- Smoking Hopes
2003 Asian American Bookview
1998 The Whole Wired World (TW3) April 13
1997 P.I.F. October
1996 Nancy Picks The Daily Hampshire Gazette December 13
1996 Neal Travis New York Post August 14
1996 Stephen Pitalo Downtown Resident’s Insider (NY) Aug
1996 Joe Guinto The Met (Dallas) August 7-14.
1996 Patricia Wayne Brown The Columbus Dispatch Sun, July 21
1996 Reviewer Magazine Summer
1996 Julie Besonen Paper Magazine Summer
1996 georgejr.com August
1996 Natalie Medigovich Lewisville Leader June 29 and June 28
1996 Helen Bryant The Dallas Morning News June 25
1996 Skip Sheffield The News (Boca Raton) June 14
1996 Shannon Warmann Metrocrest News (Dallas) June 13
1996 Neal Travis New York Post May 23
1996 Transpacific Magazine May
1996 Harriet Hiller The Minute Man (Westport) May 13
1996 Rose Sung Hunter Envoy May 7
1996 Brian Taraz Revolt in Style (San Diego) April
1996 Clay Reynolds The Dallas Morning News Sunday, Feb 11
1996 Publishers Weekly February 16
1996 Clay Reynolds –San Antonio Express-News January 21
Publishers Weekly February 16, 1995
SMOKING HOPES
Victoria Alexander, Permanent Press
$22 (208p) ISBN 1-877946-69-9
As a bleached blonde bombshell whose excessive plastic surgery has rendered her ‘as unreal as animation,’ Charlie Dean, narrator of most of the richly written first novel, relates her life as a ‘hostess’ in a Japanese geisha house in Manhattan. The strength of Charlie’s voice and character renders her story continually surprising: a bookworm who enjoys George Eliot and James Joyce, she brings a wryly intelligent eye to her sordid employment, and particularly to customers’ ever-constant hope that sex is part of her job description (it isn’t). Alexander’s subtly threaded explorations of love and hope, her sensuous, distilled prose and her incisive wit make this a sophisticated, resonant debut. (Apr.)
FYI: In order to write Smoking Hopes, which won the Washington Prize for Fiction, Alexander worked worked part-time as a hostess.
The Dallas Morning News Sunday, February 11, 1996 ‘No trade deficit for Charlie: Hostess has her own import plan for rich Japanese swain’ Smoking Hopes Victoria N. Alexander, The Permanent Press, $22 By Clay Reynolds ’Hopes’ is the name of a Japanese brand of cigarettes favored by the customers of Manhattan’s Club Kiki, where the novel’s narrator and main character, Charlie Dean, works. The men who come there enjoy the company of a rotating cadre of beautiful American women. The hostesses sit with them and light their Hopes in more ways than one.
Neither Charlie . . . nor her co-hostesses are prostitutes. Indeed private liaisons with the clientele are strongly discouraged by the Mama-san, who runs the club with an iron hand. Nevertheless, many of the girls succumb to the temptation represented by the wealthy and free-spending Japanese, each of whom seems to want his own personal American mistress as a symbol of his status in the most status-conscious of all countries.
Charlie herself succumbs, but she does so deliberately. She has ulterior motives. She plans a sea voyage to Japan to find her estranged husband, also her best friend’s estranged lover, and to recapture him with her newly learned charms. Accordingly, she takes up with a foolish Japanese executive, Hiro, who becomes so enthralled with his tall American blonde beauty that he loses his reason and eventually much, much more.
The most remarkable achievement of this often funny and highly sensual novel, though, is not the plot or setting, though both of these elements are handled with alacrity and grace. A dark comedy with cunning observations on society and culture, it avoids political correctness by employing a sometimes brutal honesty.
But it is the character of Charlie Dean herself that makes this novel work. Few narrators in my experience have been presented with such uncompromising honesty, such deep and deliberate introspection.
San Antonio Express
To understand the mind-set of women who work in such clubs, Ms. Alexander worked as a [hostess] in a Japanese men’s club in Manhattan. She apparently was successful in her research, for Charlie emerges as a completely believeable product of 1990′s femininity, a woman whose ultra-sensitivity is knitted through the narrative.
