Constant Reader August 2024 (Adult) The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

 

 

Over the last couple of years I’ve had occasion to watch the dark satire The Menu. (Spoilers ahead for the entire film.) The movie deals with a group of one percenters who have been invited to an exclusive dinner at an island resort where one of the greatest chefs of all time Julian (Ralph Fiennes) has invited some of his guests for a special meal.

As the film progresses Julian reveals that he has darker plans for the guests he’s invited. The courses he serves continuously take on a darker edge as he makes it very clear that none of the people invited are going to leave this establishment alive. On the surface, this is well-acted, dark satire about eating, the wealthy and the privileged. I say on the surface because the more often I’ve watched the film, I’ve realized not only is it far more shallow than it appears but when one considers the subtext – which is out in the open -  whatever message the writers are trying to say is not only botched but completely tone-deaf.

Let’s set aside the fact that Julian told everyone who was invited that they were going to die when they come and not only did no one take it seriously, the one person who did wanted to because it would be worth it if he could experience Julian’s cooking. The guest he invited (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a highly paid escort who Julian talks to with affection and opens himself up too. He decides to offer her the greatest gift – instead of dying with the patrons, she can die with the staff. When Taylor-Joy naturally says there is no difference Julian says: “Of course there is. Isn’t there?” And as one his kitchen says: “Yes chef!”

Now consider what that means. Julian has persuaded all of the people who have worked in the industry who now work for him that they can get revenge – and that revenge is to commit mass suicide. The moment they say this is the most horrifying moment in the film because it makes clear that for all of these chefs have essentially been brainwashed into kill. Julian is clearly as much a monster as all the people he has invited to die, and it’s worth noting that even the people he’s chosen to die are more or less there for arbitrary reasons. In perhaps the most unsettling case the film star (John Leguizamo) who’s come here for the first time wants to know why he’s been chosen. Julian tells him that on one of the few days off he had he went to see one of his films and it was terrible. That’s why he deserves to die. Leguizamo’s character starred in a bad movie. Julian doesn’t blame the writers, director or marketing staff: he blames the talent. Just as frightening is when Leguizamo’s date tells him that’s she innocent she’s in college. Julian pauses and asks where she went to college. When she tells him Brown, he basically dismisses her too.

That’s hardly the most offensive thing Julian does in the film: as was mentioned in a film review, at one point he compares himself to Martin Luther King in his suffering. The African-American guests realize the irony but are too terrified to do anything. And it’s clear he’s also a sexual predator: one of his female chefs tells the assembled (cheerfully) that he tried to screw her and that she rejected his sexual advances for months. She seems just as willing to die for him as anyone else. His maiter’d (Hong Chau) is threatened by the interest Julian takes in Anya-Taylor Joy’s character and when she goes to bathroom, Chau tries to kill her for ‘taking her place’. Taylor-Joy tries to find out why she wants to die for him, but she kills her by mistake.

And by the end of the movie it’s clear Julian is a snob and elitist who has no compassion for anyone or even the working class: he’s just as much a subject of the one percent as everyone else. There’s no difference between how the guests and service people die: the restaurant is essentially blown up with everybody inside it. I’m not sure what the message from The Menu is supposed to be but charitably, the film is the story of a deranged cult leader, a racist and sexual predator, who has convinced dozens of working class people to kill themselves for some vague greater good. I find it hard to understand how any of this is entertainment, certainly not comedy.

I’ve wanted to right about the flaws in The Menu for awhile and then earlier this month I started reading The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz.  According to the book jacket Bartz is a practicing therapist and this is her first novel. And I devoured it in less than a week.

I mention The Menu because of an old quote of Truffaut about how the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. This isn’t the same thing; The Writing Retreat is only a novel (so far) but it takes so many of the precepts at the center of The Menu, does them infinitely better, uses a different set of characters that reveal the flaws of the film and asks far more frightening questions – which Bartz is more than willing to answer her share – and most importantly by having all of the major characters women, asks deeper and more unsettling questions that will linger after you turn the final page. And she does in a novel that is also terrifying and hysterically funny often in the same page.

