Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

A while ago, I was procrastinating on work by reading the Guardian’s Life and Style section.  This was a bad case of procrastination, and I hope my supervisor does not read this review, because I had an incredibly urgent deadline on and there are about a thousand things I would rather read than the Guardian’s Life and Style section, which makes me itchy and prone to rant.  Anyway, on this occasion it was lucky that I did, because I came across this article by Rhoda Janzen, describing the tragic aftermath of her youthful decision to purchase a black strapless bra in defiance of her strict Mennonite upbringing.  When I had dried my eyes and located the cats – who had tried to flee far away from my helpless hooting and sofa-pounding – I decided that this was an author I must read.

This was doubly lucky for me because if I had read some of the reviews first, or seen the lovely website with its endorsement from Elizabeth Gilbert, I probably would have passed over Mennonite in a Little Black Dress without a second thought.  Yes, I am a bit of a snob.  But in my defence, the glossiness of the presentation and the self-helpy effusiveness of a certain sector of the reviews really don’t do justice to the surreal, spiky humour of the book.

Because this is one of the funniest books I have ever read.  This might seem like an odd statement, given that this is essentially a memoir of a broken marriage, preceded by an operation gone severely wrong and immediately followed by a serious car accident. You may say that this hardly sounds like light entertainment, and you would be right, it isn’t.  Janzen’s prose is heavy on the one-liners – veering at times into a sort of bright brittleness which is both apt and perfectly understandable – but MiaLBD (for brevity) does not run on gags.  It is something far more substantial than that; one of these cases, like Three Men in a Boat, where each re-reading brings another aspect of the humour to light.

Speaking for myself, and I very rarely laugh aloud at books, what reduces me to helpless cat-scaring laughter every time is the dialogue.  The dialogue throughout is bizarre, riddled with non-sequiturs, and instantly recognisable.  Janzen has a sharp ear for the peculiarities of communication between people who know each other intimately and yet have to talk across a divide: generational, cultural, philosophical, educational.  I spent some time trying to choose an example to cite here before finally settling on these few eloquent lines from Chapter One (The Bridegroom Cousin):

“Maybe my cousin Wally smokes a little weed,” I said speculatively (although I would bet my few remaining financial assets that he does not).

“Nooooooooo,” said Mom.  “Your cousin Waldemar would NEVER do weed!  He drives a tractor!  In his spare time!”

What can I say?

Atlantic Books, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-0857890313

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