Charlie tells her tale with integrity and intense circumspection, never apologizing for her proclivities, for her excesses . . . Although she is not moralistic, she does set hard standards for herself and guards against falling into the role of victim. . .
Charlie is an intensely self-conscious character. She is constantly performing, if not for an audience of paying customers, then for people on the street, her neighbors in her almost surrealistic Manhattan neighborhood, ‘Thirteenth Alley.’
Smoking Hopes is a sometimes funny, sometimes reflective and ironic tale . . . I have no doubt that more, much more, will be heard from author Victoria N. Alexander.
SMOKING HOPES
In Smoking Hopes (Permanent Press, $22), narrator Charlie Dean is living in New York, making money largely based on her looks, and hoping one day to be reunited with her ex-husband Gottlieb. In this excerpt, Dean is meeting her friend Lola in a bar near her New York City apartment.
“The day-to-day existence of Charlie Dean is punctuated with interruptions to the tune of: Your tits are nice. That this is a self-imposed handicap raises questions to be dealt with; the answer to this figures largely into the understanding of the heart of Charlie Dean. Why do I need to project my features well beyond the footlights?
As I make my way to the rear [of the bar]…I shout up to Lola, finding her at the end. She’s going on a trip to Japan! she announces. Can you believe it?
I try to get to her. We are still separated by the crowd. Someone pulls my wrist, that black dancer [she had just left behind], and whispers, “Why do you dress like that if you don’t want it?”
Why do I dress like a fille de joie? Actually, I’m making a fashion statement, poor me, not a sexual one. Why, this outfit describes the kind of music I listen to. Psychofunk and hiphop house. Sometimes, I even dream that out of a slavish dedication to some new fashion I’d seen in an advertisement, I go grocery shopping bare-breasted, or sometimes without pants. In the fresh vegetable section, I begin to get the feeling that some shoppers aren’t aware of that particular style. I begin to suspect I’ve gone too far, and I feel really silly, but I conceal my shame, trying to act naturally.
Or is it shortsightedness? The optimum beauty is the traffic-stopping kind. As a topless dancer, I learned that if every customer didn’t gasp and hand me a 20 the moment I walked on stage, I was not beautiful enough. Conspicuousness, that’s beauty. If blonde is pretty, blonder must be prettier…If a mini-skirt is sexy, a micromini is even sexier. But when does it stop being beautiful, become theatrical, and then finally ridiculous? When you see that showy image of yourself alone, with no one watching, without an audience.
So there you have it. I’m caught, a child in her mother’s make-up kit–red lips, perfectly round and garish circles of rouge on her cheeks, neon blue eye shadow. Naively, I believe I look beautiful, but Mother, who knows better, says I look like a little whore, and I squirm giggling as she wipes the mess from my face.
But I’ve learned that kind of girl gets all the attention, and wanting to be one is probably not merely a taste for the illicit. There must be some objective reason why we like whorish looks, some staid sound value, or chemical reaction, or something undeniably true and real, something unworthy of contempt.
That kind of girl gets to sail to Japan to Gottlieb.”
Carrollton native Victoria Alexander bares it all to make a literary name for herself. But is she exposing too much to be taken seriously? JOSEPH GUINTO reports.
I am waiting. Waiting like the tramps for Godot and like the characters in Carrollton-born author Victoria Alexander’s new book, Smoking Hopes, are always, always waiting. They wait for love, for fulfillment, for purpose.
Myself, I’m just waiting for Victoria, and she is 10 minutes late for our interview. I’m sitting in a Lower Greenville coffee-house. Not unlike the people who populate Smoking Hopes, who hope they will get what they wait for, I also have hope. I’m hoping Victoria won’t show.
Judging from her press clippings, including good reviews in publications as disparate as Paper magazine and the Dallas Morning News, Victoria is an excellent writer. Judging from the photos in her press kit, Victoria is, well, hot. On top of that, I’ve already seen her naked. The back cover of Smoking Hopes features a picture of Victoria in puris naturalibus, sans vêtements. A nude photo on the back of a book being touted as “literary fiction” makes me wonder if Victoria has wrought an artistic work or simply cranked out some smut.
