There has never been another book like Graham Rawle’s novel Woman’s World. I’ll let Rawle himself describe his feat: “Woman’s World has been collaged from individual fragments of text (around 40,000 in all) found in women’s magazines published in the early 1960s. It has taken five years to produce.”
Did you get that? This is a novel—one with a coherent, linear plot and a cast of characters as well-rounded as any you’d fine in a “conventional” story—that the author has assembled not with a pen, a typewriter, or a computer, but solely with a stack of old magazines, a pair of scissors and several pots of glue. It literally looks like a 450-page ransom note: every page is a riot of retro fonts in various sizes, with even the page numbers pasted onto the bottom corners by Rawle’s own hand.
Rawle’s incredibly labour-intensive compositional method means not only that every page of the book is literally a work of art, but also that every single sentence becomes unusually compelling—you can’t help but marvel at how cleverly he’ll take words and clauses from two, three, four, even five different sources and link them up into a brand-new sentence that makes grammatical and literary sense.
But what makes Woman’s World into more than a technical stunt is the fact that its form perfectly reflects its content. The book’s narrator is Norma Fontaine, a young single woman living in suburban London in the early 1960s with her brother Roy; obsessed with clothes and homemaking, she breathlessly parrots all the fashion and decorating advice she’s absorbed from popular literature—and since Rawle has used articles and advertisements from vintage women’s magazines as his raw material, Norma’s speech can’t help but be peppered with almost dementedly breathless descriptions of “simply wonderful Brillo soap pads” and “raucous red Boulevard court shoes with daintily styled baby doll toes for up-to-the-minute elegance.”
But the full extent of Rawle’s ingenuity becomes apparent a few chapters into the narrative, as we gradually become aware that Norma isn’t, in fact, a real person, but the alter ego of her “brother” Roy, a handsome young man whose job, love life, and reputation are all put in jeopardy by his irresistible compulsion to cross-dress. Suddenly, the style of the book makes more sense than ever—Norma’s feverish, hyper-feminine personality is something Roy has constructed for himself... something he’s literally assembled for himself from the pages of thousands of women’s magazines. Imagine a cross between Far From Heaven, Fight Club, and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Glen or Glenda? and you’ll have something close to Woman’s World.
Just make sure you imagine something so smoothly written and containing so many delightful turns of phrase that if you simply heard it being read aloud, you’d never guess that each part of the sentence had been sewn together like a Frankenstein monster. Rawle has an especially adept way with similes: a metaphor is “as plain as a hard-boiled egg”; Roy’s face looks “white and strained like sauerkraut”; a skirt Norma tosses in the fireplace grate “blazes intensely out of control for a moment like a holiday romance with a girl from Hartlepool.”
It’s remarkable how a book assembled within such narrow strictures manages to create so many subtle effects: Rawle always keeps it clear what Roy is thinking even though he limits himself to telling the story from “Norma”’s perspective; and he also captures the poignancy of Roy’s situation, effectively playing off his genuine yearning to lose himself for a few hours within a whirl of feminine happiness against “Norma”’s serene but ridiculous confidence in her own glamour whenever she goes out in public in her lipstick, her wig, her favourite red pixie jacket, and her “powder-blue stud-fastened skirt by Alexon.”
I love thinking of all those magazines Rawle destroyed in order to create this book—all those glossy pages, with holes now cut into them where the best sentences used to be. To think that Norma used to live in those holes, scattered over thousands of pages. How lovely to know that Rawle has gathered up all those pieces of her soul and finally reunited them.
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