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Eugénie Grandet–Honoré de Balzac

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It will tell you something about me that the Balzac I know best is his story “Sarrasine” (1830), a text mostly ignored by readers for a century until, so the story goes, Roland Barthes came across an offhand reference to it by Georges Bataille that intrigued him enough to devote an entire seminar to the little story, the result of which was his extraordinary narratological study S/Z.

“Sarrasine” is amazing and holds up to many readings. But one story out of the thousands of pages Balzac wrote, well, it’s not much to base a judgment on, is it? (Technically I read Père Goriot a long time ago, too, but I can’t tell you anything about it except that it’s about a boarding house. It’s about a boarding house, right?) But now as part of the Slaves of Golconda group I’ve read Eugénie Grandet (1833) and I’m planning to immerse myself in Balzac as soon as reasonably possible. The guy was clearly a genius.

To come to Balzac through Barthes and post-structuralism is now so old-fashioned as to be almost quaint. The news that Princeton has bought the library of Jacques Derrida, though it warms my heart, makes me certain that the theory that was meat and drink to me is rapidly becoming antiquated. As Alexander Trocchi once said of the canonization of Dada, even “the turds of anti-art were framed and hung alongside “The School of Athens.”

Although Barthes offered his reading of Balzac as a critique of the ideological dominance of literary realism—specifically, its way of pretending that what it is doing is merely transforming things into words when in fact every thing, in this case every referent, is already produced through the combination of a number of interpretive codes—Barthes would be the first to acknowledge what time has made increasingly clear: S/Z is a paean to that realism, and especially to Balzac. Barthes described the realist writer as a painter whose main tool was not his canvas but the frame he placed around it, which Barthes employs as a figure for the condition of representability itself. To show anything it must first be selected, chosen, made. The trick played by realism—the ideological sleight of hand that bothered Barthes in the early 70s—was to pretend that the frame didn’t exist and that the canvas was simply a swathe of the real. But that didn’t mean, as critics of post-structuralism liked to say, that the art of the canvas was second-rate or disingenuous or bad. After all, S/Z is as much love letter as critique.

It’s entirely possible, though, that what Barthes said about literary realism might really only be about Balzac. Maybe the circulation of codes—by which Barthes meant both pre-established conventions for depicting and thinking about the world, and the way texts are in fact citing other texts when they claim to be showing life—isn’t the way realism works. Maybe it’s just how Balzac works. That’s the thought that came to me when I read, in Eugénie Grandet’s stilted and awkward opening pages, this description of Monsieur Grandet, the heroine’s father, a miserly cooper whose speculations first in the wine trade and later in the financial markets make him rich: “Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet had the qualities both of a tiger and a boa-constrictor.” A tingle ran down my spine. Hadn’t I read about tigers and boa constrictors before? I pulled my copy of “Sarrasine” off the shelf where I duly found this description of a woman entranced by an old man she does not yet know is a castrato: “She was under the spell of that timorous curiosity which leads women to seek out dangerous emotions, to go to see chained tigers, to look at boa constructors.”

No doubt someone has written a book on the history of circuses and the Paris zoo (which, a quick Wikipedia search tells me, was founded in 1793) or any of the other ways in which such exotic animals might have made their way to 19th century France. If anyone knows about that stuff, please let me know, but honestly I’m only halfheartedly interested in that sort of background. What I’m genuinely interested in is how this repeated imagery tells us something about Balzac’s method and the preoccupations of this book. It’s not that Balzac copies himself—Barthes says copies are at the heart of Balzac’s work: what they are about and how they are made—but that in citing himself, in returning even to tropes that aren’t at all central to the subject matter of his writing, Balzac incorporates a process of circulation that is central to that subject matter.

Balzac delights in expressing and examining received wisdom; Barthes called this doxa and Franco Moretti called it Balzac’s “loquacious wisdom.” One of Balzac’s favourite formulations (present dozens of times in “Sarrasine,” admittedly less frequently in Eugenie) is “one of those”: “Prompted by one of those ideas which arise in a young girl’s heart…”; “It was one of those looks in which there is almost as much coquetry as deep feeling.” The implication is that readers will know what the narrator is talking about (ah, one of those ideas, one of those looks). The narrator becomes a kind of cataloguer of the world, able to show us what we might have missed but what, prompted by his description, we recognize as present in the world. But again the point isn’t that literature simply reflects the world beyond it but that it summons that world into being. The circulation of tropes, whether the “repetition” of known truths (“one of those”) or the self-citation of metaphors and images (tigers and boa constrictors) contributes to the way Balzac’s texts elide their own construction. How otherwise could such fanciful and melodramatic tales have come to seem so natural? The seemingly haphazard quality of the prose and the structure—this isn’t Flaubert—similarly contribute to the “natural” or “found” quality of the work: here is a slice of life.

As I said above, circulation isn’t just present in the form of the text. It’s also important in its content. The circulation of tropes that realist representation depends on is like the circulation of capital. And Eugénie Grandet is, at least superficially, about a miser (though the fact the miser is Eugénie’s father and that the book is not named for him suggests we might need to rethink that assertion). Grandet amasses his fortune first through trade (often by deviously undercutting his fellow vintners) but later through investment and speculation, where money is made from money. Rohan wrote about how unconcerned the novel seems to detail the source of Grandet’s money, how uninterested in detailing the labour that goes into making it. But from the perspective of capitalism, the more alienated capital is from labour the more powerful its ideological purchase.

That said, there are important counterweights in the novel to the idea of effortless speculation. Grandet loves gold, even picking gold threads out of a dress. He hoards copper coins in his study, so many that when he takes them out of the house, under cover of night, he needs a servant to help him carry the cauldron on a yoke around his neck. (The scene where Eugénie, half asleep and in the fever of new love, chances upon her father in this act is a masterful phantasmagoria.) In this sense wealth is highly material—and so too are the vividly evoked deprivations Grandet’s household endures as a result of the father’s miserliness, like the sugar cubes Grandet finds time in his busy schedule to cut up. Indeed, the miser challenges the idea of capitalist circulation, because he wants to hoard his money rather than keep it moving about. So although the novel depicts the increase of the Grandet fortune as implacable and inevitable, it also positions the miser as not just the capitalist par excellence, but also, more challengingly, as the limit of that economic system.

I struggled with how to understand the relation between money and heredity in this book. For heredity—by which I mean the passing on of emotional traits and values rather than of physical characteristics—seems to be something that also persists implacably. The novel tells the story of a family, but mostly it focuses on just the father and his daughter. What the daughter takes from the father is important to understanding the book’s remarkable ending. (Balzac might not be too great with beginnings, at least as evidenced by this book, but he sure knows what to do with an ending.)

The back cover of the Oxford edition I read—which comes with a really excellent, smart but not pedantic introduction by Christopher Prendergast, you should check it out if you’re at all interested in this book—asks “Who is going to marry Eugénie Grandet?” “This is the question,” the copy adds, “that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur,” the town in the Loire where the book is set. Amateur Reader has pointed out that this is not really the question of the book. I submit that if there were something like a guiding question for the book it would be something like: “How should we understand Eugénie’s fate?”

I love the book’s way of wrong-footing us, of presenting scenarios we’ve seen before and then upending them. When Eugénie’s glamorous and spoiled Parisian cousin Charles comes to visit, and when the girl is instantly smitten with him to the point of giving him her heart, and, just as importantly in this novel, paying off his debts, we think we know what to expect. Surely this rakish dandy will do her wrong; surely he will be her ruin. When Charles learns, shortly after his arrival in Saumur, of his father’s suicide after the shame of becoming a bankrupt and accepts that his only hope of recovering any position in Parisian society is to seek his fortune in the Indies, we are sure he will abandon to Eugénie. And in this case we are right, just as we are also right that Eugénie will hold fast to his memory. Charles, who whatever his flaws was always rather sweet, becomes hardened in his seven years overseas—not least because he soon realizes that the real money is in selling people not goods. Embroiled in the slave trade—in “unremitting contact with selfish interests”—he becomes hardened and cynical: “his feeling for others contracted and withered away.” Balzac immediately adds that after all Charles is a Grandet: “The blood of the Grandets fulfilled its destiny. Charles became hard and ruthless in the pursuit of gain.” That ruthlessness extends to his personal life. On the ship home, Charles meets a titled, well-positioned family that has been much reduced materially. Although he doesn’t much care for Mademoiselle d’Aubrion—and Balzac does his best to make sure we don’t either, describing her as “thin and spare, with a supercilious mouth, dominated by a blunt, over-long nose, which was normally yellowish but became quite red after meals, a kind of vegetable phenomenon that is more unpleasant in a pale, bored face than in any other”: nothing by halves for our Balzac—Charles marries her anyway, because her family’s connections will open Parisian society to him. So important to him is this idea of securing a brilliant position that even when he learns that Eugénie has repaid his father’s creditors, with interest, he only pauses momentarily to lament the loss of a fortune the size of which he hadn’t suspected—what he really cares about, Eugénie can’t give him.