She’s now 15 minutes late, and I’m wondering if Victoria isn’t just a flighty stripper who got lucky on a publisher’s couch – a dumb blonde with a laptop, some time on her hands, and good grades from English class. The only thing keeping me here is the mention in her press kit that Smoking Hopes – whose main protagonist is a cosmetically enhanced former stripper who now works at a modern-day geisha club where women pour drinks, light cigarettes, and flirt with Japanese men – has won the Washington Prize for fiction. Then I realize that, without much journalistic diligence on my part, I have no idea what the Washington Prize for fiction is.
The instant I decide to leave, the coffeehouse door swings open, and a cool woman with long, blonde hair walks in. It’s obviously Victoria. I can tell from her leg muscles. They’re stripper’s legs–the sort you might develop from dancing in high heels for hours at a time. And she is wearing just such high heels, a blue, pleated miniskirt, and a blue half shirt that exposes a hint of a navel.
My first impression says Victoria is exactly what I worried she’d be. But, as we sit down and talk, I will regret having judged a book by its backside.
Victoria Alexander is the kind of women other women love to hate. She looks good in micro-miniskirts – or nothing at all. Because her writing and eloquent manner of speech make her impossible to dismiss as a dumb blonde, she has run headlong into feminists.
If Victoria Alexander is the kind of woman other women love to hate, then Smoking Hopes’ main character is the kind of woman men love to hate. Charlie Dean is beautiful, if a bit surgically enhanced.
In reviewing her book, the Dallas Morning News said of Dean, also the book’s narrator, that she “tells her tale with integrity and intense circumspection, never apologizing for her proclivities, for her excesses, her calculated use of her beauty and sexuality to achieve her goals, whatever they may be: a free cab ride Up Town, an emerald ring, an extension on her overdue electric bill or income taxes.”
Dean works in the Japanese hostess club, as Victoria did while researching the book, making up to $200 a night by simply lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, and talking to Japanese buisnessmen. The patrons pay $100 per hour for the girl’s company.
“There’s really no American version of the hostess club,” Victoria says. “You can’t compare them to a topless club or anything like that. The Japanese are very polite, very indirect. The highlight of the night comes if they can get a girl to waltz with them, and they can get close. But they’re very bad dancers.”
The hostess clubs are essentially a Japanese way of playing the traditional dating game: the flirting, the maneuvering to the dance floor, the hope on the man’s part that the woman might actually like him.
Though dating clients is strongly discouraged, hostesses have been known to take up with some of the men outside of the club, even to find a husband among the patrons. For her part, Victoria always explained to the men that she was working at the club as research for her book. But that didn’t lessen their hopes that she would take an interest in them.
She pushes her empty iced coffee aside and leans forward again on the table. She whispers, “You know what? That didn’t make a bit of difference. They’d want to be in the book, of course, but they didn’t get it: That was the only reason I was there.”
One client even traced her down at Hunter College, where she was teaching. “He had bought a gold bracelet from Tiffany’s,” she recalls. “By the time he found me, he handed me the bracelet, said he was late for a meeting, and left.”
Another client paid her $3,000 for four meetings in which she taught him Mark Twain.
Those events all find their way, in small pieces, into Smoking Hopes. It is a solid, moving and funny work. The title stands both for Hopes, a brand of Japanese cigarette, and hope, what drives the characters in the book. They all hope to find love in the strangest places and people.
Hopes is a black comedy to be sure. The lives of the characters are laughable – but they’re also pitable. Most of all, they’re real. Regarding the hostess clubs, Victoria provides keen insight into a world that most Americans know nothing about. Regarding her main character, Charlie Dean, she provides insight into the life of a woman on her own in the modern world, with the gawking men, credit-card debt, bugs in the apartment, and noisy neighbors that go along with it.
“What I write is literary fiction,” Victoria says with an arched brow that asks if I know what literary fiction is. “It’s not Danielle Steele, not John Grisham, not . . .” She stops herself and smiles playfully, pleased that I am shaking my head head in agreement. “I don’t want to become famous off this. I don’t want to make a movie based on the book. I don’t want to make a million dollars. I want to be taught on college campuses when I’m dead.”
Well, I tell her, you have to have hope.
Now Victoria Alexander and I are both waiting. We are hoping her husband will arrive to pick her up.
