Mother and the Wolf: Maternal Power in Fairy Tales
Once upon a time, I was trying to tell a story, only I didn’t know how it went. There wasn’t a main character, there wasn’t an adventure, and when I tried to begin the story I just disappeared into one thing after another. “Happily ever after”—after what?
I was trying to tell a story about motherhood, and each time I set out from home I got lost in the woods… Read more at Tor.com
Stories of the Mind-Mother Problem
When I became a mother, it was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. By age 33 I’d held down jobs and signed a book contract. I’d moved to a new city for the man I loved. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. But having a baby was clearly a vastly larger acquisition–and it felt like a powerful act of self-definition.
Yet when our son was born, a hairless human the same size and approximate cuteness as our cat but with far fewer abilities, I didn’t feel like I’d taken charge of my life so much as lost my way in it. I felt at once supremely capable and alarmingly vulnerable. I had had no idea that love could be so boring, and part of me resisted, while another part wished only to stare besottedly at my baby.
I spent my days nursing while reading the New Yorker, a gift subscription from a friend who didn’t want me to lose my intellectual edge. I spent my days wallowing in the adolescent conviction that nobody loved me. I swung wildly between ecstasy and self-pity, satisfaction and frustration. Though I was evidently the adult in the room, emotionally I was 14 again, wandering in the dark forest of my own feelings.
I probably behaved with teenage obliviousness, too, like most parents do, acting like the whole world revolves around them and the baby. I felt my emotions twanging like rubber bands and wondered what had happened to the unsentimental mom I thought I’d be. I’d had a map of motherhood in my mind, but when I arrived there, there were no signposts and no paths.
Anne Enright writes that after the birth of her child she felt she had arrived at “a place before stories start. Or the precise place where stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain? This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind.”
Enright wrestles with this shift in Making Babies, her brilliant memoir of her early motherhood. She finds few answers and many questions: how should a mother recollect herself, or create herself anew? And for a mother who is also a writer or artist, how to cope with a maternal role that in all its demands for care and selflessness seems like the opposite of creative autonomy?
Some time and another child later, I was still thinking about the relationship between creative work and mothering, a parent’s love and an artist’s independence of mind. To find out more I decided to look at great artists and writers who were also mothers. Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Louise Bourgeois, the painter Alice Neel: how had they done it?
I started writing about them—and found myself back in the woods with the same useless map. I didn’t know how to tell their stories as mothers; I didn’t know what a mother’s story looked like, or why anyone else would want to read it. Rachel Cusk comments that “the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify.” I couldn’t find a narrative thread.
It’s rare to see a mother as the protagonist of her own story. When “The Mother, the Woman” was the controversial theme of the Dutch Book Week a couple years ago, two male writers were invited to pen the annual essay and work of fiction. Was a mother only imaginable seen through the eyes of a son? Could motherhood never be the mother’s story? I worried we’d gone no further since the American feminist Susan Rubin Suleiman said a generation ago: “Mothers don’t write, they are written.”
That’s not true; mothers are writing, painting, and shaping their stories now more than ever. But the stories that are told, like Enright’s, are often histories of frustration and fragmentation. Cusk calls birth an event that “divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed.…When she is with her children she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.” The novelist Jenny Offill writes of feeling that “a bomb had gone off” in her life.
Psychology, which has long neglected mothers’ stories in favor of the child’s point of view, is starting to suggest explanations for this fragmentation. In her fascinating book Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, American journalist Chelsea Conaboy explores new scientific insights that make it clear that becoming a mother is not the end point of a woman’s psychological development, as Freud once stated, but a time of growth and change.
According to this research, new mothers are confused and emotionally volatile not only because they’re sleep-deprived, miss their old life, and don’t have time to themselves. Quoting scientist Jodi Pawluski, Conaboy reports that the maternal brain is undergoing dramatic physical change, driven by the “endocrine tsunami that accompanies pregnancy” and the emotional stimuli of motherhood. Pregnancy and early parenthood, she writes, mark a “developmental epoch as significant as sexual differentiation and puberty.”
This is not a matter of maternal instinct. On the contrary: there is no circuit in the brain that automatically powers up when a child arrives. Instead, maternal or parental feelings are created over time by the interaction between parent and child. Babies attract the attention of adults by being cute. Adult brains respond by building new neural pathways to facilitate care. A restructuring takes place in the neural networks that determine how parents respond to their environment, how they regulate their own emotions, and how they assess the needs of others and act in response. The more you care, the more caring you become.
