Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference

July 7, 2012
Reviews

In nearly every story in “The Beautiful Indifference,” Sarah Hall achieves a fine balance of language and subject matter. Sometimes the sentences are introverted and brooding, the setting ominous. Sometimes the words are as stubborn and glowering as the characters they describe. Hall finds beauty in unlikely places: in a sudden outburst of rage, or in “the smoke off the pyres and the pools on the abattoir floor.”

In “Butcher’s Perfume,” the powerful opening story of this collection, her mix of dialect words unknown to my dictionary (“gannan pride,” a “kessen moon”) and the crude language of modern youth lends power to her rural setting. You can hear that the people she describes, inhabitants of the remote north of England, are governed by their own rules: even their language refuses to toe the line.

Sarah Hall (Carlisle, 1974) grew up in Cumbria and likes to set her fiction there. It’s a place where the wild beauty of the Lake District, beloved of the Romantic poets, combines with a fierceness in the local character. On the embattled border with Scotland a history of violence lingers on the land. “This was where the raiders met, coming south or north. This was burnt-farm, red-river, raping territory. A landscape of torn skirts and hacked throats, where roofs were oiled and fired, and haylofts were used to kipper children.”

In “Butcher’s Perfume” Hall gives us a portrait of a family called the Slessors, a rich, rough, superstitious, horse-taming, gypsy-descended clan, “forged from the old rage of the north.” Their youngest daughter, Manda, is as fierce as any of them, with “eyes that got set off easily, like a dog (…) prone to attack for no other reason than that it catches you looking its way.” And yet her belligerence makes her beautiful: “it suited her, and she was lit up, the way someone plain looks better when they sing, when suddenly it seems they have bright colours under a dull wing.” The teenage narrator, Kathleen, is befriended by Manda, gets to know the Slessors, and watches as they punish cruelty to horses with their own harsh justice.

Hall likes to pick at the rough knot of people’s feelings for each other, unraveling strands of brutishness and grace. Animals play an important role in these stories, often serving to symbolize humans’ animal nature. In “Bees,” a woman emotionally stripped bare by a divorce moves from the north to London. The moment she arrives, her psyche “a red, essential thing,” seems to leave her: “It happened as you were getting off the train in Euston station (…) There was a sudden internal event, like cramp or a stroke, like waters breaking. Something rose up inside your chest. It split you open. It tugged itself through the walls of muscle, slid to the floor and moved off into the crowd.” Later she spots a fox slipping through the back gardens of London, embodying the easy self-assurance she hopes one day again to feel.

In the title story, the sight of a runaway horse shifts the balance of a romantic weekend. A woman has arranged a rendezvous in a northern town with her younger lover. Her women friends think she is using this impermanent affair to avoid commitment. But for her the “beautiful indifference” she feels in their casual relationship seems to be enough—until the sight of the wild, spooked beast causes her to acknowledge the frustration she harbors beneath her apparent detachment.

The book’s themes come together most obviously—almost too obviously—in “She Murdered Mortal He,” a ghost story set in a resort in an unnamed African country. An English couple come for a vacation but break up unexpectedly. The woman walks into the jungle, where her bewilderment and anger at her lover’s rejection seem to appear in animal form and take revenge. The story is atmospheric but the resolution unsurprising.

The same goes for “The Agency,” a tale of a fortyish professor’s wife who makes use of a male prostitution service. Although the story centers on the woman’s initial hesitation and we see nothing of what happens inside the “agency,” the story reads more like a sexual fantasy than a credible story.

Still, Hall is excellent at this length, and her writing seems more powerful than ever. In her earlier work she leaned on her literary predecessors. “The Electric Michelangelo” (2004), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, owes a debt to Sarah Waters’s “Tipping the Velvet.” “The Carhullan Army” (2007) flirts unsuccessfully with science fiction. But this new book is entirely her own—as is her sensuous, truculent northern voice.

 

Trouw, July 7, 2012. Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference (London: Faber, 2011). De prachtige onverschilligheid (Amsterdam: Anthos, 2012).

How to Review Books by Women

May 25, 2012
Essays

“The most enjoyable read since ‘Jane Eyre.’”

No books by women on the short list for the Libris Prize? If it’s any consolation, the gender gap in recognition isn’t just a problem in the Dutch literary world. In a much-discussed recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, American novelist Meg Wolitzer brought up yet again the question of the divided audience. While women read books by men, many men, consciously or unconsciously, leave out the books by women, as if literature were a checkerboard floor that they could cross by stepping on only one color of the squares.

If Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” with its female protagonist and emphasis on relationships, were written by a woman, how widely would it have been reviewed? Closer to home, if a woman wrote about the death of her child (as Anna Enquist did in her Libris-nominated “Contrapunt”), would she be awarded a major prize? A novel by a female author, Wolitzer writes, will seldom “make the leap onto the upper shelf where certain books, most of them written by men … are prominently displayed and admired.” Books by men, however domestic or small their subject, are always going to appear more significant than books by women. They have status. They have cachet. They’re the squares everyone wants to stand on.

Wolitzer wasn’t specifically unhappy about prizes: in the less conservative English-language literary world, awards like the Man Booker and the Pulitzer routinely go to women writers. She was talking about a whole process of “segregation,” from the images on book covers to bookseller categories like “women’s fiction” that act like a “men keep out” sign. One specific grievance was a set of statistics showing that in 2011 only about a quarter of all books, fiction and nonfiction, reviewed in major English and American publications were authored by women.

The same situation prevails in the Netherlands. NRC columnist Arjen Fortuin wrote that he’d counted his reviews for 2011 and discovered, to his embarrassment, that without noticing he’d appraised five works of fiction by women, twenty-three by men.

Don’t go blaming me. As English literature critic for Trouw I make a point of reviewing at least half books by women. But even then I’m starting to wonder: am I reviewing them right? What do men look for when they look for a book, and am I giving it to them? I reread my recent review of Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!,” a novel Wolitzer mentions as being popular among men. I could have been encouraging men to read it. Instead, I suspect I was subtly telling them not to bother.

I’d pitched the Russell book to my editor because a male friend of mine had said he liked her writing. I’d also been asked to write about Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder.” Reading the two novels back-to-back, I was struck by the way both used a journey into a tropical swamp as backdrop for an exploration of female sexuality. In Patchett’s book, a symbiotic group of plants and insects in the Amazon rain forest proves the ultimate fertility drug, in a narrative full of nightmare images of childbearing and fraught maternal relationships. (“Womb of Darkness,” I called it.) In Russell’s book, the unmapped waterways of the Florida Everglades stand for the turbid channels of the teenage heroine’s emotions.
Sex and pregnancy as a jungle? Pairing the books in a long double review I wrote,

It’s an old metaphor: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have taken up again to describe their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them ‘wetlands’: the sites of a fecundity and desire that women themselves must learn to navigate.

Okay.

Now I’ve never minded being icky in print, especially if it gets people’s attention. But I bet that any men who were still following me at that point weren’t encouraged to go out and read the books. The fact is, there’s plenty in both novels to keep a man entertained. “State of Wonder” is full of action. If it were a movie, it would be David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” crossed with “Avatar.”

“Swamplandia!” doesn’t only deal with a girl’s coming of age. Russell also confronts Florida’s dramatic history of ecological devastation and reflects on fathers, sons, and masculinity in contemporary America.
So what do I have to do to get men to take notice?

When I’m reviewing, I do tend to focus on women’s experience. Sometimes I’m deliberately compensating for the literary overemphasis on men. At other times I’m genuinely excited to read something new about women’s lives. It’s partly a question of ideology. In college in the 1980s, while the characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot” were reading Roland Barthes, I was reading the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey on the female gaze and the feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous on writing from the female subconscious. I read “forgotten” writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Jane Bowles. I read Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” in which she found in domestic arts like gardening a secret history of women’s creativity.

Along with a generation of writers and scholars, I set out to research women’s work and lives. I ended up writing a biography of an unknown woman writer, Alice Sheldon.

The irony is that Sheldon didn’t find her way as a writer until she started working under a man’s name. In the late 1960s, she began writing as “James Tiptree, Jr.,” using a masculine tone and settings. She didn’t adopt a male pseudonym just to be taken seriously; it was more complicated than that. But the effect of the pseudonym, and of the masculine voice she started using in her fiction, was that she was taken more seriously.

It was surprisingly simple for her to get men reading. She invented male characters who liked to fish. (Her husband liked to fish.) She gave them a hard-boiled voice and let them talk about machinery. For men, instant comfort zone. Even when she started writing about feminist subjects, men kept reading.

When I was working on the book, I got to know some of Tiptree’s male friends and colleagues. fans. I felt them looking over my shoulder as I wrote, and I tried to make the story accessible to them. I didn’t want to claim Sheldon for the women’s side. In the end, the book I thought was a feminist project found its way to a many-gendered readership. It’s something I’m proud of, that I was able to speak across and in between the lines of sex.

One thing I conclude from this is that the difference between what men read and what women read is actually much smaller than we think. I suspect men are actually pretty broad-minded when it comes to fiction. As Alice Sheldon discovered, it might take nothing more than a subtle shift of eye and voice to make them feel at home.

