I very briefly joined blue sky. I lasted about four minutes before the rising panic set in. Do I have to see what “everyone thinks”? No, it turns out I don’t.
This year has been revelatory for me. I started practicing Tai Chi, following on my interest in 5e acupuncture. I reread lots of mystery novels, and only a few new books. I have taken two hikes per week on average. Yesterday, I saw a kestrel, a hawk, and an owl within the city limits.
At some point, you have to stop sublimating!
I will never be committed to anything as much as keith urban is committed to frosted tips
Here is a short review of Tessa Hadley’s Free Love, out now, at Bookforum. I’ve long been interested in Hadley’s approach to the British novel, in part because I see her as offering an interesting corrective to the idea that formal experiment must look a certain way. Her novels “look” quite conventional — the narration is stable, distant; the characters and their situations are familiar. But at their core, Hadley’s novels trouble very stable conventions of family plotting, especially those drawn from Freud. This novel is no exception to that habit, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Well, well, well. Look at who has lost her posting energy! I haven’t, exactly, I’ve been working on a few short projects and one long one while I, simultaneously, began swimming pretty regularly for the first time in, oh, thirty five years. It’s been glorious. More on that soon, I hope?
Meanwhile, here is a review for NYRB, my first. It’s about Cusk and Lawrence, and merciless writing. I loved the editorial process for this, which was exacting, but generative. A perfect balance.
I have been trying to get down 500 words about Sally Rooney’s latest novel all week. My elder child just began kindergarten, and while I thought that five hours every weekday of one child’s care would equal a bit more mental space for thinking about novels, I am instead spending five hours succoring a bereft toddler – taking him to the city, or a park, playing endless games of shop in which I am never able to order correctly. But why am I surprised? This is how it’s been since 2018, when my second child was born and I stopped working full-time. Tonight is the first time in a week I have not done the bedtime routine. This is half by choice and half by habit: the bath and bedtime stories is, on the face of it, the least onerous part of our nighttime work. Tonight, for example, I just went up and down the garage steps four times taking various bits of compost and tinfoil to their respective bins. “Please, don’t baby,” is a sentence I actually just said to a tearing bag full of dirty diapers (don’t worry, it didn’t). But the bedtime routine is tricky because it takes ages. Many people I know have successfully sleep-trained their children. And it’s true that now, when they’re tired, they do snuggle up and go to sleep: they’re just never tired! They always want one more story, and one more explanation of why something happened in a story. And, forgive me, I am always willing to read one more bit of myth or Ramona or Brambly Hedge. So, we sit there. Me: grimly reading, because it’s what I do; them: grimly listening, because that’s what they like. But then, I should remember that the pandemic has shattered most of our routines, and that they, unlike most people, have benefited from the greater share of parental attention, and the greater share of sibling-rhythm time. I, too, have benefited: if you’d told me five years ago I would spend eighteen months as the solitary care-giver for two, sometimes three, children for nine to ten hours a day, I would have laughed. I have learned a lot about care, and how much energy and time it really takes, since this all began.
This is neither here nor there with Rooney, though I will get to her. But, the other, more frustrating fly in the ointment is that while I don’t seem to have the energy to sit down and finish a solitary thought at the end of the day, I certainly have been having them! And I never seem to get around to writing them down, so they pop into my head, gel a little bit (semi-freddo? panacotta?) and then fizzle once I get a chunk of time, an hour or two to think about my own mind. My elder child has started giving “brain kisses,” which are little pecks on one’s forehead, and often, it feels like that’s what I really need: more brain kisses, less brain work.
The indignities of middle age have hit hard in the last year. I’ve been forgetting words when I speak, searching for them with a roving wrist action, like I can file through a rolodex to get to “coincidence,” or “concurrence,” or something else, what, exactly, is still opaque. My left foot always seems dirtier than the right, a product of hauling children around on my hip for half a decade – now, I just stand that way, even when I’m not carrying someone bodily, which in itself is a rarity. One breast remains two, maybe three, cup sizes larger than its fellow. My wrist cracks when I turn it. The line between my brows has gone from being a hint to a ridge. The one really significant research project I managed to work on in the pandemic – something I still turn to when I have a free minute – has gone from being an obsession to a friend: will I ever figure out what it is? Probably not.