Research from Dutch neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema, among others, traces the physical evidence of this alteration. It doesn’t happen right away: some of the women Conaboy interviews are shocked by their lack of immediate warm feelings for their baby. It’s a long-term process: “Caring for a baby changes what researchers call the functional architecture of the brain, the framework across which brain activity moves. And remarkably, those changes last, not only weeks or months after a baby is born but perhaps even decades later, over a person’s whole life span.”
The changes aren’t all good. Parents’ minds must be flexible to keep up with their children’s rapid growth, so their brains become “more moldable, more adaptable…, maybe even more so than at any other point in adulthood.” This lability and hormonal overload can trigger mood shifts (a majority of participants in parenting studies show symptoms of mild depression), anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also, as Cusk observed, make you feel like a stranger to yourself.
But it doesn’t have to leave new mothers, in Offill’s terms, shattered, It can also look like Enright’s portrayal of motherhood as the start of a new story with the mother at the center, a story of growth and change, of losing and finding the way.
In the women’s lives I wrote about, I realized, there was a storyline after all. They all had times when they lost themselves, or lost what they cared about most, when everything fell apart. While Alice Neel was pregnant, she had panic attacks at the thought of having to give up her career. While Alice Walker was caring for her infant daughter, she said, everything she wrote sounded “as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.”
They were confronted with their secret fears, their childhood pain, their rage. Some felt more vulnerable, through their children, to the stress of living under white supremacy. Almost all of them mourned when their children grew up: the loss of their mother role turned out to be as difficult to process as its arrival.
They came back from their losses, too. After Lessing left her husband and lost custody of her children, she felt adrift, but full of new resolve to have her life mean something. Toni Morrison called becoming a mother “the most liberating thing that ever happened to me,” because it let her ignore other people’s opinions and demands. “I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that.…The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
Recovering from an emotional breakdown that came out of her depression and confusion after her youngest son left home, Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook. In her sixties, after her children and partner had left home, Alice Neel put new energy into her career. She found fame partly with her portraits of pregnant women, into which she put all the discomfort, pain, excitement, and self-discovery that had once been her experience.
They changed, they recollected themselves, and that was their narrative. It’s the story that Conaboy tells, about how mothers grow and adapt to the constant interruptions of life with a dependent other. They are pushed in unplanned, unpredictable directions by a baby whose presence is quite literally mind-altering. And, as adolescents do, they make themselves anew.
Necessary and validating, Mother Brain confirms the changes I saw in my own life and the lives I wrote about. Conaboy tells as science the story that they told in their art: Neel’s paintings, Lessing’s fiction, Walker’s essays, Audre Lorde’s poetry about the children she raised in a lesbian relationship. It’s a story of self-creation and self-discovery, of going into the wilderness of new experience—the wilderness that arises between mother and child—and, with luck and hard work, emerging more powerful for having been so profoundly changed.
I wrote for Trouw about the pleasures of reading and writing biography, especially its power to recognize the undone-ness of ordinary lives. English version coming soon; the Dutch version is online at Trouw.nl.
My beloved friend Krishna–who first introduced me to Born in Flames, the 1983 feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden–asked me to be on a panel on the film in the Samen Tegen Racisme (Together Against Racism) series, Pakhuis de Zwijger, November 20, 2020. I appeared together with Gina Lafour, Shishani Vranckx, and moderator Manjit Krishna Kaur. Here’s the text of my talk, which was about the film, Adrienne Maree Brown’s thoughts on emergent strategy, and my reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching. See the video here
I came here to talk about mice.
Krishna asked me to talk about where I see myself in this movie—which characters I identify with. And I thought of the part where Flo Kennedy—who was an impressive feminist lawyer in real life and here plays the mastermind behind the revolution—is talking about action and power. She says, “What would you rather see come through the door: One lion, unified? Or 500 mice? You know, 500 mice can do a lot of damage.”
At one time I would have tried to name one of the heroes. But the truth is, I’m a mouse.
I’m a mouse in a pattern of mice, a multitude of mice. Mice get things done. Patterns make things happen. In the terms of Emergent Strategy, by the Black feminist activist Adrienne Maree Brown, mice are emergent. Their actions are linked to the actions of other mice; they join together to make intersectional links of community and persistence. They adapt, they’re resilient, they’re resourceful. They chew on stuff.
They’re also hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings who created the Earth in order to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything—because let’s not forget that we’re in the realm of science fiction. And that’s where we need to be. As Brown says, “Science fiction is a way to practice the future together.”
