My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson

Reading My Hollywood, Mona Simpson’s new novel about the lives of a Filipina nanny in Santa Monica and the woman she works for, feels like stepping back in time. The book affirms the fact that certain arcane household practices persist, notably the use of servants, in more outwardly “progressive” families and neighborhoods. Similarly, the novel shows the disparity between male and female roles in marriage and in family, roles that were said to have been equalized decades ago but which Simpson shows retain a rigidity that would make Gloria Steinem wince.

Alternating narrators between chapters, Simpson tells the story in the voices of both the nanny Lola, using a halting, ungrammatical English, and her first boss, Claire, a classical composer uprooted from the East and newly replanted in Los Angeles. Simpson’s prose is terse and tight, delicate but biting, and every perception feels right on. The dual perspective is a valuable technique, allowing greater insight through multi-faceted narration. The technique, too, feels like an honest effort at including a forgotten, subaltern voice.

Through Lola’s chapters, Simpson is able to realize her as a full entity, rather than an adornment to Claire’s lifestyle. In all fairness, however, it is easy to forget that it is Simpson, presumably the initial inspiration for Claire, who crafted this narrative, who has access to the publishing world, whereas the real-life Lola is still a disenfranchised foreigner working a difficult job. However, despite some overly stylized prose given to Lola’s voice, she does feel very real, as do the situations she faces.

To that end, the whole upstairs-downstairs feel of the novel is pitch perfect in its ambiguity—the modern version of the classic division between lords and servants is turned on its ear in a world where employer is both boss and, tenuously, friend. A scene in which Lola is forced to mediate between her weekend employers, Helen and Jeff, in a marital spat, as well as the numerous scenes in which Claire invites Lola to dine with her and her son and Lola, respectfully, declines, showcase the uneven ground that Lola negotiates in her work environment. Another Filipina nanny, Lucy, demonstrates her acumen when Helen offers her an outfit to wear to dinner with them—she picks older clothes from the back of the closet. “Even offered the whole closet, Lucy understood what Helen wouldn’t want her to take.”

The less glamorous parts of the job are also on full view, perhaps to the chagrin of Simpson’s real-life Santa Monica neighbors. Ignorance, stinginess, and the filth that these women clean up add to the reality of the novel. Lola makes the observation that her employer thinks a Filipina nanny should accompany a newborn baby home from the hospital, like an accessory, claiming they are better than Hispanic nannies. Money talk is pervasive, among the nannies, between Claire and her husband Paul, and the sound of coin counting in Lola’s mind is incessant. What cannot be overlooked here is that, no matter how tender or personal the work, being a nanny is a job, a means to an end, and Simpson examines these means critically.

In the Book of Ruth, a nanny journal comprised of testimony from generations of immigrant nannies who, at one time or another, all lived in the home of a woman named Ruth, one woman writes a plea to President Roosevelt, asking for him to shorten her long work hours, confident that he can help, given the improvements he had already implemented after the Depression.

Ironically, however, it was FDR’s administration that, when establishing the first federal minimum wage in 1938, excluded domestic workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act, in order to court the vote of Southern Democrats. Because of this emphasis on money, there is a feeling throughout My Hollywood of a rift between the nannies and their employers, the latter seeing the former as some prole-force capable of issuing their own ultimatums. At one point when Helen and the husbands are discussing their nannies, complaining about their demands, in this case, a cleaning lady so Lucy can spend more time with the kid, Helen explains Lucy’s methods, her “little smile inside her smile”, and when Paul sympathizes with Helen, Claire incisively notes, “What did he think? It was us against them?”

***

The light this novel sheds on the “modern marriage” is equally compelling. Despite the conversation that starts the book (a Claire chapter), Claire’s husband Paul is absent from much of the story, always at work, leaving Claire with their son and Lola. Because she feels the modern tug of war between working and spending time with her child, Claire feels the disappointment of accomplishing neither. However, because Paul is never there, the male presence in the book is proportionately small. The only other somewhat full male character, Jeff, Lola’s weekend employer, is a philandering film director, equally absent. This dearth leaves the book feeling somewhat lopsided, but in a realistic way: it serves to put the reader in the child’s seat, always surrounded by women, not really knowing the men.

Claire’s keen observations of gender politics make her chapters especially dynamic. When Claire is taking parenting lessons with the headmaster of a private school, for example, the introductions discount the mothers’ work as mere background. “No wonder parties in our twenties felt giddy: a secretary interested in journalism could, in the span of a few years, tip over to a background in journalism. Background was just preparation for these little chairs.” When Helen tells Claire her mother always worked, as explanation for tabling her own “background” as a lawyer and an erstwhile poet, Claire noted, “Your dad always worked too.” Helen’s “background” is put to rest in one short sentence: “The poetry contest wouldn’t be mentioned again.”

Lola’s chapters, however, while insightful into a different life, still feel less full, less absorbing, possibly because she herself is not fully absorbed in her life in Santa Monica. Always working to support her children and husband in the Philippines and, purportedly, to return, she has one foot in each world, but neither on the ground. In the end, however, the yoked stories of the two women join together seamlessly and we see how they are really just two tellings of the same tale. The overlap between Claire’s and Lola’s stories makes me wonder what these kids will feel for these Lolas and Claires when they are old enough to read to themselves.

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