But, to Rooney. This little bit has a huge spoiler, so sorry, Sally, I have to think about this part. The last – very last – turn in Beautiful World, Where Are You, pushes one of her main characters into pregnancy, the final turn in the bildungsroman of a modern woman’s life. A character must find herself, then find love, and then produce a child. It’s an interesting way for a Rooney novel to end: she is deeply, pleasurably committed to comic endings. If marriage is unlikely for her characters, deep and abiding companionship is not. But, ending on the note of reproductive charm – the blissful moment a baby is expected but not yet here – is a startling adjustment to her novelistic mode. I have been trying to figure out, all week, if it’s a sign of a deeper commitment to comic pleasure, or a sign of its dismantling. I sense that the pregnancy plot goes hand in hand – in some way – with Simon’s religious intensity in this novel, but I’m not precisely sure where that connection lies. Are the twinned conventions of family and church so egregiously wrong-headed for most of Rooney’s readership that the turn indicates a desire to irritate her legions of fans? There are enough passages in Alice’s letters to her friend Eileen that explain the novelist’s frustration with overly familiar fan-doms to produce this kind of account (sorry, Sally). But, perhaps there’s something else that pulls family and church together in an extension, not repudiation, of Rooney’s comic mode?
I thought, when I read Normal People, that Rooney was offering an intriguingly positive account of the pleasures of heterosexuality. This was (mis!) read as a critique of queer theory or even of queerness as such. Nothing could be further from the truth! But, because Rooney’s major intervention in the novel takes the form of quasi-romantic, heterosexual plotting, it’s hard not to think about what she is doing in representing fulfilling straight sex. And Rooney is careful to mark out many of her characters as bisexual. Both Alice and Felix in Beautiful World are bisexual, we even see Felix using a grindr-like app early in his romance with Alice. What do we make of a plotting system wherein queer characters end up finding fulfillment in heterosexual romance? And, does this have anything to do with this novel’s interest in pregnancy and religiosity?
One little breadcrumb might be Rooney’s use of the Song of Solomon as a vedic choral note in the second half of the book. I first noticed it in the scene of Eileen’s sister’s wedding (I admit I’ve only read the book once through, so I would have to go back to see if it appears earlier). “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock:” the passage intervenes in the moment Lola and Matthew exchange their vows. In the world of realism, we are overhearing a psalm sung at a wedding. But, given that the passage echoes again, later, in relation to Eileen and Simon, we might think, too, that the Song holds a special significance for the two: is Simon the rock? Is Eileen? What, if anything, does this reference have to do with Alice’s interest in “the Christian mindset,” which she argues imbues her daily life with a moral meaning that she has, heretofore, been missing. What to make of this? Is Rooney making a case for a deeply conservative world-shaping project? Do we all need to settle down and have families and go to Mass to make everything make sense again?
I don’t think so; not exactly. But perhaps a more positive vision of the communal and moral possibilities of “the Christian mindset” make more sense after the last eighteen months than they have for the rest of my adult life. I’m not sure what I, a person raised by religious people, and raised into a religion, think about this. I moved away from the church as a teenager, but I will admit, too, that the appeal of it strikes me now in ways it never has before. Not just because of a quietly awakening (maybe?) religious feeling, but because of the comfort in communal life that church, in an ideal world, offers.
What I thought about Rooney’s first two novels is that they offer a vision of a recuperative heterosexuality: one that is neither compulsory nor bought at the cost of one’s moral, mental, or physical health. One, also, it goes without saying, that is not bought at the cost of queer health. But I think what I enjoyed about this most recent novel is the way that it gestures to a weirdly recuperative conservatism. Part of the challenge of making the world a place of equality appears to be how we accommodate old ways of living. Do we throw family life out because it has, historically, been a site of misery and inequality? I don’t think so. And while I am very, very tired of spending my days caring for small children, I also, in the last eighteen months, have found resources within myself I did not know were there. And this is perhaps terrifying to claim: I am happier caring for my family now than I was when the pandemic began, in part because I know I can do it.