When I volunteer for the Women’s March, together with others, I’m a mouse. When I show up for Black lives, for Black queer and trans lives, standing on the Museumplein, holding up a sign, I’m a mouse. When I help an American register to vote, I’m a mouse. One such act is nothing. Many such acts—that’s everything.
If 500 mice can disrupt what’s there, they can also create what’s not there. Brown asks, “What are the ideas that liberate all of us? The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s).” I’m there for the collaboration of the mice.
Lately, the last couple of weeks, I’ve been checking the news. I get up every morning and I say, “Is he still there? Is that fog that settled over America ever going to lift?” And a couple of days ago I thought, No. This fog of untruth is the new climate. I have to learn to live with it, and I can probably learn a lot about that from other people, the ones who’ve always been lied to about their freedom.
How do you find your way in a fog? You focus on critical connections. You help each other survive and thrive. Intersectionality puts you at a crossroads: You can move toward each other, offer assistance where needed, check your privilege. Look for patterns for the many, for the mice, the ones who are, as Audre Lorde said, “seeking a now that can breed futures.”
Seeds are the future. You may not know where you’re heading, but when you get there, be ready to plant yourself and grow.
Roads are the future. Colson Whitehead writes that the Underground Railroad, the escape route from white supremacy, is built at the same time that it’s being used, by the people who travel through it and the allies who maintain the rails. “Who are you after you finish something this magnificent?” he asks. “In constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side.”
Somebody once asked the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin what she would do to save the world. She answered that since she didn’t actually have that kind of superpower, she would go on doing what she’d always done. She would write novels and worry.
I think that’s the mouse way. You do your work, and worry, and survive. Water wears down mountains. Mice waylay the plans of men. Le Guin preferred the way of water; she believed in patience and flowing around the obstacles.
Me, I’m here for chewing up important documents, nesting in the cabinets, doing my little bit to save the world.
“I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—to discover that a book on mothering was also about not-mothering. Yet the problem of an unplanned pregnancy, for women born between 1900 and 1945, is a story that runs throughout my book. Of the women I’m writing about, almost all struggled for access to birth control. Several had at least one abortion. To have some control over the timing and material circumstances of pregnancy and child-rearing is essential to the practice of the mother-writer or mother-artist…”
In response to the growing pressure on reproductive rights in America, Literary Hub published a short excerpt from my upcoming (really!) book on writing and mothering, The Baby on the Fire Escape. [Read more]
Grievance, paranoia, and Ian Buruma
Many observers in the Dutch press had a hard time understanding the fall of Ian Buruma. My explanation was published in Dutch in Letter&Geest on September 29, 2018.
Ian Buruma is out. Our man in New York, the Dutchman who made his name in the English-speaking world with insightful books about Japan, his family history, and a murder in Amsterdam, winner of the Erasmus Prize, resigned under pressure last week as editor in chief of The New York Review of Books.
Buruma’s offense was to publish an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, who wrote about losing his job and friends after several women accused him of sexual assault. The first-person account by the Canadian former radio host was meant to add nuance to the fierce debate around #MeToo. Yet Buruma was sharply criticized in the media and online. In an interview with Dutch monthly Vrij Nederland he called his resignation “a capitulation to social media and university presses,” which had sided with #MeToo against freedom of opinion.
Only there was something fishy about Ghomeshi’s soul-searching. If Buruma had Googled his name, he would have discovered that ‘several’ women was actually more than 20. Ghomeshi spoke of being charged with two counts of sexual assault, not seven; these included non-consensual hitting and choking during sex. He mentioned a settlement, but not that it was for a three-year-long campaign of sexual harassment of a colleague. Descriptions of more violent abuse, given by women outside the courtroom, he insinuated were baseless gossip.
When an interviewer pointed out the discrepancies, Buruma dug his hole deeper by stating that the facts of the case didn’t matter. To him the piece was about Ghomeshi’s humiliation and exclusion and whether he had now served his time. Besides, he added, Ghomeshi was acquitted. Nothing was proven. It was impossible to say what really happened, and to him it didn’t matter. “The exact nature of his behavior…I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.”
His indifference was his undoing.
After word of his resignation went around, I got into a conversation online with a few other American writers. Some were celebrating his fall. Some worried about the destructive power of #MeToo. Misogyny! Freedom!
The big words started to bother me. Why, I asked, should this be about anything more than poor editorial judgment? An editor is responsible for the facts and, in a personal essay, the emotional honesty of what he prints. Buruma hadn’t done his job.