I suspect Charles isn’t the only Charles in Balzac’s works, and I bet some of them get their own novels. But in this novel his trajectory must remain only a sketch because its main interest is in Eugénie. Her honour has not been besmirched; she hasn’t become a fallen woman. She and Charles share only two kisses before his departure; he does not force himself upon her or leave her ruined. Nor does she simply renounce the world after her disappointment. She doesn’t become a nun, exactly—this isn’t The Princesse de Cleves. It’s true that her first reaction to the news of Charles’s dismissal of her after seven years is to calmly state that now she can only “suffer and die.” She even tells her priest that she wishes to leave the world and live in seclusion. But she doesn’t. She learns Charles’s marriage will not come off until his father’s creditors are appeased and arranges to pay all the outstanding bills. We don’t know why she does this. From self-abnegation? From a desire for revenge? To make Charles dependent on her? None of these are right. What we do know is that when she decides to take this action, a friend of the family tells her, “ ‘As you said that, your voice was just like your late father’s.’” This a moment after the text has told us: “she decided that, in future, she would assume an impassive expression as her father had always done.”

So the heredity that concerns the book pertains as much to Eugénie as to her Charles. For she too is a Grandet. And she becomes increasingly like her father. She is immured neither in a convent nor in the walled garden where she once sat with Charles, but she is imprisoned in a life of emotional nullity. Although enormously rich, she doesn’t hoard her wealth; indeed, she gives generously to charity and the Church. But the hardness that attached itself to Charles also begins to manifest itself in her. She isn’t cynical, but she does, the narrator tells us, respond to others “ironically,” a word it would never have used to describe her earlier.

It is in this spirit of emotional asperity that she agrees to marry a lawyer from Saumur, the now middle-aged son of one of two families that had been vying for Eugénie’s hand—and her fortune—since even before the arrival of Charles. But she marries Monsieur de Bonfons only on the condition that he expect nothing more than friendship from her. (And that friendship seems quite icy.) She doesn’t pine for Charles, she doesn’t preserve the memory of their courtship in Havishamian aspic. She simply turns that part of herself off. When Bonfons dies only a few years later, she becomes even richer, even more isolated, even more forbidding. The irony of the Grandet family is complete: the one who cares nothing for gold is showered with it. She uses it to do good in secret. But despite this charity, and despite her beauty, which, the narrator tells us, persists even as she approaches forty, despite her poise, she isn’t the same as she was as a girl:

She has all the nobility of grief, the saintliness of one whose soul is unsullied by contact with the outside world. But she has also the rigid outlook of an old maid and the narrow vision that comes from the restricted life of a provincial town. In spite of her income of eight hundred thousand livres, she lives as poor Eugénie Grandet used to live. She lights her fire only on the days when her father used to allow the fire to be lit in the living-room, and puts it out according to the rules in force when she was young. She always dresses as her mother did. The house at Saumur, sunless, devoid of warmth, gloomy, and always in the shade, reflects her life.

I’m interested in the way the book here reverses its understanding of the distinction between Paris and the provinces (Paris = flashy, vain, superficial; provinces = solid, demure, profound). There’s enough criticism of Eugénie in this passage to complicate the saintly resignation that would otherwise have reduced her to caricature. To be sure, if the book really believes in the ideas of emotional inheritance it so often references, then she couldn’t have ended up any other way, and so it would be meaningless to speak of criticism. And on the book’s final page, the narrator both backpedals on some of the things it says here—claiming that “the greatness of her soul lessens the effect of the narrowness of her upbringing”—and finds fault with the situation itself. Whether the tragedy is really that “a woman who, made to be a magnificent wife and mother, has neither husband nor children nor family” (a surprising thing to say, given the book’s interest in heredity, which would seems to make nonsense of the possibility raised here that Eugenie was made to be something her family could not have given her), the book does leave us feeling the hopelessness of her situation.

But Eugénie Grandet is melancholic not tragic. From the first sentence, in which the houses in certain provincial towns arouse melancholy as much in the stranger who comes across them as in the people who live in them, melancholy is referenced throughout the book, the best way to describe the strange uncertainty of the narrator’s description of the widowed Madame de Bonfons. Melancholy is the way the book gives its protagonist a fate more complicated, if not necessarily more pleasant to experience, than those typically granted to heroines of the period. I find myself thinking about her a lot, and, as Barthes once did, look forward to delving further into the vast and surprising work of her creator.

Words to Live By

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But perhaps the moral value of the disciplines we call the humanities actually lies in the care and self-consciousness with which the desire to understand is regulated, in finding ways to cajole it away from egoism and self-inflation so that idealism and learning, thinking and knowing, can co-operate.

It isn’t easy. When I write a commentary on a text I’m aware that I know things that have the potential to generate a toxic cloud of dullness which could obscure the poem I am supposed to be explicating. I know stuff about the practice of sonnet writing in 1609, stuff about the history of words, stuff about the history of gender and sexuality. When I set that down in the form of a commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets I also know that explication can be the most excruciating form of bardicide. Holding back on philological learning in order not to drown out the little voice inside which keeps on saying ‘the reason you are doing this is because this poem is fascinating beyond anything you could begin to create,’ and letting readers see why it might be worth knowing more in order to understand better is what I think I am doing. … [A]cademics manifest in unusually public ways the general tendency of desire to turn into something else in the course of its realisation. The caricature philologist could be regarded as a person in whom the desire to understand has suffered its final metamorphosis: the means used to pursue the end have entirely obliterated the end itself. We take the risk of becoming that person whenever we interpret more than casually. We owe it to ourselves to back off from time to time, and remind ourselves of our own ends.

—Colin Burrow, “Are You a Spenserian?”

Happy Birthday, EMJ!

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WordPress tells me that a year ago yesterday I started this blog. I wish Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau nothing but the best in the coming year, including, just maybe, a more frequent posting schedule.

Keeping this blog has meant a lot to me and given me some sorely needed confidence about my writing. It’s helped me be freer and looser in my writing, and allowed me to contribute, albeit in a small way, to a larger ongoing conversation online about books that I value a lot and am pleased to be part of. And it’s made me think more carefully and clearly about the things I’m reading. What I tell my students is really true—you can’t know what you think about something until you write about it.

I’ve a couple of blogging goals this year: to write more posts and to keep them shorter, and to try different kinds of writing, more in the vein of the personal essay. I’ve been striving here to write pieces that combine criticism with personal reflection, pieces that bring my own reading experience or history into the discussion of the books I write about. So I think the writing has already been personal. But I want to try to write essays that are inspired by, even grounded in, things I’ve read, but that aren’t so much reviews per se.

It matters a lot to me that others are reading these posts. I know from my stats that there aren’t that many of those others, but numbers aren’t everything, and the encouraging feedback I’ve received has meant so much to me.

To my readers, then, thank you for your interest & support.

I take requests, too. Maybe not about which books to write about—I always want recommendations, but I usually follow my own reading inclinations and it can take a long time before I get to them, which is why you should never lend me a book—but about the kinds of pieces you’d like to see here. Do let me know, if you’ve a mind.

That’s all for now. More mountains to climb. The bedside pile is particularly north face-ish just now.

A Year in Reading, 2014

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Late on this, I know, but here are a few thoughts on my 2014 Year in Reading.

Thanks largely to my sabbatical I read a lot last year (96 books). Included in that list were many books that I liked, some that I liked a lot. But I’m left with the impression that it was a more muted year than the previous one. The spread between the best and the worst wasn’t as big. But I didn’t read as many indelible books, especially compared to 2013. Rebecca West, Olivia Manning, the last volume of Proust. Hilary Mantel—hard to compete with those.

But I read a number of good things. And although you wouldn’t know it from this list I made an effort to read more nonfiction this year. I especially liked Wright’s Thirteen Days in September, Shavit’s My Promised Land, and Bernard Wasserstein’s The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews, which I wrote about here.

David Bezmozgis—The Free World & The Betrayers

These were my books of the year, and I regret not making the time to write about them.

Part of the reason I didn’t is that Adam Kirsch has already said everything that needs to be said about them. He argues that Bezmozgis is a striking outlier in the current wave of literature being produced by the children of the Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate in the 1970s and 80s. Like Bezmozgis, many of these writers were born in the USSR but came to the US—or, in Bezmozgis’s case, Canada—as young children. But unlike them he is at least as interested in what the émigrés left behind in the old world as what they found in the new. The Free World is a beautiful, funny, and smart novel about one extended family’s experience leaving Latvia for the West. The title refers, of course, to America and its promises. But it also refers to the aimless freedom of Rome and its environs, where the family, along with dozens of other Soviet Jews, await visas to their final destination. As Kirsch points out, Bezmozgis doesn’t concentrate on the experiences of a child, that is, of someone close to the age he would been when he left the USSR. (He already did that in his first book, the wonderful linked story collection Natasha.) Instead, he focuses on his parents’ and grandparents’ generation, and the conflict between them as they negotiate a strange new world. Most impressive is Bezmozgis’s sympathetic portrait of Samuil Krasnansky, a true Communist and Soviet patriot to the end. As Kirsch says, Bezmozgis reminds us of a whole category of people and way of life that many readers would prefer to forget: “the generation of Jewish Communists who ardently believed that the Soviet Union was forging a path to Jewish and human liberation.”

Samuil’s past is told so vividly that we can’t help but contrast it to the more petty and aimless story of his sons, trying to provide, in however quasi-legal or illegal fashion, for their families in this Italian interregnum. Yet Bezmozgis isn’t nostalgic: his point isn’t that the past is better but that it has a value that shouldn’t be forgotten even when it has been apparently inevitably superseded.