Once, when I was in the throes of dealing with the humiliating exit from my job, I had a long conversation with a senior colleague at another institution. I greatly admired this colleague. I still do. But, as I was walking around the Mission, pushing the stroller to get my resistant newborn to nap, she told me something that struck me as a huge mistake. I had, wearily, told her about my miscarriages and the work it had taken me to stay pregnant with my son. I told her how scary my mental health issues were right after the birth. I told her everything was delicate, and that I had not yet found childcare. She told me to get him a nanny and to spend every second of the day working. She told me to use the rest of my maternity leave to publish articles. To get a jump on the next book. To do everything I can to make my case look like a slam dunk. I faltered: “But, I had just had him. I wanted to spend time with him. It wouldn’t be good for him to be separated so early; I was still solely breastfeeding him.” It’s burned on my brain what she said to me. The shape of the moment is still crystal clear: I was walking past the house where the drummer from Santana hung out (true), my baby was asleep, I was very close to tears again. “But you will be better off in the long run; he will be better off if you keep your job.” She said this, and she believed it. I am pretty sure this was precisely wrong. It’s not the way family life has to be, but for me, it’s better that I’m here. It’s better for everyone.
There will be some spoilers, so don’t read if you haven’t finished the book! I read Libertie, the new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, in three big gulps, late at night when I should have been sleeping. I had read her first novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman, and enjoyed the complexity of Greenidge’s first person narration, which depends on a character coming into strange, belated awarenesses of her family’s structure and her own emotional and sexual needs. Charlie Freeman is primarily set in the years I was a teenager, so I also warmed to the descriptions of the outfits teenagers wear when they want to slip into new personas. Teenage description remains a weakness of mine! I just love it! The second diegetic timeframe in Charlie Freeman is the late 1920s, and develops some really complicated ideas about coercion and consent in and around sexual life, so I was really intrigued by the description of Libertie’s plot, which focuses on the eponymous heroine’s teenaged and young adult years in 1860s Kings County, New York. Like Nymphadora in Charlie Freeman, Libertie was written by a historical mind, with a particularly vividly rendered dailiness, especially in the working life of Libertie’s mother, a physician with a special interest in homeopathy. This is the kind of detail I really enjoy, one that boils down extensive research into a few well-chosen Latin names or lists of symptoms.
One of the most compelling aspects of these two novels is Greenidge’s investment in examining psychologically dense problems – how a queer woman might relate to a family in the 1990s, how temperament conditions one’s life as much as intelligence or capacity, how the heady mixture of naiveté and sexual desire prompt people to do things they might otherwise not do. At the end of Libertie, when the protagonist is newly pregnant and has discovered a revolting secret kept by her husband’s family, Greenidge boils down the difficulty of describing mental states: “I was not sure where this thing called a will came from. Mama had it. Emmanuel [her husband] had it. Even mad Ella [her sister in law], in her obsession, had a will. But I did not. Would it come when whatever was in me was born? Or did I have a little more time to develop one, before this something else was here?” (280). The challenge – of finding oneself – often feels like a banal one, especially in those terms: how can we “find” ourselves? But here, by placing the attention to a rapidly changing body alongside the merest glimmer of self- concept, Greenidge draws attention to the way our psyches do come into being: not through rapid revelations or cataclysms of understanding, but by testing ourselves, lightly, sort of awkwardly, against the people around us. Of course, in this moment, Libertie, the character, has left her mother and her mother’s ambitions for her in Kings County and travelled to Haiti with a man she barely knows as her husband. In most stories, this plotline alone would count as a will: but Greenidge knows the mind better than most. As Libertie’s pregnancy moves forward, we get another powerful description of the relationship between embodiment and psychic self-development: “Within a month of the time in the graveyard, I felt [the fetus]. The women in Mama’s care had always described it as a flutter, but this felt more like a determined, persistent churning. As if a current was gathering inside me. […] By the end of the month, the wave was steady and predictable. I imagined the child there, as faceless as the skin of the ocean, as formless as a wave” (283). “As faceless as the skin of the ocean:” is the child a body without a will, or a will without a body? I think, perhaps, Greenidge gets to the utterly bizarre experience of pregnancy and childbirth in one discrete image here: there is a will to life nestled within Libertie’s womb, a will that is at present absorbed in and by her body, not yet separate or separable from hers. But the movements, after quickening, remind you that, no matter how much you think pregnancy is happening to you, it’s happening to two of you: there is a body there, inside you, and your will – the will to move forward, to walk or run, to breathe the air around you – is what keeps it alive.
