A Review of Barbara

Before we consumed movies under duvet-cover mountains or on airplanes flying over oceans, people dressed up to watch them in theaters. Heavy red curtains peeled back to reveal the silver screen as if it were a stage. After the arrival of more-casual movie houses, filmmakers rolled credits over an imposed curtain backdrop; in the first shot of Frankenstein (1931), an actor emerges from behind velvet folds to warn the audience that what they are about to see may shock them. Such overt framing devices are less common now that we’re used to flipping between reality and fiction.

In Barbara, a new novel by Joni Murphy saturated in the aesthetic dream of old Hollywood, this type of set dressing and stage setting is reanimated, with our speaker stoically monologuing her memoir. Her name is Barbara; she is forty years old; the year is 1975. She’s an actress filming a Western and having an affair with her younger male costar. In the afterglow of sex she can finally unfold herself, talk to him about the rapes she’d never call rape, the redness of her cheeks after her mother slapped them, and the bandanna she wore over her eyes in a green sedan on the way to an illegal abortion. Now that the curtain’s up, she’s going to spill her entire life story; what you are about to hear may depress you.

For most of the novel, Barbara’s first-person narration stays on a linear track. She whips past the milestones of her family trauma, romantic lows, and career highs, while tapping the touchstones of mid-century pop arts and culture. Barbara’s memory of her mother’s violence is tangled with her mother’s signature smell of “Dove soap and light sweat, Lucky Strikes and L’Air du Temps.” On the day she learned that her mother died by suicide, she spent the morning reading Marilyn Monroe’s cover story for Life. Barbara soon gets out of Colorado and chases the dream in New York City, where getting fingered under the tablecloth in a hotel restaurant leads her to an acting class, which leads her to summer stock theater, which leads her to more roles and more men. Asides like “We discussed atomic weapons and the inspirational Fidel Castro” are time stamps marking how far we have come.

But Barbara doesn’t read like historical fiction, and real-world events are blips in the story. (Sometimes...