At one point in The Free World a character recalls an absurd detail from the Sharansky trial. What is background material in the first novel–a sign of the larger political moment Bezmozgis is interested in–takes center stage in the second. Natan Sharansky is the obvious model for Baruch Kotler in The Betrayers. Sharansky—the most famous of the refuseniks–spent more than a decade in Soviet prison camps on trumped up charges while his wife campaigned publically and continuously for his release. When this was finally granted, in 1986, he moved to Israel and became an influential politician. Kotler’s life maps on to Sharansky’s in almost every detail, except that Sharkansky’s personal life remained above reproach, unlike Kotler’s. At the beginning of The Betrayers, he has arrived in Yalta, his boyhood home, with the young woman with whom he is having a suddenly very public affair. By a coincidence so bald and overt that the novel spends a lot of time thinking about its baldness and overtness, he ends up staying in the only room available in the city in high season, in the home of the man who all those years ago denounced him to the KGB. (As you can see, pretty much everyone in the book could be described by the title.) Tankilevich, the informer, is presented as sympathetically as Kotler, and the hardship of Jewish life in Crimea (only exacerbated by the events that happened between the time the book was written and published) is movingly presented. Kotler’s principled response to an imagined Israeli pullout from the West Bank, especially in relation to his reservist son’s very different, yet equally principled take, is also fascinating. My only wish is that the book had more time for its female characters. But the novel seeks to understand everyone, which is one of the reasons it complicates its talky, schematic structure. My sense from casual online browsing is that many find this structure a liability. But for me it shows again that Bezmozgis is the smartest and most surprising young (North) American Jewish writer today.

Josephine Tey—The Franchise Affair

This was one of the first books I read last year and it stayed with me to the end. Strange and unsettling, The Franchise Affair is about an unambitious lawyer in the English countryside who finds himself defending a mother and daughter against accusations that they kidnapped and abused a fifteen-year-old girl. The suspense of whether the couple is guilty is handled superbly, but what makes the book really interesting is its grim suggestion that aggression and vindictiveness lurk inside everybody, just waiting to come out. This philosophy really messes with our reading experience: just who are we supposed to sympathize with? As in all of Tey’s books, the expected romance founders, but her dispatching of the idea here is even more determined than usual. That failure is offered as yet another example of people’s inability to read each other. See Rohan Maitzen’s intelligent review for more about this terrific book.

Caleb Crain—Necessary Errors

Necessary Errors will always have a soft spot in my heart because it’s the first book I blogged about. But I also love it because it’s so smart and rueful and moving. A much better than average novels of innocents abroad. I can’t wait to see what Crain will write next.

Roz Chast—Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Everybody says this about this book, but it’s true: reading it, you will both laugh out loud and feel very, very sad. Of course I’ve always loved Chast’s cartoons—what self-respecting neurotic person doesn’t? But this memoir of her parents’ very old age had a depth and power that surprised me. Made me think about all the conversations neither my parents nor I want to have.

Three Books by Tove Jansson

2014 was Tove Jansson’s centennial and the least I could do was read some of her books. I dispatched The Summer Book, The True Deceiver and Fair Play in the space of a week: they’re wonderful and wonderfully short. They pack a big punch, too. I want to read them again; I’ve a hunch they’ll only get better. (Surely there’s some class I can shoehorn them into?) I wanted to write about them, to force myself to articulate what makes them so great. But I never did. It didn’t help that the week I read them was the week before the semester started. Something else stopped me, too, though. I think it was my sense that they are more complicated than they seem and that delving into them would be a real project. For now, I’ll just say a few obvious things: they are marvelous books about Northern weather and the way it makes you feel—how summer up north makes you feel indomitable and reckless, coated in endless light, how winter makes you feel shriveled and curt, menacing in a different way; they are marvelous books about taking a break from ordinary life; they are marvelous books about friendship, how hard it is to attain and how much it can mean when you do; and above all they are marvelous books about artistic/intellectual work. In this regard, Fair Play is the pick of the litter, even though it was the one I liked least for most of my reading experience it. (An excursion to America seemed particularly infelicitous.) But the ending is so moving and lovely, you forgive everything and realize you’d been wrong in finding parts of it lame and clunky, on the contrary everything was just right.

Penelope Fitzgerald—The Bookshop

Another book I wanted to write more about and didn’t. Early Fitzgerald, but classic, the story simple to the point of nonexistent. A middle-aged woman decides to open a bookshop in a windy, damp Norfolk town in the late 1950s. It doesn’t work out. The Bookshop is devastating, mostly because Fitzgerald calmly underplays everything. We feel so sad at the end because the world didn’t end. Thinking about it now, I see surprising similarities to The Franchise Affair: both novels have a dark vision of English provincialism. Fitzgerald is funnier than Tey, though. Fitzgerald is always funny, in a desperate, almost daft English way. At long last, a book about books that doesn’t think books will save the world.

Sarah Kofman—Rue Ordener, Rue Labat

Last summer I wrote about re-reading this in preparation for a new course. I was surprised how my students took to the book—their energy and insights made me appreciate it even more. Professional bias, I know, but I still think teaching a book is the best test of its value.

Karl Ove Knausgaard—My Struggle (Books1 &2)

I don’t care what Stevereads says. This book, whether novel or memoir or whatever it is, is fascinating. Will it stand the test of time? Who knows? Not much does. But it stayed with me all of the past year, especially the first volume, especially those indelible scenes in which the narrator & his brother muck the filth out of their alcoholic father’s house.

Nathan Englander

This was a special part of my 2014 reading, because I got to hang out with the author for a few days this fall, and he’s totally hilarious and a total mensch. I like For the Relief of Unbearable Urges best as a collection, but think there are individual stories the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank that are stronger (“Free Fruit for Young Widows” is amazing). The Ministry of Special Cases felt like an inspired misfire, but I gather the next novel will be set in Israel and I can’t wait.

Peter Higgins—Wolfhound Century & Truth and Fear

Another winning recommendation from Jenny Davidson. These were my favourite light reading this year. Is this steampunk? I think so. It’s an alternate history of 20th century Russia, it’s crime fiction and fantasy, it’s a totally compelling and carefully imagined world that owes so much to so many wonderful books. Look, for example, at this totally cool and endearing list of “books that shuffled and groaned and whispered on the shelves while Wolfhound Century was being written.” The sequel was just as wonderful and I await the third impatiently.

The Vet’s Daughter–Barbara Comyns

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Barbara Comyns’s strange little book The Vet’s Daughter (1959) is narrated by Alice Rowlands, a seventeen-year-old girl who temporarily escapes the desperate circumstances of her home life when she takes a position as companion to an old woman, the mother of one her father’s colleagues. This woman, a Mrs. Peebles, is so sunk into depression or anxiety or ennui or something that she earns Alice’s description of her as “so sadly vague and harmless.”

Mrs. Peebles has survived a house fire, the death of her husband, and even a suicide attempt. A man delivering bread to the house discovered her “limply hanging in the green barn among the apples, and he had the presence of mind to cut her down with a pair of sheers and untie the dreadful rope around her neck.” This passage puts me in mind of the suicide Mr. Valpy, whose death in Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical fragment “A Sketch of the Past” gets fused in the mind of the young Virginia with the image of an apple tree in the garden. More pertinently, it offers a fine sense of Comyns’s calm way with horrible things. Some of that measured quality attaches to the narrator too, though equally characteristic is the gallows sprightliness evident in the sentence that comes right after the description of that macabre discovery: “Sometimes, when I looked at her there appeared to be a sinister brown stain round her neck, and I couldn’t help wondering if her eyes had always been so prominent.” This is funny, but not arch or knowing; mostly it’s discomfiting. Alice’s sentiments here seem almost naïve, but she is neither guileless nor foolish, even though she is almost always at the mercy of others.

Of all the unsettling, even startling things that happen to Alice in The Vet’s Daughter, why is it that the detail I remember most is so benign? Alice’s time with Mrs. Peebles comes to an abrupt end when the old woman—distraught that the couple who have kept house for her, a nasty pair straight out of a Roald Dahl story, have absconded with the silverware—is found drowned, presumably having finally succeeded in killing herself.

A kind policeman questions Alice and, as she has nowhere else to go, takes her in for the night. His house—unlike all the other filthy, dilapidated houses in the book—is “red-bricked and very clean.” (I picture it like the policeman’s house in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, all bachelor ship-shape.) And there’s an unexpected grace note: “Homing pigeons that had failed to return were in a box beside the fire, waiting to be claimed.”

Maybe the reason this image stays with me so strongly is that it’s one of the few homey, domestic, and even hopeful moments in the book. True, these birds are failures, homing pigeons that never made it home. In their dispossession they are rather like Alice. But they seem to have ended up well. Imprisoned, perhaps, or packaged at least, yes, but well looked after, all cozy beside the fire. And surely someone will want them: they are waiting to be claimed, after all. It’s unclear anyone wants Alice, for anything other than abusive or mercenary reasons, except perhaps Mrs. Peebles’s son Henry, Alice’s father’s colleague, the man who arranged for her to look after his mother and who cares a great deal for her even though she can’t bring herself to return the feeling. (In the end, he proves unable or unwilling to save Alice.) The pigeons in their box remind us of so many unhappy animals in the book, especially those in Alice’s father’s care—a term we can only use ironically, since he sells the ones he doesn’t like to a vivisectionist. That’s to say nothing of the ones he has used to furnish his house: a rug from a Great Dane’s skin, a monkey’s skull that sits on the mantelpiece, “a horse’s hoof without a horse joined to it” to prop open the door to his study. The house is full of piteous and frantic mewling and screeching and barking—as well as, before long, the tortured cries of Alice’s mother, who dies from a painful, undiagnosed illness.