A nice little passage from The Thirteen Problems (1932) that draws attention to Marple’s essential Victorianness. Compare this to the way Poirot is framed as a creature of modernism, with his natty suits and foppish, soldierly mien. Here, Christie piles on the Victorian objects — Jane Marple never loses her Victorian aspect, despite carrying on well into the 1970s. The old-fashionedness of Jane Marple always reminds me, strangely, of Clarissa Dalloway, especially Clarissa at Bourton, a late Victorian girlhood that gave way to a palpable, anti-modern Virginity. Like Clarissa Dalloway, Jane Marple thinks often about her girlhood, when she seemed to be on the precipice of romance, but unlike Clarissa, Miss Marple remains her own woman:
“His [Raymond West] Aunt Jane’s house always pleased him as the right setting for her personality. He looked across the hearth to where she sat erect in the big grandfather chair. Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting – something white and soft and fleecy. Her faded blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and nephew’s guests with gentle pleasure” (3).
A short list on war in new novels for the NYT. I was really interested in the narrative technique of the Hernandez novel. By avoiding proper names, we begin to lose track of the actors. In the focal family, this is manageable, but to my eye, the greatest use of this technique comes half-way through the book, when Hernandez moves to examining the after-effects of war on women only loosely connected to the core family. You really do lose track of which woman is being discussed, and then you feel gob-smacked about the rhizomatic reach of living inside war.
I wrote about Christine Smallwood’s debut novel, The Life of the Mind, for the newest Bookforum. It’s a really fascinating narrative project. At once, it’s incredibly close to its protagonist, not committed to liking its protagonist, and — strangely! — understanding and justifying the larger social and professional failures that are at play in academia, and which lead to its protagonist’s misery.
I felt very strangely about reading the novel, too, in part because I had an academic job (the thing Dorothy, Smallwood’s protagonist has been working towards when we meet her), I had miscarriages in that job (one in a faculty meeting! It wasn’t great!!!), I feel the extreme pathos of the Christminster cakes in Jude the Obscure, and I have, on occasion, picked my nose, so in many, many ways I felt like the novel dovetailed with my experience in weird, inchoate ways. In my review, I tried to get at some of the uncanniness in the narration, which is really remarkable, but didn’t delve into the oddness of reading a book that, at times, felt very, painfully close to my own life. At least I didn’t go to school in New York, and my own advisor was a model of professional decorum.
The bigger questions the novel raises are left unanswered. Is there a place for human-scale life in the project of the academy now? Is there a place for mothers in the academy? Is there a place for literary (or historical, or theoretical) enthusiasm that isn’t torqued to professional advantage? I certainly don’t know, and Smallwood’s novel doesn’t purport to have the answers.
But I do know that, for me, the problem of understanding my own mind has become less fraught now I’m not keying every breath to a tenure clock or a conference abstract. This might not be what you want to hear, but the nagging voice doesn’t go away, but you can block it more comfortably—without fear of reprisals—once you fall off of that track. Horrendous to admit it: my writing is clearer and more free-flowing than it ever was as a professor. Is that because I have more time? Hardly. I’ve been on child-care for two small children and one half of a preteen since last March 8. Instead, I’ve been reading more novels, in different genres, than I have for years. I haven’t been reading as much poetry, definitely not as much criticism. But the novels: they’re opening paths to thought that I hadn’t quite realized was missing in my daily life.
Next up, an attempt to get a long-standing project on Agatha Christie off the ground. And preparing a talk for the c19 research group at Columbia. Onwards!