I looked back at my tone of voice in recent reviews. I know I tend to be cautious in my enthusiasm and stingy with my praise. I don’t like to go around saying that this or that book is a masterwork, the most enjoyable read since “Jane Eyre.” Sweeping statements aren’t my style. Frankly, life-changing books are few and far between; and besides, I like to give readers room to judge for themselves.

When I wrote about Lydia Davis, I see I talked about her “gentle yet penetrating insight”—weakening that masculine “penetrating” with a girlish “gentle.” I probably should have put more emphasis on her knockout prose style and the way she lets emotion carom off the obstacles of the intellect, as if she were constructing, not stories, but pinball machines of the soul.

What about Ali Smith’s “There but for the”? “Powerful thoughts about decency, kindness, and connection.…Profound, whimsical, and irresistible.” Rats, I probably knocked it out of the running with that “whimsical,” not to mention “decency” and “kindness”—definitely not the characteristics of a high-status read. I should have put more weight on the book’s outspoken politics, its enigmatic male central character, its Joycean intellectual fireworks.

An air of authority, that’s what I need. Here’s veteran critic Jan Donkers in NRC on David Vann, a much-acclaimed new talent who searches for his themes not in fetid swamps but in hard, cold Alaska. Donkers writes, “To this generation’s list of talented American writers, we can add a new name.… Vann again reveals himself to be a masterful writer whose precise prose seems carved from blocks of ice.”

This book is Big, is what this type of review says. (It’s amazing how that word “American,” as in “Great American Novel,” lends authority all by itself.) And there are clearly men for whom this kind of status matters. The same way they’ve got to drive the best car, drink the most expensive wine, or have the latest gadget, they have to read the newest, most advanced book, the one they heard about on last night’s talk show. Whether it’s about politics, money, football, family, or love, they’ll read it if the alpha male tells them to.

I’ve thought at times I wanted women to write differently. In an essay last year on Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” I wrote that one response to that book, among women writers, might be to go out and “dream bigger dreams, write in an ambitious style, quit wallowing in the comforting miseries of the domestic.”

But the truth is, the big-car, expensive-wine books by women are already there. Lionel Shriver, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Téa Obreht; and in the Netherlands Charlotte Mutsaers, Marjolein Februari, Marente de Moor, Renske de Greef, to name just a few—they all write books that entertain, impress, reveal secrets of contemporary life, and are guaranteed to add to your status if you mention them at parties.

Pretend I’m male, just for a minute. Pick a new byline for me: John Phillips? Julius? Stick a mustache on your mental image if that helps.

Ready? For all the ambitious women who have been dreaming bigger dreams for some time now, here goes. “Swamplandia!”: great American novel with tense scenes of wilderness survival. Ali Smith: devastatingly acute social criticism. Zadie Smith: the voice of multicultural authority. Alice Munro: sentences as polished as a butter knife—and your brain is the butter. Jennifer Egan: her musical taste is even better than yours.

Read them. They’ll make you a better man.

Trouw, May 25, 2012.

Patti Smith: Just Kids

April 24, 2012
Reviews

When twenty-year-old beatnik Patti Smith first moved to New York with Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket, she fell in love with a boy named Robert Mapplethorpe. Later she would become a rock star, he a provocative photographer who aestheticized the gay male body. But in the summer of 1967 he was an art student in hippie love beads, she a college dropout hoping to become a poet.

Two penniless seekers arrive in the city, meet, and vow to devote their lives to beauty. “Just Kids” is not a rock memoir so much as it is an irresistible story of bohemian partnership. The enormous appeal of Smith’s book—which in America was both a bestseller and a literary success, winning the National Book Award—lies in how it abandons all celebrity cynicism and takes us to the place where art begins.

They became famous separately, not together. Patti Smith (1946) released her first album, Horses, in 1975. It and her three subsequent albums were extremely influential, as much for their message and her persona as for the music. “Outside of society, that’s where I want to be,” she sang, and she wore ripped T-shirts and projected a wild, almost mystical charisma. In 1979 she abruptly left the stage and settled down in Detroit with musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, with whom she had two children. She returned to performing after his death in 1994.

Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) is best known for his portraits, his stylized, black-and-white male and female nudes, and his graphic pictures of the gay S&M scene. In his self-portraits he played with gay imagery, portraying himself as a sailor, a leather boy, or a pretty androgyne. In 1990 some of his photographs, labeled “obscene,” touched off a public controversy.