Whatever their fate, then, the pigeons don’t suffer as these other animals do. Maybe I held on to the image’s intimation of a happier future—the moment someone finally claims the birds—as a corrective to my uneasy suspicion that Alice has had something to do with Mrs. Peeples’s death. And I don’t just mean that in the childish sense of the omnipotence of thoughts: Mrs. Peeples disappears on an afternoon when Alice has fled the house, unable to take the woman’s presence any more (“She became repulsive to me, like some old brown flower”) and the girl feels guilty for having felt that way. I mean it more literally: in the possibility that Alice has done her companion in.

That suspicion might be a way to understand the strange paragraphs—suddenly and unusually narrated in present tense—that describe Alice’s search for Mrs. Peeples. Here’s the first one:

Clank, clank my feet on the stairs; clank, clank on the landing. All the doors are open. One of Mrs. Peeples’s black shoes is caught in the ironwork and abandoned. Through the open doors are rooms with open windows, and it is like a zoo with the animals let loose and escaped. No one is there. “Mrs. Peeples, where are you?” Where are you? Not upstairs or below, or in the garden where you never went. Where are you? For a long time I look for her, even in the green shed, but she isn’t there hanging from the roof with the rope cutting into her brown neck.

The garden where you never went. It’s as if Alice knows she is already dead. The odd syntax of the final sentence, which paints the picture of the death it claims to disavow, doesn’t make the scene any less creepy. And why is Alice saying to herself (“Where are you?”) what she has already said out loud? In the end, I don’t think Alice has really killed Mrs. Peeples. Instead it’s as though she’s in a fugue state here, which is a pretty good description of the whole atmosphere of this strange little novel.

*

So who is this Barbara Comyns and where did she come from? The US edition includes a short introduction by Comyns, reprinted from a British reprint from the 1980s. (It is the fate of writers like Comyns always to be reprinted, always to be rediscovered.) Comyns gives us a rather helter-skelter autobiography. We learn of a violent father who went through the family fortune, an invalid mother who suddenly, unaccountably went deaf, a series of unlikely governesses. Her childhood seems to have been both privileged and hardscrabble. Later came art school and two marriages and a whole series of odd jobs, in advertising and in real estate, as an artist’s model and a refurbisher of cars. Throughout she kept writing, though with only middling success, it seems.

It’s heartening anyone published her at all, so odd is her prose (at least based on this book). I remember once in graduate school, having recently discovered Henry Green, another unusual English writer of the mid twentieth century, telling one of my advisors that I wanted to include him in my dissertation. She was generally speaking encouraging of my project (as well as unusually well read for an academic). But talking with her made me nervous and prone to prattle on. I remember saying to her, rather grandiosely, that Green wasn’t like anyone else, it was as if he’d dropped to earth from the moon, to which she tartly responded that no one dropped from the moon, that he wasn’t so unusual as all that, that he had his context like anyone else. I think now that this is true. And reading Comyns I was reminded of a number of other wonderful, more or less minor British writers from about the same time.

There’s something of Jean Rhys in Comyns’s portrayal of the hopelessness felt by young women (though Alice, and perhaps even her deaf friend Lucy, who flits intriguingly along the margins of the novel, is more resourceful than Rhys’s protagonists). I caught echoes of Richard Hughes’s hallucinatory portrayal of childhood in A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and of Rebecca West’s matter-of-fact inclusion of supernatural elements in her amazing The Fountain Overflows (1957). (It’s probably no accident that these last two titles, like The Vet’s Daughter, are published by NYRB Classics.) Sometimes Comyns reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald, in the obliquity of both her narrative structure and her own biography. (Fitzgerald kept herself and her family afloat by taking all sorts of odd jobs, too.) I even caught an anticipatory hint of early Ian McEwan—The Vet’s Daughter is like a less macabre Cement Garden (1978). And those are just the writers I know: I’ve a hunch, that Comyns might be like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Muriel Spark, though I haven’t actually read them yet.

So Comyns might not be sui generis. But I don’t think I was entirely wrong in thinking (wishing?) that Henry Green, or Barbara Comyns, or any similar writer, the ones that slink through the supposedly dull and genteel world of twentieth century British fiction like feral cats, is an alien, weird figure. However romantic or idealized, that way of thinking might keep us alive to the wonder of such writers. And in literary historical terms it can help us see that realism only ostensibly triumphed in the fiction of the period. In reality, a perverse, fantastic, Gothic strain runs throughout it. I’m thinking, in addition to those I’ve already mentioned, of writers as seemingly different as Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, and Daphne du Maurier. (Importantly, I suspect, the weirdness that disrupts these novels almost always manifests itself in depictions of children.)

In The Vet’s Daughter the clearest example of this strangeness—the oddest, most unsettling thing in this odd, unsettling book—is Alice’s sudden ability to levitate, or, as she prefers to call it, to float. One night Alice finds herself rising out of her bed and she knows she isn’t dreaming because she hits her head on a sconce that is still cracked in the morning. She is as surprised by this turn of events as we are. But the novel takes it in stride. It quickly becomes clear that we aren’t to take the floating as a hallucination on her part or a metaphor on the novel’s (her way of rising above the unhappy events of her life, say). Alice’s ability is both ordinary (when she cautiously asks Mrs. Peeples if she has ever heard of anything like it the woman says she believes it used to be quite common) and extraordinary (it fills everyone who sees it with horror, even disgust). I like that the novel doesn’t try to explain it away, or use it as a way to redeem or transform Alice’s mostly grim and unhappy life. Indeed, it’s not long before someone—her father, the very man who hatefully said he hoped he would never see her again—tries to profit from Alice’s ability. He arranges a public demonstration, doubtless the first step on a tour that, Alice sees all too clearly, will make her into a freak show exhibit.

In a marvelously ambivalent ending, though, these plans are foiled. Alice’s appearance in the air above Clapham Common causes a riot in which three people, including Alice herself, are killed. The first person narration comes abruptly to an end, her fate given to us through a newspaper report. The bitter irony of the book’s end fits with its way of ruthlessly undermining anything nice or good that happens to Alice: a boy she falls for, who teaches her to skate, throws her over; Henry, Mrs. Peebles’s kind son, doesn’t come when she calls him in her hour of greatest need.

Perhaps surprisingly, given what I’ve said, The Vet’s Daughter isn’t unrelievedly bleak, but it’s hardly easy going. You can see why I needed to hold on to those pigeons, and to think of them as rescued. But the book whetted my interest in Comyns’s other books, even though I’ll need to take a deep breath first.

Writing about this book made me like it more. (Always a good sign.) I read it along with the good folks at Slaves of Golconda. I’m curious to see what they made of it, and hope you will too.

Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home—Nina Stibbe (2013)

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This is such a funny book and in this season of short days and enforced cheer you owe it to yourself to read it.

In 1982 the twenty-year-old Nina Stibbe moved to 55 Gloucester Crescent in London to become a nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmer and her sons. Wilmer was and is the editor of the London Review of Books. Her sons Sam and Will (from her marriage to the film director Stephen Frears) were ten and a half and nine years old, respectively. The playwright Alan Bennett lived across the street and came over most nights for dinner. The biographer Claire Tomalin and the writer Michael Frayn lived down the road. They had a helper, a sort of personal assistant, called Mark Nunney, who Nina likes but can never quite seem to get involved with.

Love, Nina collects the letters Stibbe sent her sister Victoria, who stayed behind in Leicestershire where she worked as an aide at an old folks home. One of the small pleasures of the book lies in piecing together the other half of the conversation. (“Sorry to hear about the gum bite… good job she had no teeth, but horrible anyway.”) Victoria didn’t like London and rarely visited, but Stibbe kept her sister apprised of all the exploits of the residents of Wilmer and her circle (everyone always dropping in on each other, like a big extended family).

These are wonderful letters: gossipy but not long-winded, punchy, dry, quick-witted, and very, very funny. (As I asked recently, what are the memoirists and biographers of the future going to do without letters?) Stibbe, who later takes a course on drama at university, is at her best transcribing bits of dialogue.

Describing a day out with her friend Misty in Brighton:

The best bit was when we went into an antique shop and Misty picked up a pickle fork with a pretty green jewel on the end.
“How much is this pickle fork?” she asked the antique man.
The man said it wasn’t a pickle fork but a runcible spoon.

Misty: What’s a runcible spoon?
Man: One of them in your hand.
Misty: But what’s it for?
Man: Pickles and such.

Later she tells Misty about Mary-Kay:

Me: She’s just very unusual.
Misty: Is she a bit mad?
Me: God, no, she’s 100 percent sane.
Misty: That’s unusual.
Me: That’s what I mean.

Mary-Kay (MK in Stibbe’s shorthand) comes across very appealingly: open-minded, smart, funny, kind to Nina, dedicated to her children but keenly aware of their faults. But Stibbe also makes gentle fun of her sometimes snooty, sometimes spacey intellectual friends, and her yuppie tastes. (It’s the early 80s, after all, and people with money are discovering eight-grain bread and balsamic vinegar.) What Nina loves most in MK is her dry wit. One letter starts “Good news! Mary-Kay has pranged the car at long last—a relief after all mine (prangs).” (Stibbe is not much of a driver, though she gives plenty of advice to her sister, who is taking lessons: “not sure Mr. T is the best instructor. He never sleeps and he’s eighty-nine.”) She goes on to fill Victoria in on the conversation at 55 later that evening:

Sam: It’s mum first time crashing.
Me: Yeah, but it’s worse than any of mine—in terms of damage done.
MK: Hmm.
Me: Mine never required any action to be taken.
MK: Only the untangling of deception and denial.
Me: You dented the number plate—irreparably.
MK: True, but my credibility remains intact.