Here’s another para I cut from the Mitchell review. It has a spoiler, and it’s harrowingly about the loss of a child. I don’t entirely know how he wrote this, it’s so precise and painfully imagined:
It is in an earlier section, when Elf comforts her sister Imogen after Imogen’s baby son dies of cot death, that we see Mitchell fully in his power, bouncing mercilessly between the comforting platitudes of Elf’s parents and the miserable, useless grief Imogen feels: “Hot tears well from Imogen’s sore eyes. Elf hands her a tissue. “He must’ve known. He must’ve wanted his mum. He must’ve been afraid, he must…” Imogen shakes and curls up like a child fitting into a hiding place. “Last night I heard him crying. My milk started up and I woke in the dark and was halfway to the door when I remembered, and my nightshirt was damp so it was out with that bloody breast pump and then when it’s done I have to wash the milk down the sink, and—“ (352-3). Imogen’s hopeless grief is suffocating; Elf helps – she soothes her sister, she comforts her – but her help won’t be enough, and this kind of grief – it’s very clear, here – has no respite. Elf’s comfort, too, is limited: the band is on the rise: its guitar player has been caught in Italy with drugs, so Elf’s loyalties are divided.
I reviewed the newest David Mitchell at Bookforum, and had a bit to say about the Mitchellverse along the way.
I had a section in this that I cut that was about the way Mitchell’s abiding obsession with the decline of British global might unifies his body of work. I have to give it a bit more thought, but I think the evidence of this in Utopia Avenue is mainly in the Dean plot.
Here is a paragraph I cut from that review, but which I’d like to revisit some more:
The driving motive in Mitchell’s body of work is a fear of being rooted out and destroyed, either physically or mentally : by the people in power, by people who hate you for what you are, by yourself for not being what you expected to be. Mitchell ties this dread to the crumbling failures of the end of British global might. In the character of Dean Moss, for example, Utopia Avenue’s bassist we see the tension between lower class ambition and upper class disdain: there might be a small vignette in Dean’s hot fury at being found wanting that presages Thatcherism, Brexit, and hateful nationalisms of all stripes. Mitchell explores a ferreting, burrowing impulse in British existence when life is made cheaper and more expendable, when the recognition of the horror of empire suddenly dawns on the people living within Britain’s borders, when culpability mingles with resentment to form a fomenting stew of anxiety and complaint.
The other thing that has been occupying me is reading Agatha Christie novels. I have now moved on to the Tommy and Tuppance novels, and boy, are they little exercises in the literary mode of detective fiction! Now I have to read Edgar Wallace, I guess. Crap.
I’m going to be giving a new version of “Edith’s Two Bodies” which engages with my more recent work on c20 British psychoanalysis for the nineteenth century research group at Cambridge University, on December 1. The talk is at 5:00 GMT, and anyone can come — do people “come” to online talks? At any rate, the convener of this group is Ewan Jones, and he has asked anyone interested in attending to email him.
Info here!
I’ve been rereading Agatha Christie’s later novels over the last three weeks and I am completely stymied by Ariadne Oliver. Hopefully more ideas on this to come down the pipeline, but what a peculiar character! The apples! The hair! The intuition!
I’m trying to think of how exactly to say this, because the plotline of the novel is so monumentally awful, but the thing that has stuck with me in my rereading of The Bluest Eye is how gentle Toni Morrison is with her villainous characters. Not just Cholly Breedlove, though Morrison’s handling of his character is virtuosic. She holds him to account for raping his young daughter almost at the same moment that she makes legible the violent sexual assault he experiences as a young man that is the key cause of his own sexual violence. The compressed way Morrison manages time in her novels is perhaps most striking around episodes of sexual violence, because it so closely mimics the insidious sense of simultaneity that undergirds the ongoing experience of sexual assault. Cholly and his friend, Darlene, are found by two white men out searching for their hounds. The men are poachers, taking things that are not theirs, and they force Cholly — at gunpoint — to continue to have sex with Darlene. In their aggressive prurience, the poachers steal Cholly and Darlene’s pleasure, evaporating it where they stands: “There was no where for Cholly’s eyes to go,” Morrison writes, “They slid about furtively searching for shelter, while his body remained paralyzed” (TBE 148). Cholly at first tries to cover up Darlene, to keep the white men from seeing their naked bodies, but as the awful scene plays out, he finds himself hating her, “The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile,” (148). Later, when Cholly rapes Pecola, Morrison brings back the nauseating sensation of this passage: “[Pecola’s] small back hunched over the sink. Cholly saw her dimply and could not tell what he saw or what he felt. Then he became aware that he was uncomfortable; next he felt the discomfort dissolve into pleasure. The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. […] He wanted to break her neck — but tenderly. Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet” (161). Morrison is careful to show Cholly’s mistake — he misunderstands, in a fundamental way, the love of a father for a child and the love of two adults — but she is also generous with him, making it clear that his past suffering and exploitation is also to blame for his confusion, his “biliousness.” After I finished The Bluest Eye I turned to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs Bridge, written eleven years before Morrison’s first novel.
