were looking forward to a talkfest" and wonder about Yvonne's sex life, or lack thereof, and her "hirsute patch"). In places the memoir dissolves into the tones of a kiss-and-tell, a little like Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, when Janzen offers up the names and accounts of a blind-date and a past fixation. Janzen's offhand remark early in the memoir that "one of [her] friends, Carla, [who] said I could use her real name in this memoir as long as I described her as a svelte redhead ..." (21), also prompted me to wonder about the techniques and the role of imagination in creative nonfiction memoir. As in a novel, dialogue and characterization are particularly strong throughout the memoir; nonetheless, some of the people seem inconsequential to her story other than their being Mennonites whom Janzen encounters during her time of convalescence, albeit the framework and context for this book. All the same, Janzen's extraverted narrative persona will capture and hold the reader's interest.

Readers will enjoy coming to know Janzen's open-hearted Mennonites, just as Miriam Toews's best-selling fiction Complicated Kindness intrigued the mainstream with Nomi Nickel's insular Mennonites. Although young Nomi remained in East Village, Rhoda Janzen could be likened to that of a grown-up real-life Nomi returning to her place of belonging. Those who enjoy stories about the journey to one's place of acceptance and the works of contemporary best-selling authors Miriam Toews, Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert will wish to read Rhoda Janzen's mennonite in a little black dress: a memoir of going home.

Trinity Western University