Another writer, friends with Buruma, said he was concerned nonetheless about the dampening effect on public discourse. Buruma had always had a strong ethical compass, he pointed out. If someone like him couldn’t publish about #MeToo, then who was free to speak?
I agreed about his moral compass. Buruma was an ally who had worked at the NYRB to hold Trump to account. But did that mean we had to throw his case into the free-speech soup? I suspected he had been too eager to run the piece, had overridden others’ warnings. (Later the publisher of the NYRB stated that Buruma had “had cast longstanding editorial practice aside and excluded all the magazine’s female staff” from the reading process, showing the draft to only one other editor, a man.) A bad article is not the same as a risky stance. Couldn’t we keep those separate?
We agreed that that was the question. We didn’t have an answer.
Meanwhile it became clear how poorly Buruma understood the debate he’d entered. In Vrij Nederland he defended his decision: Ghomeshi, he emphasized, was not convicted. “It is absolutely not true that I do not have empathy for women who are mistreated or assaulted. But I also want to know: what happens when you are publicly pilloried on social media? That story had not been told.”
Yet that story has been told over and over, by women, who very often find themselves subject to online insults, threats, and campaigns of intimidation. The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, wrote an excellent book about it last year, Women and Power. Letter&Geest interviewed her on it, and I wrote about it here. The NYRB didn’t run a review.
Buruma’s first assertion is equally irrelevant. From the beginning the goal of #MeToo was to bring to light the actual events and lived experience of survivors of sexual abuse, in the face of men whose whole career as abusers was predicated on their being powerful and willing to lie. Unfortunately, acquittal in court often means little more than no witnesses and insufficient proof.
To see how an abuser works this to his advantage, just listen to America’s current president. In ‘Fear’ Bob Woodward quotes his advice on the subject: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women…. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”
It’s almost impossible for someone in the Netherlands to understand the effect on the body politic of a president who swims in lies like a predatory fish in a muddy lake. America is awash in grievance and paranoia. Trump turns all the news into a matter of opinion, and freedom of expression into a sludge in which the press is slowly going under. As NRC critic Thomas de Veen commented, a personal essay like Ghomeshi’s “is in practice almost a license to bend the facts to your own ends, because it’s ‘your story.’”
What America is suffering from is not a shortage of opinions, but a lack of solid ground.
Bad timing certainly abetted Buruma’s fall. As a writer, he’s known for being wary of strong emotions and extremist political positions. From such a reasonable point of view, though, it’s hard to comprehend just what a powder keg America is right now. Rights, including women’s rights, are under pressure. If women seem “hysterical” to you, it’s because we’re looking over your shoulder at everything that’s coming at us.
That includes Brett Kavanaugh, whose youthful assholery is being aired in public because we aren’t being told his judicial views, and because his apparent hostility to women’s rights isn’t enough by itself to keep the Senate from confirming him. Democrats are weaponizing #MeToo as a last defense against institutional sexism. It’s risky, desperate, destructive, but I’m right there with them.
The American Left (young people, women) is out for blood. So is the Right (old people, men). Even my calm, level-headed 80-year-old mother is breathing feminist fire. This situation is distorting everyone’s judgment, including mine. Including that of Buruma, who wanted to preach peace to the opposing armies and was left lying on the battlefield, a martyr to the ill-chosen free word.
No, I finally concluded, it’s not possible to see Buruma’s departure separately from larger questions of political anger and freedom of speech. But it’s not a threat to free speech, either. On the contrary: free speech thrives not on self-serving half-truths but on integrity, transparency, and accuracy.
The Left’s insistence on openness can seem dangerously Puritan. But in these days of Trumpian gaslighting, all I crave is the truth. And honestly? You can get lost with your fact-free contrary opinion.
Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797—let’s call it the second Monday in October—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he was walking on the coast in southwest England, became ill and stopped to rest at a remote farm. An image had been tugging at his attention, from a seventeenth-century traveler’s tale about China. In this unfamiliar house, in his delirious state, it unfolded in his mind into a beautiful vision, a city on a hill as it were, with a sacred river, a “stately pleasure dome,” and “twice five miles of fertile ground,” all surrounded with a wall and bending to the emperor’s decree.
But as Coleridge went on writing, the pleasure garden fell under a shadow…. read more at 4Columns
Jonathan Franzen is a little like Times Square, the Eiffel Tower, or a Dutch windmill. If you’re a local, you can protest all you want that he’s not the only sight worth seeing, that you know other, less touristy spots, that there’s more to our great country than this one monument that’s on all the postcards. The foreign visitors won’t be satisfied until they’ve been there.