I have been told I should read Mrs. Bridge for a long time. I understand it is one of those books that has a special space, especially in the creative writing curriculum in the United States. And while I appreciated the sensitivity of Connell’s presentation, and at time admired the balance of pity with derision, I felt unsatisfied by the end of the novel, in part I felt like Connell, for all of his detailed thinking about India Bridge’s specific social and relational situation, doesn’t seem to think she deserves any better than what she gets. Pity and derision are not generous stances.
There are moments when we get the sense that Mrs. Bridge experiences a sense of her own life’s boundedness. In her half-lit friendship with Grace Barron, with her trip to Europe with her husband. “The Clock” presents the closest reach toward sublimity that Mrs. Bridge is allowed, and even that is deflated, minimized: “For some time, perhaps an hour or more, [Mrs. and Mr. Bridge] had been reading, separately; he had the financial page of the newspaper and she had been idly reading of the weddings that day. The rain blew softly against the windowpanes, shutters rattled, and above the front door the tin weather stripping began to moan. Mrs. Bridge, with the newspaper in her lap, listened to the rumbling and booming of thunder over the house. Suddenly, in total quiet, the room was illuminated by lightning. Mr. Bridge lifted his head, only that and nothing more, but within Mrs. Bridge something stirred” (MB 93-4). The intensity of this internal shift is profound, and Connell tells us it registers across Mrs. Bridge’s life, but it is also miniscule, scanty. “She never forgot this moment when she had almost apprehended the very meaning of life,” (94). I felt dissatisfied with India Bridge’s characterization; not just that this is a portrait of a woman who never fully peers out of her social condition, and who never fully comprehends the kinds of things — friendship, intellectual excitement, surprise — that might have shaken her from middle class complacency. This seems to be the topic of the novel, after all. But, she is given short shrift even by her creator. Mrs. Bridge is narrated across thirty years of her life — from her early marriage to her recent widowhood. And while the pathos of the characterization is clear, the precision of it is not. Because Mrs. Bridge does not have language to articulate the sublime Connell clearly shows her experiencing here, are we expected to think she experiences it less? Do we really live inside a world that grants full appreciation of experience to people with language to describe it? Surely not. More than that, though, the sensitivity Connell shows to the antinomian, at times antisocial, Bridge children — people with roving intellectual ambitions, people who feel irritated with the social striving of their mother — is a clear ballast against any carefulness he has in narrating Mrs. Bridge. Mrs. Bridge is, after all, Connell’s mother’s generation, Connell’s mother’s age. And what do we do, in writing, if we don’t actively deride, and perhaps even pity, our mothers?
I’ve been trying to think about how I felt about the ending of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which I wrote about starting last week. I enjoyed the book a lot — it was breezy, well-paced, and Alam’s experiments with deeply focalized female narrative voice are very well-done. I also had a horrible reaction as I got closer to the end of the book, where I found myself speeding up, almost physically writhing on the bed as we see the development of the novel’s illness revealed on the page (god, the TEETH thing!!!). I was in bed because I was sick over the weekend (HOW!?), so the horror of the symptoms Alam lays out might have been more potent to me than they would otherwise be (I am sure there’s a lot to be said about writing about a horrifying pandemic only just before everyone who reads your novel endures a…horrifying pandemic). But I also was curious about that reaction — the reaction of speeding up to finish something because you’re discomfited — and what that says about the relationship between a book’s plot and (for lack of a better term) its writing. I love to linger over sentences, and I am often a very slow reader, so I felt a little bit annoyed with myself for speeding through the end of the novel because I felt so freaked out by the plotline! When I was in late elementary school, I worked my way through all of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” anthologies in my school library primarily through a process of careful reading and anxious, rapid speed-reading. I do not know if I have the constitution for suspense.