The novel is told from the perspective of Alex, a thirty year old woman who has all but given up any idea of being a published writer. At the start of the book she’s going to a book party of her friend Ursula, who has just gotten her first book published. Alex is terrified she will encounter her former roommate and best friend Wren, who has just become a published author in her own right. Just seeing Wren there forces her to leave the party, get drunk and engage in a sexual encounter with a colleague that ends horrifically.

That night Ursula calls her and tells her about a writing retreat that is being planned by Roza Vallo, a personal idol of Alex since she was thirteen. We read a New York Times Magazine article and we learn Roza is a horror novelists that merges Gothic horror with erotic sex as well as queer themes. She broke on to the scene at nineteen and gaps have come between each published novel: there was one of twelve years between her last two and the last one was nine years ago. Rosa has announced a month-long retreat for four authors under thirty in her upstate New York mansion in the Adirondacks  Her first line in the interview is: “People think I’m a witch,” and she cheerfully says she’s a bad one. That’s the clearest foreshadowing of who Roza is, though in the context of this novel it’s not a sign of the paranormal.

Alex ends up getting invited to the retreat thanks to Ursula, but she doesn’t mention she hasn’t written anything in nearly a year. She doesn’t know that’s about to be the least of her problems.

As she arrives at the retreat she learns the history of Blackbriar, the nearly 200 year old mansion that Roza purchased and has refurbished. Like any good horror novel, the mansion has a sordid history. It was owned by a wealthy industrialist who fell in love with a much younger waitress and married her. She was part of the spiritualist community and as part of her channeling, claiming to have contacted a demon named Lamia, who wanted to channel a ‘great commission’ through her. Her colleagues left, there was a snowstorm and when the staff returned, Horace was eviscerated bed and Daphne was in the basement, her body burned beyond recognition – with three completed paintings nearby.

Alex very quickly meets the four other women who were invited: Poppy, who comes in with Alex, Keira, the only woman of color at the retreat, Taylor a young woman form Atlanta – and Wren, who was also invited. The warning signs start coming fast and furious: we’re told in advance cell coverage is spotty, the wi-fi quickly dies the moment everyone gets to the mansion, they drive to a very isolated space and the friendly drivers who tells everybody who comes there warns them about the big snowfalls that come sporadically.

We also meet two members of Roza’s staff: Yana, her assistant and Chitra, her chef. Neither seems particularly happy to be working for one of the greatest authors of her generation. That’s the other warning sign: Roza, for all her feminism and being a member of the MeToo generation has never hired BIPOC above the assistant level.

Roza doesn’t appear until dinner that night. And she makes it clear immediately that this is not going to be a friendly retreat. She demands that if they have any novels their working on they scrap them, and that they’re going to write a new novel in the next thirty days. There are limits of 3000 words a day that can’t be broken, they will meet every day to criticize everyone else’s work and they will be serving as an editor. Roza will meet with each of them individually but only joins them for dinner occasionally.

It's telling that at the start of the retreat Alex thinks her biggest problem is the presence of Wren, who she complains about to her friends at the retreat as to why their friendship shattered. I won’t reveal it her, but it’s clear that Wren still sees herself as the wronged party and has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.

Soon, however, there are larger concerns for Alex. She begins to have strangely erotic dreams that involve lesbian encounters. (Alex believes she is heterosexual at the start of the novel.) Wren seems determined to use the retreat as a feud. Roza’s meetings with Alex take on the less idea of inspiration and become more surface then anything. And it’s clear that Roza seems to enjoy pitting the women of this retreat each other, engaging in gamesmanship – or perhaps the more accurate word is ‘gameswomanship’ Roza seems to enjoy pitting the woman against each other, claiming it leads to creativity. But before the retreat is half over, we realize her cruelty when she drugs everyone in the retreat without their consent – with LSD.

The day after everyone wakes up there has been a massive snowstorm and it seems like one of the women has walked out into the snow. And now I will start to grow vague because you should find the rest of the secrets by yourself.