There’s no getting around it: Franzen is a place of interest. His 2001 novel “The Corrections,” about the troubles of three adult children heading home to spend Christmas with their parents, was both a literary success and a bestseller. His next novel, “Freedom” (2010), was even more ambitious, dealing not only with an unhappy marriage but with environmental destruction, the Iraq War, the damaging effects of moral compromise, and the burden of too much liberty. “Freedom” was acclaimed for its ironic yet compelling style, its canny interpretation of the zeitgeist, the “majestic sweep” of its narrative. In Trouw, Rob Schouten praised Franzen’s “panoramic perspective” and his ability to interpret the condition humaine.
Reviewers and interviewers began to speak of a “Great American Novel.” Franzen became the first living writer in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine. At a time of postmodern experiment and declining interest in fiction, Franzen seemed like literature’s best hope of turning the tide.
Still, readers in America and the Netherlands are awaiting his new novel, “Purity,” with guarded anticipation. While critics prepare to discuss the book’s merits and reappraise Franzen’s role in the cultural conversation, a larger question keeps getting in the way. Is the figure of the “Great Writer” still relevant at all?
Franzen doesn’t fit the image of the literary alpha male. He’s not an old-fashioned, self-regarding titan like Norman Mailer or the Dutch “Big Three.” In interviews he’s more awkward than authoritative: part arrogant, part apologetic, often saying more than he means to. Last week in a Guardian interview he commented that he and his partner had thought briefly of adopting a child, partly to get in touch with young people. Clearly this was just one of thousands of thoughts that arise in Franzen’s fertile brain and occasionally escape through his mouth, but within hours his desire to adopt an “Iraqi war orphan,” torn from its self-mocking context, was being sneered at on social media while he was criticized for insensitivity. Even when he’s not saying something clumsy, his stature makes him a target for attacks, some of them from writers frustrated by the disparity in status between literary women and men. His clashes with the novelist Jennifer Weiner, who is annoyed that her books are classed as “women’s fiction” while his are “literature,” are legendary.
All this fuss and feuding masks another issue: the lack of a common voice in American letters. Maybe there never was one. The American literary scene is has long been relatively diverse, or at any rate more scattered, geographically, thematically, and demographically, than the more concentrated worlds of Amsterdam and London. The nearer you approach it, the wider the range of voices. Even Updike and Roth, who from a distance seem to tower over the rest, in America are just two buildings on a skyline.
One explanation for Franzen’s preeminence is that he’s still willing to defend the novel as a vital part of the culture. He believes there’s a need for books like “Freedom,” big sweeping social novels about the middle classes, politics, the family, love, how we give life meaning. In a 1996 essay in Harper’s magazine, full of youthful ambition and righteousness, he wrote that he longed for a time, lost between the rise of television and the death of serious reading, when novels had an impact on Western culture and spoke to the American soul in times of crisis. He wrote that he still had faith in the socially engaged novel in the mold of Dickens and Tolstoy, the novel of manners in the broadest sense, fiction that deals with social and familial bonds and asks: How do we live? How should we behave?
This type of novel has a particular appeal for Dutch readers. While Americans are susceptible to dreams, adventures and theatrics, the Dutch, it seems to me, are deeply concerned with questions of social and personal conscience. In a country where discussing moral choices comes so naturally, the dilemmas Franzen writes about in “Freedom” take on an extra appeal. The theme of too much freedom resonates even more for a generation that broke away from their parents’ bourgeois morality and let their children run wild, but never gave up their underlying faith in ethics and family ties.
Franzen has told us a lot about his own family, especially in the autobiographical pieces collected in “The Discomfort Zone” (2006). He was born in 1959, the youngest child of Scandinavian-American parents thoroughly devoted to the ideal of fitting in. Like so many people in the 1950s, Earl and Irene Franzen had escaped from unhappy Depression-era childhoods and sought contentment in “normal life.” The family lived in Webster Groves, Missouri, a prosperous, largely white suburb of St. Louis, the mirror image of troubled Ferguson across town. “I grew up in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class,” Franzen states, and in his career he’s struggled to understand his inexplicable discontent with the pleasant middle—the impossibility, for his whole generation, of embracing their parents’ values. “My mother seemed to me hideously conformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun,” he writes, looking back on himself as a confused teenager. “I’d been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them.”
