Applesauce (novel)
Applesauce (novel)
Applesauce is a 1966 novel by June Arnold. It is a work of feminist literature with an avant-garde and experimental style, including an unreliable narrator, a non-linear narrative, and unconventional semiotics and orthography. The novel's themes include gender, androgyny, motherhood, suicide, and substance abuse.
"[Gus] sat still but barely listened, because he was watching Jos face and body for landmarks, tiny forgotten expressions and expressionless gestures which would connect the stranger sitting here now (surprisingly aged) with the other people he had known over the past quarter-century who went by that name and face."
"Every day she gave [her children] Dinah and Alice and Juni (separately according to their individual needs) — love. Every day she reached, smoothed, opened, added a grain of strength to their store. And at the end of every day she felt the coming on of panic: she was dispensing grains from a stockpile that didnt exist; she was giving love from the red side of the book, she was robbing emptiness by closing her eyes and pretending there were grains, hoping that somehow they would become grains, that the air held in her closed fist would in passage granulize itself into a single tiny grain just once more. It had so far. But every night, in payment for getting her wish, she had to feel the full force of her own emptiness plus the minus emptiness from all her back borrowings. This of course increased (at the rate of two grains daily)."
"For years she was too little to run out by herself because something might happen to her, until she was too big because the other thing might happen."
"Beginning at birth, [Gus] thought, the project [is] myself. How build a man not allowed to be a man."
"Thats the whole point. If I were ugly, I would have accepted it by now; or if I were beautiful. Its just this middle ground, this being slightly homely, plain, uninteresting-looking — just this missing being pretty — that causes all the trouble. Because then you see, I hope and I try — I take tweezers and pull out hundreds of hairs to change my hairline because Ive decided, ah, theres the trouble; youd be pretty, Rebecca, if you just didnt have such a low forehead, and it works. For a day or so (hour or so) Im pretty. Then I think, no, it isnt the forehead, its your mouth. Its too thin...But thats the trouble. One has to be just near enough to being pretty to long to be, and to believe a man when he says Youre beautiful, but far enough to know, always, underneath, that its a lie."