Because The Writing Retreat involves a horror novelist, you may find yourself expecting supernatural overtones and while they are there, that is not the story Bartz is interesting in telling. It probably won’t surprise you to know that Roza is not who she seems to be and while I won’t give everything away, the references I’ve made to The Menu, Chef Julian and the staff of his restaurant might give you a hint as to the kind of person Roza is. The difference is that Roza is a lesbian and a woman of prominence but as we learn the true backstory of how Roza Lazlo became Roza Lazlo, we realize the nature of her nature in a way The Menu never tapped with Julian – and Bartz is fully aware of the implications and doesn’t shy away from them.

Late in the novel a terrified Alex listens to Roza explain exactly who she is. She claims to have a calling -  ‘a creative midwife’ she says. When Alex in disbelief that she’s described herself an editor, Roza dismisses the idea. But Roza is an editor. By the time she reveals it we see that Roza has the kind of personality of an editor: she takes people who are gifted, breaks them beyond recognition, and makes them serve her even after she’s done so. That is the definition of editing of a personality. Another word would be ‘grooming’ and its very clear by this point that’s exactly what Roza has been doing to all of those around her.

There’s also a question that Bartz implies but doesn’t state; something about the feminist movement and the role of woman overall. What’s happened has taken place over years, decades even and its only until now that people have become suspicious. Did Roza Lazlo get away with everything she’s done because she was a woman? Did male society think her incapable because of toxic masculinity and did female society think her incapable because she was a public ally and therefore someone who deserved the benefit of the doubt?

Now if I’ve made this novel sound to grim, I should also mention that The Writing Retreat is also a brilliant meld of many genres: locked room mystery, satire, and of course horror.  This is a novel that has so many winks to Stephen King you probably would lose count, including the fact that all four versions of the archetypes he illustrated in Danse Macabre – the Werewolf, the Vampire, the Thing Without a Name and The Ghost – are all on display in some form as the novel progresses. None of them are in the supernatural context, I need to make that clear, but it seems that way to Alex.

Bartz pays tribute to other authors as this novel progresses and the one I’m reminded of the most is Peter Straub, King’s colleague and occasional collaborator who also wrote some of the best horror and suspense novels I’ve ever read. His best work frequently had a sexual undertone, most notably Ghost Story, If You Could See Me Now and Floating Dragon and there’s a clear sexual nature in so much of what happens that it's a fitting tribute.

Of course other readers will remember King’s series of horror stories about writers as well: you’ll be reminded not only of Misery and The Dark Half, but also Bag of Bones and Secret Window, Secret Garden. The difference is, of course, that all of the major characters are women which as we all know King has had a lot of trouble get right over his long career. That Bartz has managed to hit all of these tones – again, in her first published novel – is astounding to me. And it’s clear Bartz has done her homework, the dedication to the novel is to her sister “who’s always up for a scary movie.” This book was published last year. I can only assume the movie and TV deals have already starting pouring in.

And it’s clear how much of Bartz’s training as a therapist is in this book: all of the characters are damaged in their own way – and in some cases have been damaged beyond repair by other characters. The Writing Retreat looks at the world women face but doesn’t have blinders as to how women can frequently be as toxic to themselves as the rest of the world can be. There’s an implication that Roza seeks out women who have experienced trauma in their lives because they are easy to manipulate and break. By the time the book is over, it’s clear that was one of the key purposes of the retreat as well. Roza is a sexual predator and it’s clear she’s as much a monster as the men she’s been targeting all her lives. And just like all the rich male ones her fame and public persona have protected her just as much.

I rarely have the joy of discovering the first novel of a writer that is as perfect as this. And I think the best way to close this review is to take Bartz and use some of the most famous closing lines in the history of Stephen King’s writing and paraphrase them to describe my feelings towards her.

I hope Julia Bartz has a long and successful career.

I hope she becomes as a great writer as the ones I’ve mentioned.

I hope she didn’t have to live through an experience like Alex to get this novel published.

I hope.