Victoria has made me rethink my first impression of her. She is intelligent, funny, and very engaging. (A few weeks later, when I have completed Smoking Hopes, I also realize that she’s a deft young writer.)
I sit back in my chair, which I believe has actually shrunk over the course of our conversation, and make an effort to appear calm, cool, relaxed – and fail. I find myself clicking my pen cap, opening and closing my notebook, and sweating. Not perspiring, sweating. I consider excusing myself to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door. Now that Victoria Alexander has earned my respect, I’m desperately hoping she doesn’t know what kind of woman I at first thought she was – and, more to the point, what kind of man I am.
But then Victoria’s husband shows up and saves me. “He’s here,” she says, pointing to a minivan parked across the street. “We unhooked the bike trailer.” They have a Harley. A fitting contradiction – the family vehicle towing the rebel bike. I meet him and he hands me a copy of Smoking Hopes, which Victoria signs. She hands it back, looking at me with a shyness I have not seen in her before. She looks hopeful that I care for her autograph, I act honored, then say my goodbyes, receiving a handshake that is distant, perfunctory. She knows, I think.
A few weeks later, I receive a letter from Victoria. She says she enjoyed our interview and hopes to see me again when she returns to Dallas. Hmm. Maybe she doesn’t know. You have to have hope.
RING THREE TIMES
Author Victoria Alexander’s naked truths.
1996 Julie Besonen Paper Magazine Summer
“A naked woman is a very powerful thing,” says Victoria Alexander, whose recently released first novel, Smoking Hopes (The Permanent Press), chronicles the comic adventures of a professional hostess in a Japanese men’s club.
Over coffee at Chez Bernard on West Broadway, Alexander, who posed nude for the back cover of Smoking Hopes (Hope is a Japanese cigarette) … has a slight Southern accent retained her Dallas, Texas, childhood. She is introspective and intellectual and not your typical idea of a showgirl. Blonde and petite (”Five-foot-two, and five nine in heels”), with limpid green eyes and translucent skin, she is currently at work on a doctorate in English literature at CUNY.
Nudity was not part of Alexander’s job in the Japanese hostess clubs of N.Y.C. Women wore conservative cocktail dresses, and no sex was involved.
“It’s a holdover from the geisha days,” she explains. About 35 such clubs exist on the Upper East Side, where businessmen pay as much as $100 an hour simply to come in and talk and have their cigarettes lit and drinks poured by beautiful women. To be admitted, men must be able to read a sign in Japanese that says “Ring three times.” Alexander made anywhere from $75 to $200 a night just showing interest in what her male customers had to say (a short stint in the Tokyo clubs netted her $400 a night). “Working as a teacher I learned how to ask questions and really dig. I’m a good listener.”
Columbus Dispatch Sunday, July 21, 1996
Hostess’s story told with wry insight o Victoria Alexander practiced the profession to prepare for her writing.
“Conspicuousness, that’s beauty,” says Charlie Dean, “hostess” at a private Japanese club in Manhattan. When she strolls down the avenue a blind man whistles and cabbies offer her free rides.
Victoria N. Alexander’s first novel, which won the Washington Prize for Fiction, follows the surgically enhanced Charlie through her days in an apartment decorated in off-Broadway props and nights of offering false hopes to her clients at the Club Kiki, where the customer is king and the conversation is sex.
Charlie may be a bimbo, but she is a literate bimbo who reads George Eliot, St. Augustine’s Confessions and, significant to this story, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Charlie is waiting too, for Gottlieb, her ex-husband. She hopes to find him by taking a trip to Japan, where she thinks he has fled. In the meantime, she meets a cast of characters who include Lola, Gottlieb’s ex-mistress, and the Japanese businessmen who smoke Hope cigarettes and offer her money for the outside chance at love.
Seemingly in a state of low-grade depression, Charlie takes advantage of Hiro, a businessman who frequents the club. Alexander’s portrayal of Hiro and the other clients shows them in the cruel light of pity and ridicule. They are seen as cartoonlike characters, which deepens the novel’s negativity.
The beauty and humor of Alexander’s writing in other parts of the story are appealing.
“Hiro shrunk into sleep and I have expanded into the unused night,” is one example of here powerful prose. Delightful twists and tweaks jump out in sentences like this: “We gulp down our crustaceans, clams, scrod and scram.”