Another time she and MK discuss the latest fad:

Me: Do you ever do yoga?
MK: No, but I hear it’s very good.
Ne So why don’t you go?
MK: I expect I shall at some point.
Me: Me too.

(This perfectly gets the sense that yoga or things like it—pilates, say, or whatever the next thing is that all right-thinking people who love themselves and want to live forever absolutely must do—will come to us all, even those of us who have absolutely no intention of ever doing them.)

Sam & Will are just as appealing, especially since they have such a foil in their nanny, who often wants to be more immature than they are. Both Nina and Mary-Kay love to banter with them. At one point, Stibbe’s brother visits and gives Sam a “sexy pen”:

Press the top and the woman’s bra disappears. We all like it and keep pressing the top to see the bra disappear.

MK: Don’t take it to school.
Sam: Why not?
MK: Your teacher will confiscate it.
Sam: What do you mean?
MK: She’ll take it from you.
Sam: She won’t want it.

I could go on quoting from the book all day. Instead, just read it for yourself. It’s not that life at 55 is perfect or even idyllic. It’s that Stibbe narrates it with such good-humour, such lack of mean-spiritedness (which doesn’t mean she isn’t judgmental, grumpy, frustrated, etc.).

Love, Nina is a joy because Stibbe has no problem laughing at her own foibles. People like this—my very best friend in the world is one, and it’s undoubtedly one of the reasons I’m so drawn to him—emanate a kind of ease that makes everyone feel good, a gift that I, irredeemably prickly and too-quickly offended, can only admire.

All of which is to say that Stibbe comes across, even in her child-like qualities, as mature and wise. Which is impressive since the book is really a coming of age story. (Hard to believe Stibbe was barely in her 20s when she wrote these letters.) The predominant narrative line tells the story of Stibbe’s acceptance into a Polytechnic where she studies literature. Stibbe becomes a proficient if not brilliant literary reader but never loses the skepticism that makes her immune to the most self-satisfied and airless qualities of the discipline. (Her struggle to complete her thesis on Carson McCullers—she soon decides she didn’t want to write about her—will be familiar to anyone who has embarked on a research project.) But Stibbe is cleverer than she likes to let on. She even allows herself a meta-moment about the best quality of her own book:

Me: Is the book OK?
Will: It’s hilarious.
Me: But you look so serious.
Will: I’m laughing on the inside.
Sam: I hate it when people laugh out loud when they read.
Will: Me too, that’s why I hide it.
Sam: They’re showing off about reading a funny book
Will: About finding it funny.
A[lan] B[ennett]: (from kitchen table) I think you’re allowed to laugh if something amuses you.
Sam: Not a book.
AB: I think one’s allowed an involuntary snort… or two,
MK: One.

When you dissolve into helpless laughter, as I did any number of times reading this book, you can decide if Sam & Will are right and you’re just showing off.

When I mentioned Stibbe’s “best quality” just now I meant her humour, of course. As I said, her book had me laughing out loud to the point of tears. My wife, who lovingly said it did her good to see me enjoying myself so much, and after asking me to read bits to her, which made me gasp further, kindly but firmly kicked me out of the bedroom. You can’t read this book just anywhere.

But in retrospect Stibbe’s best quality isn’t her humour. Nor is it her keen editorial eye. (She always knows exactly where to stop her transcriptions.) Instead, it’s her kindness, which appears in her openhearted respond to the gruff but loving Bohemianism of life at 55. She knows she was lucky to have landed with Wilmer and her sons, and even when she moves out, just around the corner, to go to school full time, she keeps coming back, like AB himself.

Late in the book she describes one of those evenings. The family is watching England play Germany on TV:

Sam: (speaking to Bobby Robson [England’s manager]) What do you go and pick two bloody Ipswich players for (taps the screen)?
MK: Stop tapping the screen.
Sam: (to Bryan Robson [team captain, no relation to Bobby]) Come on, Robbo.
MK: Stop putting your hands all over the screen.
Sam: Come on, England.
Sam: I can’t watch. I hate football.
Will: It’s only a friendly.
Sam: (to Bobby Robson) It’s only a friendly, Bobby (taps screen).
MK: Sam, stop touching the screen.
Sam: I can’t watch.
MK: Neither can we—all we can see is your hands.

I felt sad at the end. But I didn’t say anything.
I don’t think Mary Hope & co [her new landlords] watch much football whereas MK and S&W watch as much as possible. So I’ll have to come round here for it. Not that I like it much, but I like watching it with them. MK mentions if a player has nice hair and Sam puts the Vs up to the ref and Will covers his face at the tense bits. They’re just themselves watching football only more so.

As the title suggests, the letters all end “Love, Nina.” It’s a very loving book. Just the thing for this time of year, or any other.

Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father—Alysia Abbott (2013)

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I enjoyed Alysia Abbott’s memoir of growing up with an openly gay father in 1970s and 80s San Francisco, racing through it in a couple of evenings. But I didn’t like it as much as some people I know. Can’t say for sure how it will stay with me, but I’m guessing most of it will vanish as thoroughly as the sometimes gritty, sometimes gossamer world it depicts.

Steve Abbott met Barbara Binder when both were graduate students in Atlanta in the late 60s. His declaration of his bisexuality didn’t get in the way of their relationship, at least not at first. They married and soon had a daughter, Alysia. In a complicated story of which the young Abbott knew almost nothing, Barbara, perhaps pushed by Steve’s regular relationships with other men, entered into a relationship of her own. Her lover, Wolf, is a suicidal, drug-addicted patient she had treated in her job as a social worker. He is arrested in Michigan trying to run drugs across the border; when the charges are dropped, Barbara hurries to get him. On the way back to Atlanta they are in a terrible car accident. Barbara dies instantly. Alysia is three.

Father and daughter move to San Francisco, where they eke out a precarious, semi-nomadic existence as Steve struggles to succeed as a writer. Alysia’s grandparents help out, taking the girl for summers to their home in the mid-west and paying tuition for a private school. (Hers is a story of only partial, yet still real deprivation.) Steve begins to publish and makes his name as an editor and activist in the burgeoning gay community.

As the 70s become the 80s more and more of his friends become sick. Abbott’s ordinary story of teenage rebellion is complicated by the advent of AIDS, especially when her father is diagnosed as HIV positive. By the time she goes to college in New York he has full blown AIDS; eventually he asks Abbott to return home to nurse him. Abbott’s ambivalence about this request—which means putting the life she has painstakingly carved out for herself on hold—make up the central dilemma of the last part of the book. Most interesting is the way Abbott delays the moment of reckoning, how for years she ignores the severity of her father’s situation, even complaining, in a letter she reproduces in the book, about how his recitation of illnesses is getting her down.

Abbott makes good use of her father’s journals and the many letters they wrote to each other. (Side note: I’m old enough to experience today’s instant, omnipresent communication as a loss. I remember when long-distance phone calls were expensive and rationed, and letter writing was common. Those letters were exciting. You could revisit them in different lights and moods. I guess future memoirists will consult their emails or texts or something, but it’s hard for me to see how that ephemera will persist. I’m also jealous of Abbott: I’ve only ever received a handful of letters from my father.) Abbott is also willing to show herself in an unflattering light. Her college-age narcissism isn’t unusual, but it’s made more vexing, more compelling because it masks her fears for her father’s heath.

Yet Abbott’s self-presentation is disappointingly detached, almost affectless. That could be a function of the denial that characterized her response to the illness. But the effect is to keep readers from fully engaging with her story. This flatness infects Abbott’s prose, too. Her sentences tend to be baldly declarative, syntactically and conceptually simple even when Abbott is engaging in self-reflection. Through a combination of inability or preoccupation or refusal of bourgeois norms, Steve Abott was sometimes a neglectful father, failing, for example, to instruct her in certain ways of social being. Her school friend Niki took up the burden, advising her to start wearing deodorant, reprimanding her when she blithely finishes someone else’s leftovers in a restaurant. Abbott writes: “Though I didn’t exactly see what the big deal was, I suspected Niki was right, and I felt overcome with that familiar feeling of confused shame.” She adds, in the only sentences that reflect on that complicated emotion (“confused shame”),“Why was it still so difficult to contain my weirdness, to hide my dirt and mask my scent? These are painful memories to revisit, even now.” So painful, it seems, that the equivalence between weirdness, on the one hand, and dirt and scent, on the other, that is, the desire of someone who has led a non-normative life to efface not just her distinctiveness but her very self is simply posed as a question and then dropped. Here pain precludes analysis.

Similarly underdeveloped is the opening anecdote, in which the five-year-old Abbott, the only child at a party her father has taken her to (she is often the only child), is left alone in the pool. She is entranced y the water (“I’ve uncovered a secret pathway to a magic pace, a mermaid sea”) but doesn’t know how to swim. Before long she is splashing frantically in the water. Someone notices and alerts her father, who pulls her out. Abbott’s commentary reads, in full:

My father notes this day in his journal with the headline “Alysia’s Swimming Accident,’ and beneath it a small scribbled drawing showing my arm flailing above wavy water. When I later find the journal entry, I smile with delight.