He was burdened by a powerful intellect, a deep self-consciousness, and a strong sense of social justice. All these qualities were probably intensified by his four years at Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college that combines high academic standards with progressive inquiry and is better known for training professors than for nurturing artistic talent. His parents wouldn’t let him study English—they were hoping for engineering—so he found his way to literature by majoring in German. He graduated in 1981, married a fellow student in 1982, and published his first novel, “The Twenty-seventh City,” in 1988, when he was 29. The unhappiness of his ten-year marriage, and the pain of the breakup, color the mood of “Freedom.”
In essays and interviews he’s revealed a number of quirks about himself, often involving his restlessness, his shyness, his obsessive wrestling with the written word. When he was working on “The Corrections,” the book that became his breakthrough, he was so determined to concentrate that he wrote wearing earplugs and a blindfold. (“You can always find the ‘home’ keys on your computer,” he said in the New York Times. “They have little raised bumps.”) He still works on a laptop with no wi-fi card, to avoid distraction, and refuses to use any kind of social media. He told the Guardian: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”
Having left the mainstream Midwest, he has found it difficult to feel at home anywhere else. According to recent interviews, he has now given up New York to live full-time in a modest house in the hills overlooking the hippyish beach community of Santa Cruz, California. He lives there with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer who may be best known for her 2003 essay “Envy,” about how difficult it can be for a writer to live with another, more famous author. He and the late David Foster Wallace, who were friends, agreed that writing and reading were most of all “a way out of loneliness.”
A common critical objection to his writing is that it’s too digressive. “Franzen doesn’t always know when to stop,” Joost Zwagerman observed in an otherwise enthusiastic review of “Freedom” in Vrij Nederland. “You catch yourself wanting to skip over whole sections.” A more serious argument is that, despite the sweeping promise of titles like “Freedom” and “Purity,” he can’t always give significance to his subject matter. He seeks great truths in small incidents and ordinary people, but often they remain small and ordinary; in speaking for the bland middle of America, he isn’t able to raise it above its blandness. On some level Franzen doesn’t seem convinced that ten cents of human experience can ever become a quarter’s worth of meaning.
But the real problem with the hopes pinned on Franzen is that they’re absurd. At a reading in Amsterdam in 2010, Franzen told moderator Jan Donkers that he hated being asked about the Great American Novel; elsewhere he’s made it clear that he doesn’t believe in it. Nor, in their hearts, do most critics and readers. Not only is American literature diverse, the few remaining serious readers of fiction don’t seem to be looking for new Great Writers. As Joost de Vries wrote recently in De Groene Amsterdammer: “Writers don’t piss the farthest anymore.” The pissing contest has moved on.
In fact the great themes of Franzen’s writing are all about this change. No matter how big the writer’s ego, there’s no hill to play king of anymore, no literary monument. There’s only the glass mountain of the post-‘normal’ America.
* Harry Mulisch, Gerard Reve, and W.F. Hermans (and arguably a fourth, Hella S. Haasse) were the towering figures of 20th century Dutch letters. Dutch critics tend to grant similar status to Philip Roth and John Updike, sometimes adding Saul Bellow to make an American “Big Three.”
Trouw, August 28, 2015. Trouw wanted a profile of Jonathan Franzen to run as the lead story in the arts section just before “Purity” came out. So they asked their resident Franzen skeptic—although I found that the more I argued against seeing him as one of the Greats, the easier it was to like his writing.
The photo is by Watter Al Bahry.
It’s rare to find a woman writer who is directly inspired or enabled by her experience as a mother. Although I would like to believe that parents have a direct line to the deepest levels of human meaning, I suspect that most of the time parenting and writing, when they’re not actively interfering with each other, merely exist side by side.
Astrid Lindgren was an exception. She was a village girl, a farmer’s daughter, who left school at sixteen and went to work for the local newspaper. When she was eighteen her boss got her pregnant. It was 1926. She refused to marry him and refused to give up the baby. With tremendous courage she went to Stockholm, found a feminist lawyer who could help her have the baby in Copenhagen (at the only hospital in Scandinavia open to unwed mothers), and kept her son in foster care for three years until she could bring him home.
I’m sure this stubborn defiance is the origin of Pippi Longstocking, and that her struggle to live her own life is the source of Pippi’s anti-authoritarian attitude. In Pippi Longstocking the town authorities tell Pippi that, because she has no parents, she should be put in a “children’s home.” She replies that she already is: “I am a child and this is my home.”