Ever brightening the dark corners, though, Alexander wins the day and elevates the book with Charlie’s character. A scene in which Charlie kills roaches in her apartment is a scream. Her letter to the Internal Revenue Service asking officials to “be a dear” and ease up on her overdue payment provokes giggles. Her entrances and fashion choices are hilariously explained with rare insight into a woman’s sexual radar.
Alexander writes of the human need for hope: “…that is what makes the human the darling, the inexplicable pet of the universe.” We hang on to this hope as Charlie proceeds with life while everything around her is crumbling. By the end, however, our own hope goes up in smoke and the disturbing ashes are left in our afterthoughts.
1996 Nancy Picks Daily New Hampshire Gazette
WHEN LUST IS SEARCH FOR HOPE nuanced novel exposes more than just flesh
Let’s start with the jacket photo. Everyone does. It shows author Victoria N. Alexander from the back, naked, with the light playing off her splendidly rounded derriere. When you put such a photo on your book jacket, Alexander said, you invite three kinds of reaction. Some people (myself included) think the book will be stupid. Some people think the book insults women. And some people are simply curious to read a book by the owner of this lovely bottom.
The main character of “Smoking Hopes” (the Permanent Press, $22, 207 pp.) turns out to be a beautiful woman nicknamed Angel who works in a Japanese men’s club in New York. Happily, this is not a stupid novel. It offers some memorable glimpses into the world of women who sells their charms, if not their bodies. In a Japanese club, men pay big bucks to converse with attractive women, have their drinks poured and their cigarettes lit. They are paying not for sex but, in Alexander’s version, for hope. (Hope is also the name of a popular brand of Japanese cigarette.) In the novel, a customer named Hiro does, for a time, have his hopes fulfilled. Angel, desperate for funds and companionship, becomes his mistress.
I was fascinated by Alexander’s description of the way hostesses play the game at Club Kiki: “That the hostess’s vision of the future differs wildly from that of her customers does not make the present reality a lie. For example, ‘I enjoyed speaking with you tonight. Please come back real soon,’ when said by a waving hostess at the door, does not mean: ‘I like you; let’s date,’ particularly if she’s said it in memorized Japanese.
“However, it does represent a Club Kiki Truth. She really does enjoy talking with him (because she is paid well for it), and she really would like him to come back (so she can draw ten bucks’ commission). Hostesses simply do not lie.”
Hiro is always seen through the eyes of Angel, and he grows increasingly complex. Alexander doesn’t prepare us, however, for the cruelty he exhibits at the novel’s end.
Her next novel, which she’s finishing up, is a more light-hearted look at strippers, entitled “Trixie, Mad Pixie.”
“Smoking Hopes” has nearly sold out its 3000-copy first printing. Victoria N. Alexander will sign copies of “Smoking Hopes” on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. at Media Play in the Hampshire Mall, Route 9, Hadley.
1996 Neal Travis New York Post August 14 Mary, Joseph. . . and Brad? So what’s it like being landlord to the couple-of-the-moment, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow? ‘I feel like the owner of the manger must have felt when he rented out his place to Mary and Joseph,’ says novelist Victoria Alexander. ‘Sort of important, but I can’t really take any kind of credit for anything.’
Alexander owns the SoHo loft with artist Neil Grayson. They were going on the road for five months to promote her new book, ‘Smoking Hopes,’ and heard through a mutual friend that Pitt and Paltrow were looking for a quiet place to stay. She says she firmly had to discourage friends who wanted to drop by, pretending not to know she and Grayson were away. In the end, the glamour couple were pretty much undisturbed.
The hefty rental income will be used to finance the renovation of another SoHo property, which is home to the Dactyl Foundation, which offers grants to artists and writers.
1996 Helen Bryant The Dallas Morning News June 25 Overnight Now the Nudes You may have read this paper’s review of ex-Dallasite Victoria N. Alexander’s book, Smoking Hopes. Victoria, now a New Yorker pursuing a doctorate in English literature, worked part time as a hostess to gather material for this work of fiction. On the back cover of her novel, she is pictured unclad, save for a pair of tasteful high heels. The shot has sold a good many tomes, according to a note in the New York Post.
