Lauren Slater: A Postscript

I mentioned earlier today that Lauren Slater has written to Beatrice in an effort to restore her reputation after the Deborah Skinner controversy. Well, she wrote again in response to my response, and she claims that the material from that chapter I'd found online and commented upon "CANNOT be accurately understood unless it's read with its connective tissue, so to speak, surrounding it."

So I did just that while I had some time to kill at Barnes & Noble this afternoon... and, frankly, the more I see of her godawful prose, the weaker her case gets.

If you'll recall, my conclusion based on the four extracts from the chapter I'd seen led me to believe that Slater may have genuinely wished to convey the idea that the legend about Deborah Skinner was untrue, but that poorly phrased ambiguities undercut her efforts. Now that I've read the "connective tissue," I amend my opinion: it seems clear to me that Slater deliberately set out to create that ambiguity concerning, as she puts it, "the bizarre myth of the dead daughter (who is supposedly quite alive)." In her search for "dead or living Debbie," she writes:

There are thousands upon thousands of "Deborah Skinners" listed on-line, but none of them pan out. I'd like to find her, confirm her status as living."

If she wasn't out for deliberate ambiguity in these and the previously quoted passages, and was actually trying to declare the myth over, Slater's even less competent a writer than I think she is.

You'll perhaps further recall that I said it appeared to me that Slater's reason for casting shadows over Deborah's fate was to inject false melodrama into a relatively prosaic story. Reading the entire chapter confirmed that opinion; Lauren Slater is so desperate to give her "story" juice that she tries to elevate pulling a book down from a bookshelf into a melodramatic turning point. She throws in a scary encounter with a barking dog for melodrama. She makes melodramatic judgments about everybody she encounters, like Deborah's sister: "She seems a little edgy, this Julie, a little too passionate about dear old dad." (Julie actually gets off the aptest line in the chapter, telling Slater to do her homework and read Skinner before calling her again.) She may have felt so strong a need for additional drama that, if Jerome Kagan is to be believed, she lies about him jumping under his desk during their interview. For now, it's a "he said, she said" situation, but I think you can guess who I find more credible.

Though I note that Slater did have sufficient honesty to admit to desecrating the late Skinner's property when the other daughter, the one she somehow managed to find, gave her a tour of her father's house. Again, an opportunity for her to toss some melodrama into the tale; confronted with the half-eaten chocolate Skinner left behind when he died in 1990, Slater takes a bite of it when nobody's looking, expecting her readers to shudder at the audacity, or perhaps the creepiness.

I stopped at the end of that chapter because I had places to be, but I'm done with Opening Skinner's Box in any event that doesn't involve cash on the barrelhead. I'd like to say you couldn't pay me to read such tripe, but I'm not that proud.