But when Mapplethorpe and Smith first moved in together, they were so poor they often couldn’t afford a whole meal: at Coney Island, he got the hotdog, she ate the sauerkraut. And they had other troubles, too. Smith was mourning the baby she had just given up for adoption. (She swears by Joan of Arc and her newborn child that she will make amends by “making something of herself.”) And Mapplethorpe was gay, though he wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge it.

Still, Smith writes, “One cannot imagine the mutual happiness we felt when we sat and drew together. We would get lost for hours. His ability to concentrate for long periods infected me, and I learned by his example, working side by side.”

Mapplethorpe loved in Smith the dreaminess, tomboyishness, and intelligence that the other kids had hated during her southern New Jersey childhood. He served as the first listener for her poetry and encouraged her to read it to an audience—the beginning of her performing career. It’s still rare for a woman artist to find a man who will support her and acknowledge her as his equal. To watch them performing the magical act of drawing out each other’s creative powers is deeply moving. Their love couldn’t last, but that didn’t matter. “I knew that one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then, nothing could tear us apart.”

When the two moved into the Chelsea Hotel, at the center of New York’s bohemian scene, in 1969, they were still a couple, although by then they both knew about Mapplethorpe’s sexuality. At the Chelsea, Smith got to know artists and performers from Janis Joplin to William Burroughs; Allen Ginsberg tried to pick her up, thinking she was a good-looking boy. Singer and producer Bobby Neuwirth, playwright Sam Shepard, and punk poet Jim Carroll were among Smith’s many lovers, friends and allies.

She and Mapplethorpe slept their way up, and so did everyone else, in a time and place where looks, love affairs, talent, and artistic persona were all inextricably mixed. It was part of what they had to do to create themselves—selves they could use in their art. In her performance and his self-portraits, they showed the way to new and necessary ways of being. She was a female Keith Richards in a man’s shirt and uncombed hair, he a gay man full of artistic machismo.

Smith ends the book in 1975, when her career was just getting started and Mapplethorpe, not a lover now but still a close friend, took the famous cover photo for Horses. Their paths had already begun to diverge. She always loved his work but was shocked by his S&M photos: “I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality….At times he seemed to be driving himself into a darker, more dangerous place.” An epilogue brings them back together just before Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS at the age of forty-two.

Smith has said before in interviews that her friend’s essence lay not in the life of sexual excess that he wound up leading, but in his artistic calling. “What does it mean to be called?…What kind of life does one have being called?” It’s this she’s tried to capture in “Just Kids,” and it’s here that she most brilliantly succeeds. In the process, she gives us a Patti Smith—passionate lover of poetry, acute observer of life—who’s more appealing, and more necessary, than ever.

Trouw, April 7, 2012

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

April 3, 2012
Articles

Adrienne Rich had immense formal skill as a poet. Combined with her wonderful ear for language, it gave her a rare ability to write poetry that is both beautiful and furious. Her lines at times hum with an anger so forceful it seems to generate static, as if the words are throwing sparks off the page.

It would be hard to overstate the influence this American poet and essayist has had on feminist thought—and on women writers and readers. In the title poem of her 1973 collection “Diving into the Wreck,” she portrays herself as a Cousteau searching for the submerged truth of women’s experience:

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

When she wrote “Of Woman Born” (1976), an exploration of motherhood and its distortion under patriarchy, Rich said, “The question But what was it like for women? was always in my mind.”

Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore. Her father, a university professor, expected greatness from his precocious daughter: he insisted that she show him her writing daily, then “criticized my poems for faulty technique and gave me books on rhyme and meter and form,” she recalled. For many years she struggled with his controlling influence. Yet his teaching paid off: in the year she graduated from Radcliffe, 1951, her first book was chosen by W.H. Auden for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series. She subsequently married Alfred Conrad, a divorced economist, in opposition to her parents’ wishes, and in 1955 had the first of her three children.

For the next several years, as a mother of infant sons, she often felt trapped. In 1958, the poet Robert Lowell wrote that she was “having a third baby—one that defied all preventative science—and…reading Simone de Beauvoir and bursting with benzedrine and emancipation.” De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” Rich later said, “talked about things that I had been half thinking but feeling no confirmation for.”

In 1961-62 she spent a year in Rotterdam, where her husband worked as an economist and she had a grant to study Dutch poetry. She translated Martinus Nijhoff, Leo Vroman, and Gerrit Achterberg, the latter with the help of the young poet Judith Herzberg. Herzberg recalls that Rich was full of life, impressively well-read, but also warm and convivial. In “To Judith, Taking Leave” (1962), Rich describes her pleasure in their conversation.

The two poets maintained a lifelong friendship—though years later, when they saw each other again, Herzberg worried that she would not be able to live up to Rich’s fierce convictions. But she recalls that her friend reassured her, saying, “You know, feminism can mean so many different things.”

