Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

When I was a child, I never questioned the Amish. I just thought they were those backwards people who were afraid of electricity. In recent years, though, I’ve been thinking about it more, about breaking down the stereotype – they are actually real people, who make decisions beyond butter churning and Bible quoting and the occasional hoedown. It seems obvious, but for me, I have mysteriously become more and more alienated from people not in a vaguely defined “traditional” American white male demographic.

So Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress piqued my interest. Mennonites, of course, are quite different from the Amish, despite the common association. They practice a more laissez-faire approach to simple living, and parting from tradition isn’t quite as frowned upon as it is in Amish societies. Janzen’s memoir makes this very clear – though a lot of her tales have some sort of Mennonite flavor to them, the goings-on in her life are often nothing special, like toilet training or playing Scrabble. The Mennonite theme that runs throughout keeps the book interesting and separable from your average memoir, while the author’s everyday approach grounds it firmly in the reality of a normal person, which makes the Mennonite bits all the more interesting to behold.

That’s the great thing here: the memoir is only halfway about being a Mennonite – the other very, very large focus in this book is on her love life, specifically her ex-husband Nick. There’s a list of the five worst Mennonite foods, sure, but there’s also Nick being an over-competitive ass in a casual tennis match. In fact, there’s a lot of Nick being an ass, everywhere, at all times. You have to wonder if maybe Janzen’s perspective isn’t skewed at first, considering his ex- status, but then you read about how he broke furniture, or very deliberately told her he didn’t care what happened to her anymore, and all potential sympathy for Nick is lost, despite Janzen’s best attempts to gloss over the severity of it all.

Levity is really the key to this book. Rhoda Janzen has clearly been through some shit, mostly with the verbal abuse and some childhood mockery, yet she maintains a lighthearted tone throughout, with an occasional reflective note. Mennonite doesn’t fall into the common trap of taking serious problems too seriously. If the book were her whining and despairing about her troubles, I would feel much less inclined to empathize with her. But I was actually wincing at points when she made a joke of, say, getting into a car accident that nearly crippled her a week after Nick left her for a man. It’s more heartbreaking when you’re left to feel sad on your own, rather than being told to feel sad.

While the levity was appreciated, you could tell it was also trying to be genuinely funny, not quite getting there. There is a lot of dialogue here, and the conversations she has with her sister or her mother might have been funny when they were happening, but as is often the case with such humor, it doesn’t quite translate to a stranger’s perspective. A lot of it is cutesy humor from my perspective, even with the darker circumstances. When it’s not being cutesy, jokes involve some sarcasm, or some point-and-laugh, or just some girl-talk gossip, none of which are particularly witty as a rule.

Another problem is that, while the truck ton of details the memoir contains is appreciated, it manages not to be very memorable. Blame it on my piss-poor memory, but I can barely recall anything. There was the musclebound Mennonite she dated, and the high school stage dance she didn’t want to do, and Nick being a cunt, but the fact is that there is just too much here, I think, unless you read it multiple times, which is quite a caveat. The structure only adds to the problem – chapters usually start off with some anecdote about her post-car wreck recovery time with her family, then segue into an opinion of hers or a link to her past or something about Mennonite culture, and then follows that by another topic, and another, before coming back to the anecdote and creating a web of connections to it from the chapter’s contents. Sure, it’s impressive, but it also manages to make all the details bleed together, especially doing this chapter after chapter.

But I think that doesn’t matter that much. The best books are memorable, but why does this have to be the best? Why can’t it be good enough for a casual read for a few hours? I may not remember much of my time with Rhoda Janzen, but I know I enjoyed it. Disposable does not mean trash.