I spent Friday finishing Alam’s novel and then read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, I started feeling better, but I began Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. You can tell I had to get back to childcare duties because I am still reading the Connell. But something in my reading united these three, though I have more to say about the last two in later postings.
I hadn’t read The Bluest Eye since my first reading (again, and in a different tenor: HOW?), when I was about sixteen. I had an astonishing high school English teacher, Cara Elmore, who taught us Black women’s fiction alongside Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter. How did I luck into this in a public school in North Carolina? It was the nineties. Ms. Elmore has long been someone I thought of and internally thanked when I read novels. She was perhaps the first English teacher I had who taught me how to unlock a book’s secrets — to use the dictionary properly, to think about character and voice — and our forays into Morrison were no different. We read Beloved in class, but I got hooked, and it was the year that Morrison won the Nobel, so she was everywhere. I picked up The Bluest Eye that same year, but my reading of it was partial. I was sixteen. The only thing I really recall about that reading is how wincingly I read the scene of Cholly’s rape of Pecola. How Morrison got those words on the paper, I do not know. I know I read it this time with both a wince and a clearer eye into what she is trying to describe there. Reading Cholly’s transgression is all the more unpleasant because we know the fact of the incestuous rape. We know it’s coming, which makes the narration of it in detail more appalling. Pecola has been trapped — washing dishes, unaware — by the narration, too.
The Bluest Eye is fascinating, to me, for how it adopts a modernist habit — shifting focalization rapidly within the same paragraph — to an American, and specifically a Black American—milieu. The zips between the present of the narration, which is already complicatedly nested in a retrospective frame (we already know about the incest plot from the novel’s opening, though the plotting of the novel takes its time unfolding that story) pop into and out of perspectives as we come to them, shifting from one time to another. In this reading, Morrison’s use of this technique was especially visible to me in the Pauline section, as she describes Pauline’s fastidiousness and anxiety.
My reading of these three novels made me realize that one of the strangest things about deeply focalized narration (all three of these books share this) is that when you pop out of one perspective and into another, you don’t always get a sense of whiplash. The Alam novel hinges on a kind of perspectival whiplash I associate with genre fiction (he uses this technique a lot to speed up the suspense and pacing in the second half of his novel — when something is happening within the Washingtons’ white brick house, he flips to a scene of horror in a subway car under New York, for example). I was left trying to figure out why the technique works as an engine of suspense in that novel, but as something introspective in both the Morrison and the Connell novels. Part of this has to do with generic framing, obviously, but I’m also wondering about whether or not the syntax itself is different in these novels. Another, half-lit thought I had, especially when working through the harrowing Cholly Breedlove section of The Bluest Eye, is that we often comment on male writers that get deeply inside female perspectives (I’d count both Alam and Connell in this category), but we don’t comment as warmly (or as vociferously) when women do it. Is this because male perspectives are expected? I don’t think it’s that simple (I’ve read the 18th century novel…), but there is something startling about reading a perspective you know to have been written by a man that feels (at least feels to me) close to an embodied (not just cerebral) female voice.
I have more to say about TBE and MB — especially about how Connell’s novel skirts (shirks?) the problem of embodiment through a characterization built on squeamishness, but I have to wait until I finish the novel! Hopefully soon.
Also this week, I responded to Rafael Walker’s essay on White Fragility and Uncle Tom’s Cabin for The Point.
The last two weeks, my younger son has been particularly difficult to get to sleep. We moved him out of our room, out of his crib. It has been disruptive. I have taken to lying in between the two twin beds in my kids’ room sort of checking Twitter and sort of just feeling the bones in my hips slide into the carpet. The pandemic has been tiring, and a newly sleepless toddler makes it even more tiring still. He tosses and turns, leans over the side of the bed, asks me for “Mommy’s hand,” and by the time he finally drifts off to sleep, it’s about ten thirty, and I race downstairs to finish up the dregs of my cleaning. My husband has done the dishes, I have to do the last load of laundry, and then I can pour myself a tiny bowl of cheerios and a big glass of water and get ready for bed. The “free time” I was cultivating for writing, tv-watching, or whatever has been reduced from two or three hours to about forty minutes. This will pass.