I wrote about Astrid Lindgren for Flow Magazine #5, edited by Nina Siegal.
“What is art good for?” This question is often asked but seldom convincingly answered. It could be that the query itself doesn’t make much sense. What is sex good for? At a guess, humans don’t make art because it’s useful. We paint, write, read, look, listen, make music because it’s what we do. Imagination is built into the way we think; it’s our interface with the world and with each other.
Often the question “Why art?” really means something else, like “Do I have to pay for it?” “What’s its cash value?” or even “Whose ideology does it support?” These questions are not about art, but about greed and power.
Sometimes, though, the question arises from a feeling of powerlessness. Frustrated by work that demands too much of us, embarrassed to dislike a novel that has been much praised, overwhelmed by the sheer flood of new books pouring over us, we balk, we sulk, we throw out the arts section unread. By “we” of course I mean “me”: critics aren’t immune, on the contrary. A critic tries to sort the meaningful from the lightweight. But there are times when it feels there are an infinite number of monkeys generating books, and I’m one of a finite number of monkeys doomed to read through the pile.
Two recent books seek to remedy this sense that reading and looking at pictures is an unequal contest between the viewer and the work. They remind us of the joy of seeing something beautiful, the pleasure of losing oneself to a book, while claiming a role for art that can withstand even an individualistic, anti-intellectual climate. Art isn’t important because it criticizes society, confers higher social status, or stimulates thought. It matters because it’s good for your mental health.
Both books come out of the School of Life, a London institution co-founded by popular philosopher Alain de Botton, which attempts to use philosophy and the arts to help people cope with daily existence. In “Art as Therapy,” De Botton takes up painting and sculpture as tools for achieving emotional balance. Meanwhile, the authors of “The Novel Cure,” who give “bibliotherapy” courses at the School of Life, offer fiction as a resource for self-knowledge. Their light, lively approach will remind you of how much pleasure you’re missing, every moment when you don’t have a book in your hand.
De Botton and his co-writer, art historian John Armstrong, insist that art doesn’t have to be so dauntingly intellectual, that it’s all right to say how a painting makes you feel. Art, they write, can give us hope, create “balance,” teach us to see beauty, give suffering a place in our life, remind us of our mortality.
An artist can be a superior maker of snapshots, preserving a scene in memory by choosing just the right details, as Vermeer does in his “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.” He can show the way to a “playful and natural eroticism” (Sir Laurens Alma-Tadema), suggest that we enjoy life more (David Hockney), teach us “how to look with kinder and more alert eyes at the world about us” (beer cans sculpted in bronze by Jasper Johns).
For the amateur art-viewer it’s a liberating idea that art should please the viewer and not the artist’s vanity. There are problems, however. For one, De Botton and Armstrong write in a deadly serious tone that conflicts with their efforts to take art away from the experts. (All remaining humor and clarity in their prose has been mucked up beyond recognition by the five translators.) For another, as so often happens with a great plan, they take it too far.
When they say that London’s Tate Gallery should seek to “collect works that meet the psychological needs of the [British] nation,” I can live with that. If the message of a 15th-century Flemish image of Christ appearing to Mary is, as they say, to call your mother more often, why not?
But then they suggest dividing museums, not by period or provenance, but according to “the important rebalancing emotions encouraged by particular works”: there should be a gallery for Self-knowledge, Love, Fear, Compassion, Suffering, and so on. At this point every intellectual, history-loving bone in my body objects. “The Courtyard of a House in Delft” by Pieter de Hooch may have a lot to say about my life, and about how to “strengthen our capacity for (…) mature love.” (De Botton loves the universal “we” and “our.”) But surely it also has something to say about what it’s like to live in the 17th century, or to be Pieter de Hooch?
To become too serious about art (like sex), to try to say it is this or it is that, is to miss the point. The best way to respond to art and literature is to try to read or see intelligently, creatively, on every level on which you are capable of responding. (We critics like to think we can help.) And if you take a playful approach to your reading, at least that rules nothing out.
The well-read writers of the successful self-help guide to fiction “The Novel Cure” (in Dutch “De boekenapotheek”) have taken the critic’s job and transformed it into a cross between an advice column and a kind of advanced party game. From a broken heart to broken china, from apathy to xenophobia, whatever your problem, they can suggest a novel to read that will improve your situation—or at least let you know that someone else is in the same boat. Their belief in the power of reading is so strong that it’s infectious, making you once again view that heap of unread books as a garden of delight.