Victoria’s husband, artist Neil Grayson, was recently nabbed by the New York cops for unlawfully pasting up posters for her book. But after he explained that his wife made him do it–and after he presented NYPD’s finest with a copy of the book–they let him go. Apparently they were too busy looking at the back cover to run him in.
To meet the object of all this attention, you can attend one of Victoria’s local signings.
1996 WESTPORT MINUTEMAN MAY 16 Novelist Victoria N. Alexander bursts onto the scene (Meet her at a book signing) By: Harriet Hiller
There is nothing ordinary about the brilliant, blond literary bombshell, Victoria N. Alexander, whose first novel, “Smoking Hopes,” winner of The Washington Prize for Fiction, is arriving at bookstores as we speak. She will be signing copies at Barnes & Noble in Westport on Saturday at 5 pm.
There is nothing ordinary about Alexander’s accomplishments-her literary criticism has been published in the Antioch Review; she teaches expository writing and is a Ph.D. candidate, English Literature, at the City College of New York, and is the wife of painter, Neil Grayson.
There is nothing ordinary about her first novel, “Smoking Hopes,” that tells the story of a young woman’s obsession with illicit liaisons that takes her on a highly erotic and very dangerous journey through a New York and Japanese world you may not have known existed.
Alexander researched the character of her heroine, Charlie Dean, by working as one of the very few Americans permitted to work as a hostess in a Japanese private club in New York.
Although born in Dallas, Victoria N. Alexander’s roots are in Westport. Her greatgrandfather emigrated here from Poland at the turn of the century; here grandmother, Amelia Nichols, lives here to this day.
At 17, Alexander, knowing she was destined to become a writer since the age of 10, left Texas for the East Village to write songs and play keyboard in a punk band.
At 19, she enrolled at Hunter College, majoring in English literature. She supported herself by working as a bird trainer in Queens, in a German pastry shop, and as a marine operator.
To earn the money needed to pay for her master’s degree, Alexander tutored at Hunter and had an outside job as a strip-o-gramer.
Alexander says, “I did little lingerie routines in restaurants where you strip down to lingerie, give the birthday boy a kiss and a little present and read a poem. Sometimes I had to write the poems myself. “It was a pretty silly, but it was fun. I never had any unpleasant experiences.”
In 1991, Alexander moved back to Westport to help take care of her aging grandmother and to begin writing “Smoking Hopes.” She lived in the small cottage next to her grandmother’s house until she married three years ago.
“The book, which took about a year to write,” Alexander explains, “is really a revision of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” that explores the fear that there is no such thing as God and basically life on earth is a hopeless situation where you sit around waiting for someone who is not coming.
“I don’t like to think that this is what literature is about today. There is still plenty of reason to see meaning in being alive, and trying to be good and to lead as meaningful a life as you possibly can.
“Although, in my book, the heroine, like Godot, is waiting, she tries to take responsibility for her own actions and tries not to depend on anyone else for here own happiness. Her life is up to her.”
The process of getting “Smoking Hopes” published took about five years. A top New York agent represented the novel for a while. “All sorts of interest,” Alexander says, “but nothing happened.” Alexander put the novel on a back burner, started another novel and commuted to New York six days a week, teaching at Hunter College, finishing her master’s degree, and working as a stripper in New York and then at Beamers in Stamford. She corrected her students’ papers in the dressing room and on the train.
“Dancing in a cabaret setting is one of the nicest things you can do, getting up there on stage with soft lights making you look lovely, dressed in the most attractive way, and just dancing to music,” she explains. “I never thought there was anything ugly about it.”
When Alexander married, a new life began. Dancing ended, she began her doctoral work, and decided to move “Smoking Hopes” into prime time, without an agent.
Three weeks after sending out a synopsis of the book, her bio and a photo, The Permanent Press picked up the book. Her life is changing now that “Smoking Hopes” is a reality. “It is very strange to have written alone for all these years and no one really reading it. Now, all of a sudden I have a public life and my work has a public life, and it’s kind of scary. It’s strange to share my work with other people. But, it’s thrilling.”
Victoria N. Alexander is just at the beginning of her career and raring to go. Her second novel is in the hands of an agent. She is on the move, and certainly very much worth watching. And, reading.