The last two nights, I have crawled into bed around midnight and opened my book, thinking I’ll just read a little bit and then go to sleep. But the book I started on Wednesday is Rumaan Alam’s new novel, Leave the World Behind, and I am gripped beyond reason. I’m about forty pages from the end after two big bursts of late night reading and I am shocked by how terrified this book has made me. I mean, we are living through an actual pandemic and, perhaps, through the actual end of democracy — or whatever approaches it — in the US. Alam’s book pulls together the kinds of details I associate with domestic fiction — what kinds of food a character is buying, how much it costs, what kinds of closures her pants have — and the dystopian frame of speculative fiction. To my eye, the details are part of the structure of terror: we can’t leave off the habits of our lives when living through a catastrophe, in part because the habits have become the scaffold that unifies our conscious lives. We check our phones. We pour a drink. We watch something dumb on tv. In Alam’s book, one of the key signals that something is wrong comes when the phones and television stop working: without the comforting glow of the NYT home page, what can we really know about the world? I haven’t finished the book yet, but it’s gripping and awful. Alam is a tight, precise prose stylist, which makes the terror of the pacing more extreme. I kept reading a few more pages in the hopes that my anxiety would abate a bit (will the husband come back? will the children be ok? why are the deer doing that?) and, no, the book just never lets up. Wish me luck tonight from midnight to one, when I try to finish this novel and not scare myself into oblivion!
I reviewed Brandon Taylor’s debut Real Life for Bookforum.
I cut an observation from this review that I’ve been thinking about since I filed it. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is nauseated. He throws up, and feels like throwing up, repeatedly in the novel. There is a psychological element to this characterization — the character has very disordered eating, due to his painful and impoverished childhood, but it serves as a metaphorical connection to a whole swath of Black expatriate novels from the 1950s and 60s. In Wright and Baldwin, characters often vomit, especially after tense exchanges. I had always connected that impulse to those writers’ investments in and reading of existentialist philosophy, but when reading Taylor’s novel, I thought of it in relation to expatriation more broadly. Wallace, though he is in an American university and was raised in an American state and town, experiences the world he finds himself in as a foreign country: the problem of the novel is what to do when you feel like an immigrant in a country you ostensibly belong to? It’s a remarkable debut, and I’m excited to read his next book(s).
Well, well, well, what a world, huh? I’m still sheltering in place. I know all of you are, too. It is hard to know when anything like my normal life will return, but I’m trying to make a new normal out of the scraps of my old life. Between taking care of the children full time and driving myself to distraction with COVID resources that — in theory! — will help me make decisions, but are in actual fact making me dizzy with confusion, I am trying to get some writing done. I have also embarked on significant culinary adventures; I am now the protector of a delicate young sourdough starter.
I’m trying to focus more attention now on the Oxford project, but I’ve been delving into a new project, about women and psychoanalysis, from which one of these essays is drawn. So, here are two short new pieces, one a part of a cluster at Post45 collated by the great Gloria Fisk and edited by Dan Sinykin, and the other a short essay on Melanie Klein and, well, having babies. This was edited by B. D. McClay!
There are some more pieces coming down the pipe, but for now, thank you for reading!
Honestly, I keep trying to have a good handle on updating this, but it never works! I should use naptime to my advantage, but I very easily succumb to warm snuggling children. Here are some new things I’ve done.
A review of the new Gillian Gill Woolf bio. A review of the latest Rachel Cusk essay collection. Some more stuff coming soon!
Before the global catastrophe, I had finally gotten into a good rhythm with reviewing. I figured out how much time I needed to research and read, and because my childcare situation had slightly improved, I was able to find that time more readily. Oh well, that’s out the window now! But, as my children get a bit older, I am finding the times when I can plop them down and get them absorbed with legos or toy food or some harried craft project are becoming more and more frequent. I have my computer in the downstairs closet and I haul it out if I have a few minutes. It’s helping. Not much, but a little!
I am better at updating twitter (read: posting ponderous bread pictures).