It’s unclear how much later this later is, but at least the final sentence has the virtue of being surprising. That’s not how I expected Abbott to respond—I expected her to say something like, “I can’t believe what a narrow escape that was, and how causally my father turned it into anecdote.” Is she so happy simply to be noticed by her father that she doesn’t care? Or was the moment not really that traumatic? (It’s certainly set up that way.) Why even begin with this story? Is it that, for Abbott and her father, at least, experience had to be recorded to become real? Perhaps the strangest thing about this moment is how idyllically it’s figured—disaster is averted, recrimination avoided. But then Abbott adds that she didn’t learn how to swim until she was in college, “a source of secret shame.” And there’s that shame again, running through the book like a livid thread, always unexplored.

Like her father’s poems, liberally included in the text, which are of primarily historical interest regarding both the gay scene in pre- and early-AIDS era San Francisco, and the Abbotts’ father-daughter relationship, Abbott’s book has more historical than intrinsic interest. Fascinating, for example, to see how much more casually people understood parenting in the 70s. That’s true even when we set aside Abbott’s father’s Bohemianism. For example, from the age of three onwards Abbott travels alone to spend summers with her grandparents. Her father coaches her to say she is four, since that’s the minimum age to fly as an unaccompanied minor. What amazed me was not her father’s little subterfuge but the airlines’ policy. I can’t imagine sending my daughter on a plane by herself next year. Yes, I realize this doesn’t necessarily reflect well either on me or on today’s culture of extreme, immersive parenting.

Where the book did hit home for me was in prompting these sorts of considerations of my own parenting. What kept me reading was its portrait of an intense father-daughter relationship to which I brought all my own complicated and overflowing feelings about being a father to a daughter. I was moved almost to tears by Steve Abbott’s evident love for his daughter, even though or perhaps because that love was sometimes so clumsily expressed. It says something about me (beyond the mere fact of me being a man, I mean) that I identified more strongly with him that with his daughter, the narrator of the story. Yet at the same time, I was surprised that the book didn’t distance my identification by presenting her father’s parenting as in any way distinctively queer. (In fact, I don’t think the book ever uses the word “queer” until the last line of the epilogue.) For all the ways Abbott records the strangely simultaneously loving and dismissive upbringing she received from the gay community she grew up in, she seldom considers what this has meant to her. She tells us what it was like to learn that she needed to dissemble about her father’s sexuality, before later embracing it, then reacting against it, then simply taking it as a given. But she doesn’t think about what queerness could bring to our understanding of family; indeed at the end of the book she casually announces that she realizes she never gave her father’s boyfriends a chance because they could never replace her mother, a surprising avowal of what I can only awkwardly call heteronormativity.

But maybe what I’m reacting to in Abbott’s writing is in fact a success not a weakness. Maybe what I’ve read as flat is in fact dispassionate, a sign of her ability to present a turbulent and unusual past evenhandedly. That’s a genuine accomplishment of the book. But I’m still disappointed in the lack of reflection on the part of the adult Abbot in relation to her childhood and adolescent sense. She rarely reflects on the past from the position of the present: I can understand wanting to keep her present life private, and I realize that the Fairyland of the title is a vanished world, such that part of the point of the book is to portray it as sealed off. Not everything needs to be Proust (though even as I write that I don’t think I really believe it), but this absence of a change in register between child and adult voices, or of a switch in temporal position makes the book less analytical, thinner somehow. Evenhandedness too easily shades into monotony.

It’s probably not fair, they’re not the same kind of book, and it’s not as though we have so many stories about gay parents that I should be pitting one against the other, but I couldn’t help comparing Fairyland to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, her remarkable comic about coming to terms with the untimely death of her closeted bisexual father. Fairyland comes off badly in this comparison, Bechdel’s prose (to say nothing of her drawings) so smart and funny and poignant, her book so much richer than Abbott’s. Fun Home is a book I’ve read and re-read, and taught, and pressed into other people’s hands. I don’t think I’ll do any of those things with Fairyland even as I have affection for the father who imperfectly did what he could with a child he always loved and admiration for the child who chronicles that love so even-temperedly.

The Paying Guests–Sarah Waters (2014)

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Just so you know, I reveal details of the plot here, so maybe bookmark this for later if you’re planning to read the book anytime soon.

Near the beginning of The Paying Guests, Frances Wray, the novel’s protagonist, looks in on her mother before going to bed. Mrs. Wray is sitting up in bed with “a book in her lap, a little railway thing called Puzzles and Conundrums: she had been trying out answers to an acrostic.” Near the end of the book, after dramatic events that Frances has kept secret, she feverishly speculates that her mother has guessed part of what has happened: “But how long before she worked out more? How long before the whole thing knitted itself together, like one of her wretched acrostics?”

These references are quite disparaging (“a little railway thing,” “wretched”), which is surprising, since, on the face of it at least, The Paying Guests is greatly interested in puzzles, mysteries, enigmas, and the like. In the great tradition of Golden Age British crime fiction, these mysteries concern unlikely protagonists. The Paying Guests’s Wrays live in a respectable London suburb. The Great War has been over for four years but its effects persist, not least in their household. Frances’s two brothers died in the fighting, and her father of ill health and grief soon after, leaving behind an unpleasant surprise: his investments turn out to be nearly worthless. Mother and daughter live on in the family home, a home that is too big for them, and too expensive. They have long since let the servants go; now the only solution to their financial straits is to let part of the house to strangers.

The novel begins with the arrival of the lodgers, the Barbers. (Mrs. Wray calls them “paying guests,” in keeping with her willingness to delude herself about anything she doesn’t want to face.) Leonard and Lilian are a young lower-middle class couple: he works as an insurance agent, she looks after their home and dreams of art school. They are the novel’s first puzzle: we share in the Wrays’ half-horrified, half-fascinated efforts to figure them out. Their manner of speaking, their gramophone, their rooms decorated in garish bohemianism: all set them apart from the fastidious, self-regarding, and yet increasingly threadbare world of their landladies (a term Frances uses to shock her mother).

Frances is a character we’ve come to know from some of Waters’s other books, especially The Night Watch (2006): the melancholic lesbian. Much of the great sadness of the Wray household arises from her thwarted hopes. We learn of her pacifist and suffragist activism during the war years (she was briefly arrested for throwing a shoe at an MP), and the woman, Christina, she met and fell in love with during that time. Later we learn of the crisis when Christina asks her to live with her and Frances bows to her sense of family obligation and breaks the relationship off. Frances cares for her mother and the household, she manages the finances as best she can. The book is a study in the exhaustion that comes from making small economies at a time when the daily business of keeping up a household was much more labour intensive than it is now. Waters describes the housework in detail: the fires to be made and kept up, the dusting and sweeping, the scrubbing by hand of the tiles, twice, first with vinegar to remove the dirt, then again with water to get a shine (which of course soon fades). Bathwater must be heated; the WC is across the yard. Even going to bed is “a round of chores—the gatherings, the turnings-down, the cushion-plumpings and the lockings-up.”

Frances, though a puzzle to her family (her mother in particular effects not to know about her daughter’s sexual orientation, holding out hope that she will find a man, and therefore a purpose to her life), isn’t one to herself. She knows the solution to her ennui (meaningful work, recognition, a room of her own, love, life) but can’t imagine where it might come from. To her surprise—but not to ours, at least not to those of us who have read Waters before—the solution turns out to be right in front of her, right under her roof in fact.

Frances and Lilian, who are often alone in the house together, slowly become friendly, their relationship characterized, on Frances’s part at least, by a muted gallantry that is part of the way she keeps all the important things about herself in check, hidden from everyone, even, almost, herself. Eventually Frances outs herself to Lilian, telling her about Christina. Lilian’s responds with wary reserve; Frances curses herself for saying too much; the intimacy dies as quickly as it had flared. But one night everything suddenly changes, Lilian’s reserve is revealed to have been fear of her feelings, and the two fall headlong into a charged relationship that consists, like the experience of being closeted, of hiding in plain sight: they steal moments together whenever they can, even under the very noses of Leonard and Mrs. Wray.

Then a lot of things happen at once. Lilian reveals she is pregnant and asks Frances to administer some pills she has purchased illegally from a shady chemist’s. The night she induces a miscarriage is the same night Leonard comes home early from a business meeting. He assumes the child is a sign that Lilian has been involved with another man. When he threatens Lilian, Frances tells him the truth. Leonard attacks her in a rage; a desperate Lilian beats him off with an ashtray, the first thing that comes to hand; the blow to the back of the head kills him.

The women subside in relief that quickly turns to shock. Lilian convinces Frances not to call a doctor or the police. Instead they manage to remove the body—Waters is great on the physicality of bodies, especially as revealed through sex, work, and death: the scene in which they desperately drag the corpse downstairs, out through the garden, and into the lane behind the house, before Frances’s mother comes home from her bridge night is a marvel of suspense and horror—and erase the signs of the struggle. Here the descriptions of cleaning that earlier seemed only to remind us of the emptiness of Frances’s life take on new urgency; so too do the earlier meditations on its futility (everything fades, everything decays: the porcelain collection always collects new dust, the freshly scrubbed floor always attracts someone’s muddy boots) take on new irony: some traces of the crime (bloodstains on the carpet, for example) simply can’t be expunged.