In 1963 Rich published “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (translated into Dutch by Maaike Meijer), the first hint of her frustration with her housewife’s existence:

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Along with other poets in her circle—Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—she was beginning to put her own experience into her work. By the late sixties she and her husband had become radicalized and were holding anti-Vietnam fundraisers in their New York apartment. The couple separated in 1970. A few months later, Conrad committed suicide.

In 1976 Rich came out as a lesbian. At that time she began a relationship with the Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff, one that lasted until her death.

In the Dutch women’s movement, it was her feminist essays that had the most impact. “Of Woman Born” was widely discussed and highly influential. More controversial was her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in which she argued for lesbian love as an act of resistance against patriarchy.

In the 1980s she moved to Santa Cruz, California, in hopes that the warmer climate would improve her rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually left her barely able to walk. In her poetry and her life, her social conscience remained unswerving. In 1997 she refused to accept the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest arts award, from President Clinton. She wrote that it was wrong, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” for the government to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

She never quite lost the Dutch she had learned, and in the 1980s could still write a sweetly ungrammatical letter to her editors at the feminist publisher Sara. The Dutch feminist Anja Meulenbelt quotes from it on her website: “Ik verheug mij op kennis te maken met u. Maar omdat ik moet van Holland naar London vertrekken op 5 juni, het spijt me dat ik kan niet uw uitnodiging voor het avond 4 juni aannemen. (…) Ik probeer nog steeds een beetje Hollands te schreven, vergeef mijn fouten, alstublieft!” (“I look forward to make your acquaintance. But because I from Holland to London must leave on June 5, I apologize that cannot I accept your invitation for the evening June 4. (…) I’m trying to wrote a little Dutch still, please forgive my mistakes!”)

In 1971 Rich wrote that writers, especially women writers, had ahead of them “the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored.” She made of her poetry maps to find the way.

Rich died in Santa Cruz on March 27, from complications of rheumatoid arthritis.

Trouw, April 2, 2012.

Womb of Darkness: “Swamplandia!” and “State of Wonder”

February 25, 2012
Reviews

Fertility without end in the rain forest? Female sexuality as a swamp? It’s an old metaphor in male writing about women: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have begun using for their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them “wetlands”: the sites of a fecundity and desire that women themselves must learn to navigate. In “State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s latest novel, and in “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, we see women losing and finding themselves in the murky waterways of their own desires.

Ann Patchett’s Amazon adventure story clearly echoes “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novel in which the Englishman Marlow sails up the Congo River in search of a mad white trader, Mr. Kurtz. But this is not your father’s jungle. For Conrad, the wilderness stands for fear of the other and awareness of one’s own inhumanity. When Patchett makes the two main figures female and the object of their quest a fertility pill, she shifts the story’s ground: “Womb of Darkness,” if you will.

Marina Singh is a mild-mannered medical researcher working for a drug company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. She is 42, stubborn, solitary, devoted to her profession. Although her father was from India, she grew up in the American Midwest, her mother’s country, and has no desire to leave. In fact, she has “a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.”

Then, in the middle of a snowstorm, Marina’s boss—an older man with whom she is having a rather colorless affair—comes to her lab to tell her that her research partner is dead. Anders Eckman had traveled to the Amazon rain forest to search for the brilliant, eccentric scientist Dr. Annick Swenson. Now a brief letter from Swenson reports that Eckman has succumbed to a mysterious fever.

Everyone who reads knows what comes next: Marina, who never wanted to go into the rain forest, gets on a plane and heads for Brazil. There she will go on a psychological journey and settle a score with a figure from her past.

Patchett likes to create a slightly magical air in her books, and “State of Wonder,” like her earlier “Bel Canto,” weaves improbable events into a story of compelling beauty. But where “Bel Canto” was a meditation on the power of art, here Patchett uses her cool, elegant sentences to take us on a nightmarish exploration of flesh and the physical world.

The lost researcher in the rain forest, Annick Swenson, was Marina’s mentor in medical school until Marina made the gruesome mistake that ended her promising career as a gynecologist. Now Dr. Swenson is holed up in a village somewhere in Brazil, where she is doing research on a revolutionary medicine. She claims to have found a fountain of youth for female ovaries: a drug that will block or reverse menopause and allow pregnancy at any age.

On the surface, Patchett’s book is about the intense relationship between mentor and student, and for a long time the echoes of Conrad are only distant ones. As Marina works her way slowly from Minnesota to Manaus, we are introduced to a large cast of characters, about whom we learn a great deal—in some cases too much. They include various researchers, a deaf native child who attaches himself to Marina, and two Australian hippies who take her to the Manaus opera house in an homage to Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo.” At last, in the heart of the rain forest, Marina encounters Swenson, the novel’s most fascinating creation. She is a complex and arrogant authority figure, both rational scientist and Ur-mother, and in the best mad-scientist tradition she is testing her new medicine on herself.

