To an outsider, Key West looks like postcard paradise: crystal-white beaches, palm trees, sunshine, pastel-painted bed and breakfasts, and a thriving LGBTQ community. Yet in Chelsea Catherine’s 2018 novella, Blindsided, there’s an unexpected sourness to seventh heaven.
This book tells the story of Carla, a successful real estate agent and first-time mayoral hopeful, and her doomed affair with her campaign manager, Eli (short for Eliza). The Library of Congress has categorized it as lesbian erotica fiction. Readers who don’t typically shop for erotica shouldn’t let the classification dissuade them. Categories are always reductive, and anyone who values character studies will enjoy this short and stormy read.
Carla is in her 40s, a Republican, the mother of a college-aged son, with a short, curvy body and an “immaculately kept” home in a well-to-do neighborhood. She moved to Key West from upstate New York some years ago for the “swimming and paddle boarding,” though she “rarely does either” anymore. She long ago divorced the father of her child and now has an on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jeb, a well-off, Trump-supporting, and genially bigoted Key West native. She struggles with anxiety and hangovers. She’s never been with a woman before.
Like Carla, Eli is a successful entrepreneur, with her own web design and marketing business. She, too, has anxiety and a rough-edged past. But there the similarities end. Eli is younger, leaner, taller, a Democrat, single, openly queer, and a hard drinker. She rents a studio apartment on the outskirts of Key West in an area where “trailers sit dilapidated on the side of dirt roads next to puddles large as kiddie pools.” She’s not exactly a native, but spent part of her childhood in the Keys. She’s a sexual alpha and an unabashed connoisseur of female beauty.
When the novella begins, Carla and Eli are acquaintances. When Carla asks Eli to run her campaign, Eli accepts despite her reservations about Carla’s values. The sexual tension is immediate and soon consummated, but must be kept hush-hush; Carla’s in denial and a scandal could derail her campaign. Eli catches genuine feelings, but Carla is increasingly torn between her true desires and the right-wing community to which she believes she must appeal to win.
The text is structured so that the perspective alternates between Carla and Eli from chapter to chapter. Eli’s sections are all in first person, while Carla’s are in close third. It’s an unusual stylistic choice that reflects Carla’s alienation from herself; she is constantly uncomfortable in her body, in the social scenarios that running for office entails, in off-kilter moments with Eli.
The novella isn’t a detailed account of running a local election. Carla’s politics are mostly elided, except immigration and a few vague mentions of fiscal responsibility. There’s little mention of municipal entities or issues. The bubba system, a Key West brand of nepotism, is hinted at, but never explicitly described. There are events that make Carla’s campaign feel concrete, including what must be the most titillating scene to ever occur at a Rotary Club. Nor is the novella a deep dive into Key West, where the author lived for two years after completing her MFA at the University of Tampa. There’s almost no historical background. A strain of clubbish wealthy conservatism taints the area’s progressive reputation. Landscape descriptions are limited and grungy, with multiple references to oceanic bacteria, sharks, and humidity. This refreshingly resists any easy definition of local color, though there were missed opportunities for more specific imagery (equally refreshing is that this is a rare instance where fiction is more depressing than reality; the real Key West recently elected an openly lesbian Democratic mayor).
Carla’s campaign provides moral stakes and structure. Catherine’s restraint in describing Carla’s bid helps keep the novella from didacticism. It’s also maybe part of the novella’s point: the personal is political to the point of full eclipse. Yet there were times when the campaign felt so besides the point and raised so many doubts that its inclusion seemed questionable. Carla is ambivalent about running, which makes watching her do it anyway oddly mesmerizing; but then why do it at all? Backstory adds context but doesn’t fully explain her ambition. The reader doesn’t share Eli’s shock at Carla’s betrayal because the information needed to form expectations about Carla’s behavior, or to have those expectations subverted, is lacking.
Carla and Eli’s star-crossed romance is compelling and conflicted enough to stand alone. Carla’s contradictions could be dramatized without the campaign. If the personal is going to eclipse the political, isn’t the argument better served by omitting the political, and letting it only appear as a soft halo? Even small-fry elections can be novelistic in scope, and there simply isn’t space to give the subject its due and make it feel more than pretextual in so few pages.
Even so, it’s impossible to be bored by the novella, which is brisk and economical. Carla and Eli’s affair is intensely erotic, made more so by undercurrents of suppressed desire and rage. They’re each well-drawn; you get the impression you might’ve met them before, buying orange juice at the store or drinking tequila at a downtown bar. Peripheral characters are immensely enjoyable, particularly Eli’s grandmother, Mimi, who casts love spells, drives a red convertible, and has a weakness for chardonnay. Descriptions, though spare, are sharp and memorable: Carla is “a good Samaritan, but not a great one.” Key West is “all just rot at the core” after you dig down past the “palms, Spanish limes, and poincianas, the drunken parades on Duval, six toed cats and blue feathered roosters.” As with Catherine’s short story Mostly Sunny With a Slight Chance of Rain, which won an Editor’s Choice in Carve’s 2016 Raymond Carver Contest, the prose is direct yet evocative.
For these reasons alone, it’s no surprise that Blindsided won the 2018 Clay Reynolds novella prize. Blindsided was published by Texas Review Press. Available for purchase from local bookstores and online.
Chelsea Catherine is a PEN Short Story Prize Nominee, editor's pick of the Raymond Carver Fiction contest in 2016, a Sterling Watson fellow, and an Ann McKee grant recipient. Her novella, "Blindsided" won the Clay Reynolds competition and was published in October of 2018. Most recently, she won the Mary C Mohr nonfiction award through the Southern Indiana Review and her book, "Summer of the Cicadas" won the Quill Prose Award through Red Hen Press. It will be published in 2020.