Some of their prescriptions are predictable, like “Madame Bovary” to cure adultery or W.F. Hermans’s “Onder professoren” to cope with envy. (The latter is a suggestion from Maarten Dessing, who adapted the book for Dutch readers with help from De Culturele Apotheek, a group of Dutch bibliotherapists who “hold office hours” in libraries and at literary festivals.) Some of the choices are more daring, like prescribing Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for an identity crisis, or “One Hundred Years of Solitude” for “death, fear of.”
In some cases the entries are more concerned with the ailment than with the book. Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” is the peg on which the authors hang a brief warning against procrastination. Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” occasions a lecture against selling your soul. In other essays the authors use the ailment to talk about a book’s literary merits—invariably making you long to pick up the book and (re)read it. If you suffer from nausea, they suggest, return to “Brideshead Revisited” and observe how Evelyn Waugh “uses repetition to maintain a state of measured equilibrium (…) Watch alliteration and overlap [carry] us forward in precise, dancer’s steps (…) while commas accommodate the fluency of flow and twirl. (…) This prose is a dance, and Waugh is the graceful, accomplished partner whisking us around the floor.”
The authors are open to a wide range of tastes, recommending classics, new books, nearly forgotten books that might deserve a revival. (Though “Stoner” doesn’t make their list, James Salter does.) They are by no means literary snobs, prescribing Westerns, science fiction, children’s books, and popular novels where necessary. But they are not averse to educating their readers, either. While prescribing Georges Perec’s wonderful “Life: A User’s Manual,” they add a brief explanation of the literary group to which Perec belonged, the lovably avant-garde writers who called themselves Oulipo.
The two British bibliotherapists, Ella Berthaud and Susan Elderkin, have put no Dutch writers on their list, and only one, Francophone Belgian, Georges Simenon. In the Dutch edition, their choices have been supplemented or replaced with Dutch and Flemish books. For some indispensable Dutch classics, new rubrics have been added, such as “know-it-all, being a” (“Max Havelaar”) and “parties, dislike of” (“Het leven is vurrukkulluk”). Unlike the English writers, the editors of the Dutch edition favor the 21st century over the 20th. They incorporate four novels by A.F.Th. van der Heijden and five by Renate Dorrestein, but just one Harry Mulisch, one Hugo Claus, one Hella Haasse, zero by Nooteboom, nil by Nescio.
For extras, the authors add sections discussing how to organize your books (alphabetically, chronologically, geographically by country of origin: “It doesn’t matter what system you choose; just have a system”). They give the ten best books to get your partner to read more—with separate lists for men and women. They tell you how to convert a non-reading partner—if all else fails, divorce may be the only option.
And they slyly defend their own discursive project with a quote from “Tristram Shandy,” Laurence Sterne’s incomparable, beloved oddity of 18th-century literature: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine. They are the life, the soul, of reading!”
Ultimately “The Novel Cure,” for all its appeal to the individual, is part of what seems to be a collective project: the growing and successful genre of books in praise of reading. We readers, feeling threatened, huddle around the campfire of books like “The Novel Cure,” feeling the warmth of its bookish zeal. Books like this haven’t been replaced by Internet reviews, book groups, and other forms of public reading. They only seem to create more demand. What is art for? For talking about. The authors of “The Novel Cure,” quoting Italo Calvino, say, “What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?”
To say that art is useful because it’s good for our mental health seems logical and benign, but there’s something narrow and profit-driven about it, too: you might as well say that art has value because it increases worker productivity. So it’s not the appeal to the individual that I like about “The Novel Cure,” but the parts where the authors argue for solidarity, complicity, reading as shared pleasure. I’ve always seen my work as a critic in that light: I don’t see myself as a therapist or a judge, but as a participant in a meaningful conversation.
Maybe for this reason I don’t see online reviews as a threat to the books and arts sections in the daily newspaper. To me, being a critic is about reading with curiosity and imagination. The more voices in the discussion, the better. But for that you need a forum, a space for debate—the very space the newspaper claims to provide. If newspaper editors say that readers are discussing books online, so we don’t need it in the papers, then what we’re saying is that there’s no room in the public discourse for talking about art. And that’s the same as saying you’ve given up on the imagination as a tool for human understanding—which is a pretty in-human state of affairs.
Trouw, December 21, 2013. Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy (Phaidon, 2013). Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, The Novel Cure: An A–Z of Literary Remedies (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013), De Boekenapotheek, translated by Hester Tollenaar and Roos van de Wardt, edited and supplemented by Maarten Dessing (Amsterdam, Podium, 2013).
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