The further upriver Marina goes, the more she slips the noose of white, masculine, corporate authority. A satellite phone given to her by her boss vanishes along with the rest of her luggage. She discards her antimalarial pills because they give her screaming nightmares of losing her father. By the time she has penetrated the mystery of the Amazonian ovaries she has lost even her clothes and, clad in a native woman’s shift, can pass for a member of the local tribe. Here Patchett seems to be borrowing from “Tarzan” or “Avatar” the idea that “going native” gives the hero special powers.

By the climax, Marina is killing giant snakes and chewing on hallucinogenic tree bark, and “State of Wonder” has stopped being a well-constructed and well-behaved thriller and turned into something more wild altogether. Patchett asks questions about the ethics of science and the nature of power, but there are other interesting images lurking in this book—ones that Patchett, alas, is too nice, or too embarrassed, to address. Childbirth as a horror story, mothers and non-mothers as aliens to one another? These are real nightmares, and they deserve a more thoroughly nightmarish treatment than “State of Wonder,” with its polished sentences and its surprise happy ending, is willing to give them.

Karen Russell, on the other hand, has no fear of the themes she raises. In “Swamplandia!,” the unmapped islands of the Florida Everglades are the site of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening. But this girl has lived all her life in the swamp, and though the territory can be dank and hostile, it feels to her like home.

The Bigtree family live on an island off the coast of Southwest Florida, where they own and operate Swamplandia!, “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area.” It’s a second-rate tourist trap with one star attraction: champion alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree.

Hilola runs the park along with Sam, known as the Chief; and their three teenage children, Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava, who help feed the alligators and train to join their mother in the show. The Bigtrees are fake Indians marketing the swamp experience, but 13-year-old Ava feels far more real than the “drylanders” who visit Swamplandia! “We stayed on the island past dusk; we waited until the moon rode up over the swamp and the only faces in the windows were our own,” she thinks. “I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers.” To her, the alligators are “creatures of the same mud we had grown up in, (…) our snouty cousins.”

But when Hilola dies of cancer, the park and the family fall apart. Kiwi flees to the mainland, where he takes a job with the rival attraction, a hell-themed amusement park called World of Darkness. Osceola starts believing she can communicate with the dead. And when Osceola disappears, 13-year-old Ava, the narrator of the story, undertakes a mysterious and frightening journey deep into the swamp in hopes of bringing her sister back from the underworld.

For Russell, the swamp serves as the outward representation of all Ava’s tumultuous teenage emotions. But unlike Patchett, she never makes the Everglades an alien place. Instead she shows it for what it is: a landscape of muddy, overgrown islands and twisting channels that is beautiful, inhospitable, and damaged by human intervention. Familiarity and strangeness are many-layered concepts in “Swamplandia!,” and Ava can find her way only by learning to distinguish reality from illusion.

Where Patchett’s novel is stylish in its writing and serious in its ethical concerns, Russell’s feels slight and rough around the edges. But “Swamplandia!” has a few things “State of Wonder” doesn’t: youthful energy, originality, humor (which holds up well in a fine translation by Theo Scholten), and a willingness to confront the dark side of sexuality. What to Patchett is both fascinating and repulsive is to the younger, more optimistic Russell something to wrestle with and win.

Field trip to the Everglades
Ann Patchett (1963) is the author of six novels, most recently “Run” (2007). She won the Orange Prize for “Bel Canto” (2001), about a group of South American terrorists who take an opera singer hostage. While writing “State of Wonder” Patchett spent ten days in the Peruvian jungle, which http://www.npr.org/2011/06/05/136863550/ann-patchett-journeys-to-the-amazon-with-wonder” target=”_blank”>she found both “gorgeous” and “oppressive.” She has no children.

Karen Russell (1981) took her inspiration for “Swamplandia!,” her first novel, in part from field trips she took to the Everglades when she was growing up in Miami. The history of the Everglades—including the 1928 hurricane that killed some 2,500 migrant farm workers, most of them black—also plays a role. The New York Times named “Swamplandia!” one of the ten best books of 2011.

Revised version of review in Trouw, Feb. 25, 2012. Ann Patchett, “State of Wonder” (New York: Harper, 2011). “Staat van verwondering” (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij,. 2012). Karen Russell, “Swamplandia!” (New York: Knopf, 2011; Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2012).