Murder, it seems, will out. The police become increasingly suspicious about the crime. It seems inevitable that the women will be found out. Their actions drive a wedge between them: they are physically separated, Lilian’s family takes her to stay with them, and emotionally separated, caught in a series of emotional upheavals ranging between fear of getting caught, elation at how everything seems to be breaking their way, paranoia that the authorities know more than they’re letting on, shame at having their comfortable lives mixed up in murder, and guilt at the idea that someone else might be held accountable for their actions.

Yet whenever the book seems to become conventional, it shrugs its shoulders, reveals conventionality to have been a red herring. Take for example its decision to limit its narration closely to Frances. We only really know how Frances is feeling. Lilian remains much more shadowy. Thus we too become suspicious of her motivations, her loyalties, her responses. We share in Frances’s suspicions. Did Lilian know, for example, about the large life insurance policy Leonard had taken out on himself only a few months before his death? Does Lilian love her—she’s never been with a woman before, after all—or is she taking advantage of her?

Lilian is the novel’s greatest enigma. We always have to read her through others’ perceptions. Even her most direct utterance—a love letter she sends Frances when away on holiday with Leonard—turns out to be open to more sinister interpretations. Added to this inscrutability are the facts that come to light about Leonard after his death. He turns out to have been having a long-standing affair with another woman, Billie, whose sometime boyfriend/fiancée, Spencer, had beaten him savagely several months earlier. Leonard’s best friend Charlie, meanwhile, was involved with Billie’s sister, which explains why he maintained to the police that he and Leonard were together on the night of his death: he was with that girl and didn’t want his fiancée to know about it. (Are you keeping up with all this? It gets a bit complicated, though Waters is admirably lucid with her details.)

The book’s most interesting surprises have to do with the ease with which the women get away with their crime. No one notices those bloodstains on the carpets, especially after Lilian’s family and the police trample over the Barbers’ rooms. It rains heavily the night of the murder, washing away evidence and ensuring that the only possible witnesses (a spooning couple) couldn’t see anything. Suspicion, which had first fallen on Charlie, comes, after the revelations about Leonard’s affair, to rest on Spencer, a young tough with a record of assault. He admits to the earlier attack on Leonard and relishes, at least at first, being accused of a crime he insists he didn’t commit but which he is glad about. Even when the boy goes on trial for murder, prompting the women to agonize over their responsibility in letting an innocent man be accused, this problem too goes away: a new witness, a fellow lodger of Spencer and his mother—they let rooms in a house much shabbier than the Wrays’—comes forward at the trial to confirm that Spencer had been at home the night of the murder. This man—a war veteran who loses his sales job by testifying (he was meant to have been in Leeds on business)—is the most admirable character, the only one we can unreservedly sympathize with.

Significantly, the man is never named, and so stands, not as a British Everyman, but as a symbol of the possible integrity that might remain in a society that has been thoroughly transformed by war, no matter how people like Mrs. Wray try to pretend it hasn’t. Like so many other veterans, various examples of which flit through the novel, the man is scraping to make ends meet, trying out all sorts of odd jobs. To lose this one is a hardship: doing so reinforces his bitterness at the society that fails to acknowledge the things he went through on its behalf.

Unacknowledged sacrifices are everywhere in the book. These losses are as much of people as of ideals, most obviously of sons and brothers, but also of lovers, especially same-sex ones. They are losses of expectation and hope. Is this, various characters ask, what we fought the war for? In this regard, the paying guests of the title might be everyone in England, or almost everyone. Certain no one seems at home in the new order, and everyone has had to pay.

Everyone except, suddenly, Frances & Lilian. The jury is convinced by the ex-serviceman’s testimony and finds Spenser not guilty. Leonard’s death is destined to remain unsolved. The women are free, their consciousnesses mostly assuaged. And just when it seems as though none of those things are enough to overcome the harm that’s come to their relationship, just when Frances has contemplated suicide from the Battersea bridge (but, in her sensible way, quickly rejected it), at that very moment Lilian breathlessly arrives and the novel concludes by intimating a new beginning for the two of them.

In this way, The Paying Guests uses its crime story framework to ask the question, what would happen if you got what you wanted, if all the obstacles to your desire melted away? One answer is that there’s no such thing: there are always obstacles, we never get what we want. That’s the lesson of most crime stories, from Macbeth to Patricia Highsmith.

But the novel’s more interesting answer is that this crime does pay, because of the desire that motivates it. The most ingenious thing Waters has done here is to use the conventions of crime fiction to make her point about the invisibleness of same-sex, especially lesbian desire. Although Waters creates a lot of suspense as to whether suspicion will fall on Frances and Lilian, ultimately, she suggests, that suspense is beside the point. The law—exclusively, even obstreperously male here—simply cannot imagine Frances and Lilian as co-perpetrators, as co- anything. The police are no different from Leonard, who assumes his wife must have been with another man. We can imagine that, had the women confessed, the police would have been as unforgiving as Leonard was. But they’ll never get there on their own. Only other women—Lilian’s sisters in particular—can even begin to imagine the truth—not about the murder, but about the nature of Frances and Lilian’s relationship. But that “knowledge” can’t extend beyond an inarticulate suspicion of something queer.

Waters is too attuned to historical reality to paint too optimistic a picture of the possibilities enabled by the invisibility of lesbian desire. After all, the relationship between Frances’s former lover, Christa, and her artist friend Stevie appears only at the margins of the story: their life together seems precarious. And Waters doesn’t show us what Frances and Lilian’s life together looks like. But the absence of robust, open, healthy lesbian relationships isn’t just an acknowledgement of history. It’s also, more interestingly, a function of the book’s narrative form.

Waters hasn’t always handled similar material in the same way. The Night Watch, for example, is another story of war and homosexuality. There too, forms of life, expressions of desire, that are possible in wartime (in this case, WWII) become much more difficult afterwards. But that novel qualified its narrative of the rise of peacetime conventionality by telling its events in reverse (that was the source of much of its power), so that the narrative of the book countered the narrative of history.

By contrast, the conventional structure of The Paying Guests left me unsatisfied. Although suspenseful, it more often feels inert, as if it were leading to something it chooses not to develop. It’s not just my naïve desire to know whether things turn out happily ever after that was disappointed by the ending. I wanted the book to take on the challenge of imagining what Frances and Lilian’s life would look like, as two women living together, let alone two women who bore the burden of the secret of their responsibility in a crime.

I think the book is aware of this failure, if not in terms of its characters then in terms of its form. Remember those references to acrostics I started with. Although it’s helpful of Waters to use the second reference to remind us of the first, there’s an obviousness here—aren’t we supposed to make the connection between the daughter’s situation and the mother’s puzzles?—that makes me think about what kind of book The Paying Guests wants to be. For not all books are supposed to be puzzles. In this regard, the part of these passages that seems the most important is nothing to do with puzzles per se but rather with the kind of book the puzzles are in: “a little railway thing.” The dismissal is Frances’s, though it might equally be her echo of Mrs. Wray’s sensibility: its snobbishness disguised as self-deprecation suits her to a tee. It doesn’t really matter, since, at the beginning of the book, mother and daughter quite agree, at least on matters of social class.

But does Waters agree? I don’t think so. I think she wants to write “a little railway thing”—though, to be sure, and this is a significant difference, a queer one. Waters has always loved popular late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literary forms (sensation fiction, detective fiction, gothic fiction, suffragette memoirs). But her desire to re-write them from a queer perspective means she can never inhabit them fully. In her past work, this has felt like an enlivening tension. But here the ambivalence comes across as more uncertain. One way to take the measure of that uncertainty is to consider the novel’s allusions to canonical literary modernism, a movement that prided itself on being puzzling.

The opening line—“The Barbers had said they would arrive by three”—feels like a flat echo of the one that famously begins Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Frances’s meditation on her neighbourhood’s seclusion—“you’d never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that”—sounds like a drier, less rhapsodic version of Clarissa’s hymn to “what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” (Waters’s book, by contrast, begins on “a wet April evening.”) But when Frances does slip into the city, she sounds like the much-wealthier Clarissa:

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged… It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that on was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it!

The rush of metaphors, the sensual attunement to the world, the exclamatory free indirect discourse: why, Frances here almost makes herself into the peals of Big Ben that boom and dissolve across Woolf’s novel.

As I read on, I kept finding other modernist references: the flower-seller Frances dashes over to as she accompanies Christina reminded me of the destination of Clarissa’s initial errand. Other references seemed more overt. The description of a sudden, pregnant silence—“She was aware of rain, in a sudden shower”—echoes the line from “The Waste Land” about the summer that surprises “in a shower of rain.” Frances’s hysterical vision, as she waits for Lilia not return from the chemist’s with the abortifacients, of a London overrun with infants—“Everywhere she looked she saw prams, she saw babies with pink, alive faces”—echoes Vivienne Eliot’s similar yet much more horrified vision in a letter to her husband. And Lilian’s exclamation about a poor world reminded me of Stevie’s heartfelt cry in The Secret Agent, “Bad world for poor people!”