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

November 30, 2011
Reviews

Madeleine Hanna loves books. On the very first page of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides shows us her bookshelves, full of old-fashioned authors—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James—whose works are meant to mark her as both a serious reader and an “incurable romantic.” On the next few pages, we discover that Madeleine has just woken up in last night’s clothes, with a terrible hangover and a mysterious stain on her dress, on the morning of her college graduation. For the reader, it’s a promising begin.

In the less than promising year 1982, Madeleine is getting ready to leave the hothouse of an American university, with no job prospects in sight. To make things complicated, she’s in love with Leonard, a tall, dark, and handsome biologist, while Mitchell, a self-doubting student of philosophy, has his heart set on Madeleine.

Books ought to help Madeleine here, but she’s been learning in her English courses that the love story has lost its meaning. Her professor teaches her that the great subject of the 19th-century novel, courtship and marriage, is dead. “What would it matter whom [Austen’s] Emma married if she could file for separation later?”

Besides, the novel itself is dying. Madeleine’s classmates are busy reading literary theorists like Derrida and Eco, who claim that fiction has nothing left to say. Contemporary writers can never express an original emotion, they argue, because it will always come out like a line in an earlier book. “Books aren’t about ‘real life,’” a black-clad fellow student explains. “Books are about other books.”

So you have the 19th-century novel, with its tidy endings, and 20th-century literary theory, which encourages distrust for fiction’s illusion of order. Having juxtaposed the two, Eugenides then takes a third road. “The Marriage Plot” is a triangular love story with an open conclusion that takes place in a world of irony and no commitment.

Eugenides is an exuberant, inventive writer. His previous two books were “The Virgin Suicides,” a dark, moody coming-of-age novel, and “Middlesex,” a big, colorful, energetic saga about the American immigrant experience, forbidden and impossible loves, and youthful gender confusion. “The Marriage Plot” is equally concerned with young people on the brink of adulthood. It’s less fantastic than “Middlesex” and more intimate, but no less ambitious: Eugenides is out to defy the professors and philosophers by showing that the novel itself still matters.

“The Marriage Plot” follows its characters through college and into the first year afterward, as they try to make sense of their sexuality and begin their adult lives. Over her parents’ objections, Madeleine moves in with Leonard, drawn to his magnetic intensity. But Leonard suffers from manic depression, swinging drastically between charismatic brilliance and depressions that “colonized every cell of his body, a concentrate of anguish seemingly secreted, drip by drip, into his veins.” Through this character, apparently based in part on the late writer David Foster Wallace, Eugenides gives a harrowing depiction of bipolar illness.

Mitchell tries to find himself through travel. In Paris he clashes with Claire, a beautiful, furry-legged, Kristeva-reading feminist who criticizes him for opening a book by the “misogynist… murderer of wild animals” Ernest Hemingway. (Of all the book’s characters, Claire was to me the most endearingly, and embarrassingly, familiar.) In Calcutta, he meets other seekers for spiritual enlightenment but fails to find it for himself.

Scene by scene, the book is never less than appealing, but as a whole it feels a little flat. Madeleine in particular is a problem. She’s popular, conventional, “a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person.” Aside from love, there’s nothing she wants. And other than feeling sorry for Leonard, she has no moral depth; when she mistreats Mitchell she feels not a single pang of conscience.

In other words, she pales in comparison with the emotionally complex and subtly rebellious heroines of the books she studies. In fact, she’s the type of self-satisfied, pretty young woman that Austen and Eliot couldn’t stand: Elizabeth Bennet would have eaten her for breakfast. I suspect she started out her literary existence, not as a well-rounded character, but as an unattainable love object. To write a novel in which the love object, instead of the pining lover, is the main character is an interesting twist, but Eugenides doesn’t make it work.

Even the narrative feels as twitchy as a college kid strung out on reading and ego. It’s full of flashbacks and shifts in tone from serious to ironic, as if the author still can’t make up his mind what to think of his callow protagonists. Eugenides raises interesting questions about the uses of literature, religion, romance, and irony—not to mention the value of a college education. Then he shrugs his shoulders and lets the questions go unanswered. Ultimately “The Marriage Plot” is as charming and as trivial as its characters, these bright kids who believe they can live “real life” in quotation marks—but who secretly want to drop their ironic pose and fall in love.

 

Happily married

Jeffrey Eugenides (Detroit, 1960) has written only two previous novels, “The Virgin Suicides” (1993) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” (2001). In “The Marriage Plot” he takes a turn toward autobiography: the book is set at Brown University, the Ivy League college from which Eugenides graduated in 1982. Eugenides, like his character Mitchell, went to Calcutta to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying, with disappointing results. Unlike Mitchell, however, the author is happily married, has a daughter and lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.