At times I thought Waters might be thinking of her own novel as a kind of dialogue with that earlier novel, Conrad’s own remarkable exploration of the uses that genre fiction (spy stories, detective fiction) might be put to. I haven’t the energy to check if I’ve remembered this correctly, but Leonard stays in my mind as fleshly, rather like Conrad’s Verloc, and there is, of course, the similarity between the novels of a murder committed from outraged despair at the thought that the person one most loves might be threatened. Conrad subordinates genre convention to modernist imperative much more than Waters; and his book is much more pessimistic, even deterministic. So I don’t want to suggest they’re in any way the same book. I’m similarly willing to admit that I may be finding these allusions where they don’t really exist. (Did anyone else notice them?) But they struck me as signs of Waters’s own uncertainty about what kind of a book she’d written: a conventionally, if carefully structured crime story that might while away a railway journey that sometimes willfully disdains the more experimental literature of the period in which it is set yet which sometimes yearns for, even needs that very experimentalism as a way to be able to tell what, in the actual genre fiction of the period, would have been an untellable story. (Again, maybe I’m wrong. There might be a ton of Golden Age lesbian crime fiction that I don’t know about. If so, please enlighten me!)

I certainly don’t regret reading The Paying Guests (it’s long, probably too long, but a quick read). I’ll read anything Waters writes. But I don’t think this one quite came off. Perhaps we might think of it as a bit of a paying guest amongst the more established instances of her impressive body of work.

 

Miscellany (3)

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I knew it would be hard to return from sabbatical, but I’d forgotten how quickly the semester becomes relentless, each day an exhausting headlong rush. I’ve missed writing here. But I’ve managed to carve out enough time to say a few words about some of the books I read at the end of the summer and even one or two I’ve squeezed into the semester.

Rennie Airth, The Reckoning (2014)

Superior if self-consciously solemn installment of superior if self-consciously solemn crime series centered on the aftermath of WWI in England. The good guys are all a little too good (worse, worthy), but the prose is better than average, and the plot suspenseful. Hard to know where the series can go from here, though I’d have said that after the last one too. I appreciate Airth’s deliberateness: only four books in fifteen years.

Karin Slaughter, Cop Town (2014)

I haven’t read Slaughter before, though she seems awfully popular and prolific. (Is that seriously her last name? It’s a bit like the inventors of cinema being named Lumieres.) I enjoyed this stand-alone, even if I found the resolution of the crime itself tedious. Like too many crime novels, Cop Town is too long. The interesting stuff concerns the introduction (I was going to say integration, but that’s just what it wasn’t) of women into the Atlanta police force in the mid 1970s. I assume the depiction is accurate: it’s awfully compelling, at any rate, without being self-congratulatory (“Look how far we’ve come”; “Can you believe what people did or said back then?”). I also enjoyed the surprising—and surprisingly successful—Jewish subplot. I’d read more of her stuff, especially if anyone has any recommendations.

Georges Perec, W., or The Memory of Childhood (1975, English Translation by David Bellos, 1988)

I read this several months ago in preparation for a course on the Holocaust and what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory: the “memories” of the missed event that haunt child survivors and the children of survivors. I planned to write about it at length here, but never got around to it. At first I decided not to include the text in the course. Then, at the last minute, when I was finishing the syllabus, I decided I needed to include at least a short selection. The book just wouldn’t quite let me go.

W. switches between two layers: a memoir of Perec’s wartime experience as a child evacuee in rural France, and a fictional tale—half boys’ own adventure story, half anthropological treatise—about a man who discovers the remote island of W., a place organized entirely around the pursuit of competitive sport.

It’s obvious the two are related, in that the second is an allegory for what cannot be described or even referred to in the first: the concentration camps that swallowed up Perec’s mother, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and died there, probably the following year. The whole exercise becomes more moving, more uncanny when we learn that the story of W. is based on one written by Perec when he was only twelve or thirteen, that is, in the years just after the war. David Bellos, the book’s translator, explains that the letter “w” in French is the double-vee, le double-vé, in which it’s hard not to hear an echo of the double life, la double vie, which Perec lived as a young child in Vichy France.

I initially decided not to assign the book because I worried students would get caught up in untangling the allegory, in making the connections between the two halves explicit, even though the book never hides those connections, indeed advertizes them. I wondered if I could get them past thinking that, having done so, their interpretive task was done. And I didn’t know what I thought about the book, couldn’t decide whether I liked it. (Which is actually a good reason to assign something.) I’m probably selling my students short; at any rate, I’ll see how they do with the excerpt. The section I’ve chosen is a remarkable description of Perec’s uncertainty about his parents and their fate, centered on descriptions of absent photographs. In that regard it will complement our discussions of photographs in Maus and Austerlitz.

Although I prefer Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, a text which also deals with a child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to France who was hidden during the Occupation, mostly because Kofman is more interested in the psychic and affective aspects of her experiences, I think about Perec’s book often, all these months later, one of the truest signs that a book is important to me.

Jorn Lier Horst, Dregs (2010, translated into English by Anne Bruce, 2011)

Dreadful Norwegian procedural. Really felt let down by this since I’d heard it praised to the skies by a number of generally reliable bloggers. Wooden translation, leaden plot, the always-irritating detective’s-child-in-harm’s-way subplot: really the full nine stinker yards. File under: title, accurate.

Henning Mankell, An Event in Autumn (2013, translated into English by Laurie Thomson, 2014)

Melancholy because apparently absolutely, definitely, unquestionably final installment of the Wallander series. (Though we know how reliable those sorts of claims can be: cf Reichenbach Falls.) Set before the events of the brilliant, distressing The Troubled Man, this work, slight even for a novella, will be enjoyed by fans of the series. Newcomers shouldn’t start here. Basically it’s a throwaway, as Mankell himself admits (he wrote it as a charity exercise to support Dutch booksellers, or something of the sort). But for me Wallander is one of the great detectives. I always love how irritated and grumpy he is about little things without ever becoming a caricature (curmudgeonly, endearing, gruff exterior but gentle interior, etc).

Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Mad and the Bad (1972, translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 2014)

One of my character flaws is a weakness for nice packaging. I’ve always judged books, and other things, by their covers, and I’ve often been led astray by doing so. (And yet I keep doing it.) I’ve long been utterly seduced by the NYRB classics series—and they’ve republished some marvelous, deserving works. (I wouldn’t know Olivia Manning without them, and a world without her is no world at all.) But just because a book has got those fancy full-color inside covers doesn’t mean it has to be good. This is only the third Manchette I’ve read (the others several years ago, I remember them only dimly) but it’s time to call Emperor’s New Clothes on this guy. I’m all for writing that pushes the conventions of a genre, either in order to invigorate another genre or to contest the very idea of genre, but you can’t do it if, like Manchette, you disdain the genre to begin with.

Many have written about the fundamental conservatism of the crime genre (even when it gets put to liberal ends, supports good causes, etc), but Hammett, Chandler, Thompson, and Macdonald (Manchette’s obvious models) are more radical than Manchette’s pretty ham-handed, self-satisfied critique of capitalism. Consider the book’s set piece: a hit man on the trail of the gang who kidnapped the nanny of the nephew of a wealthy industrialist (is there any other kind?) tracks the bad guys into a department store. The ensuing shoot-out gets out of hand: the store is set aflame and looted by euphoric customers whose frenzied lust for consumer goods spills over into the streets of a provincial French town. J. G. Ballard would have made this both funny and ominous, a tonal instability we wouldn’t quite know what to do with. Manchette makes things clear: there’s no difference between the thieves and the customers. Manchette reminds me of late 60s or early 70s Godard: they’re both tediously earnest, but Manchette has none of Godard’s expressive range, the delirium of style that makes the films work despite themselves. His idea of style is a pretty one-note imitation of the hardboiled. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Laurie R King—A Grave Talent (1993)

Although the early 90s now seem what the 70s were to me as a young adult (embarrassing, quaint, hopeless), King’s novel, the first in her Kate Martinelli series, doesn’t feel dated. It impressed me with its intelligent and subtle representation of a queer relationship, and its vivid description of the forests of Northern California. I wish the book were shorter—it has its longeurs—but it cemented my appreciation for King’s talent. (I really liked her first Holmes pastiche.)

Sarah Waters—Tipping the Velvet (1998)

Having unaccountably stalled out a hundred pages into this book last year, I started over again and read the whole thing in just a few days. It’s a wonderful debut, and I bet people will be reading it for a long time. It’s not perfect, especially when it seems designed to illustrate a caricatured version of Judith Butler. But at its best it impresses with sinuous, incantatory sentences and exciting narrative reversals (which Waters would perfect a few years later in Fingersmith). Sometimes the book is boisterous, but mostly it’s sad. The queer melancholy that returns in full force in The Night Watch is already evident here.

Maybe I’m just an unrepentant modernist, but what’s really stayed with me is the ending, with seems like an homage to and queer rewriting of the end of Forster’s Howards End: in both cases a new kind of non-nuclear, even non-biological family is imagined in a pastoral setting. Forster’s novel is famously anxious about how modernization/development threatens that idyll, complete with class snobbishness about middle-class redbrick spreading like a stain on the countryside. I was left wondering whether Tipping the Velvet, on the face of it so progressive and generous, might not be similarly conservative (if not about class). When Nan, the protagonist, steps in at the end to give the rousing speech that her lover’s brother, a socialist, cannot articulate, showmanship seems to trump politics. Yet Waters is nothing if not knowing: one of her aims is to redeem performance as something other than “mere” appearance, as substance itself. So maybe I am off target here. But something still niggles at me about the book. I liked it best when it’s least in control of itself, least amenable to allegory.

I want to write more extensive posts on some other books I’ve read: two by Nathan Englander and three by Tove Jansson. We’ll see whether the semester lets me.