Trouw, November 30, 2011. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: FSG, 2011).

Ali Smith: There but for the

November 5, 2011
Reviews

At an unsuccessful dinner party in an expensive house in Greenwich, London, a man named Miles excuses himself just before dessert, goes upstairs, and locks himself into the spare bedroom. When his hosts, a materialistic couple called Genevieve and Eric, discover him there, he declines to come out. He pushes a note through the crack: “Fine for water but will need food soon. Vegetarian, as you know. Thank you for your patience.” The hosts want to evict him but can’t bring themselves to break down their 18th century door.

The couple, Genevieve and Eric (Gen & Eric, “generic”), try to get Miles to leave by slipping packages of ham under the door. “You have no idea how awful this is for us,” Gen wails. “There is lovely, lovely furniture in there.” Nothing works. Eventually, Miles’s fame spreads. A crowd stations itself permanently outside the back window, acclaiming him as a sort of modern anchorite, a saint walled into his cell. Gen, making the best of a bad situation, starts selling souvenirs.

Postmodern literature, of the Jonathan Safran Foer/“Dog in the Night-Time” variety, is often characterized by gimmicks and tricks. In “There but for the” Ali Smith throws in the whole bag. She packs her narrative with puns and wordplay. (Each section, for instance, begins with one of the four words from the title.) She weaves in obscure knowledge about astronomy, English history, musicals of the 1930s, Dutch winners of the Eurovision Song Contest (“Ding-a-Dong,” 1975). She writes dialogue without quotation marks. Filling her story with facts and fragments, she takes the risk of driving her readers crazy.

Yet the result isn’t madness. Instead, Smith’s new book is sparkling, magical, and full of warmth and heart. If she plays intellectual games, it’s not to disrupt or deconstruct the narrative, but to help her get at emotional truths. She breaks the story into fragments to reflect our fragmented age, but between the pieces she slips in simple, powerful thoughts about decency, kindness, and connection.

Over the course of the novel, Smith shows us the enigmatic Miles through the eyes of four near strangers whose life he changes. (Another postmodernist trick: telling the story from several different points of view.) Anna remembers him as a 17-year-old boy who was kind to her on a school trip. She is now a single woman in her forties who has left her work at a “refugee processing centre” after her boss told her she had “just the right absent presence” for the job. Miles’s situation reminds her of illegal aliens hidden in trucks. But she also thinks “Knock-knock. Who’s there?” then considers it as an existential question. Who is she? What would it mean to be “there”?

The other narrators are Mark, a gay man in his sixties; May, an elderly housewife; and Brooke, Gen and Eric’s neighbor, an extremely precocious and talkative nine-year-old girl. (Yet another postmodern device: a narrator who is mentally peculiar.) At one time or another, Miles has eased their loneliness and shown them how to see things in a new light.

The story takes place in Greenwich and the Greenwich Observatory plays a role, letting the characters think about clocks, distance, boundaries, “the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there.” A local church dedicated to St. Alfege, an 11th-century martyr who was imprisoned by the Vikings and learned wisdom in his cell, lets Smith bring in themes of monasticism, spirituality and historical distance.

Even Smith’s silliest word games have metaphorical overtones, like the knock-knock jokes and the one about the man who invented the door knocker and was awarded the No-bell Prize. The translators can’t have had an easy job. (The Dutch text, by Irving Pardoen and Meindert Burger, is remarkably lively and readable under the circumstances, though not free from the usual sloppy mistakes.) Even the English title, “There but for the,” is a riddle, the first half of a saying: in full it’s the compassionate observation “There but for the grace of God go I.” For Smith, I think it translates to a moral imperative to look outside yourself—and to open your heart.

The connections between all these ideas can feel a little contrived at times, and Smith’s satire of two-earner complacency a bit heavy-handed. She makes up for it with an impressive control of her themes, and especially with a great gift for creating lovable characters with complex human hearts. That’s one difference between this new book and her 2005 novel “The Accidental.” That book was also about a stranger arriving in a household, as seen by the four members of the family who take her in. But those characters were unhappy, secretive people living false lives, while the characters in the new book are appealingly open to the world.

At the end, Miles explains to Brooke, the too-bright nine-year-old, that intelligence is a good thing. “But there’s no point in just having it. You have to know how to use it. […] Instead of being the cleverest, the thing to do is become a cleverist.” In her call for a wise use of all our resources, especially our brains, Smith has written a book that is profound, whimsical, and irresistible.

Trouw, Nov 5, 2011. Ali Smith, “There but for the” (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011). “Als niet dan zou” (Amsterdam, Mouria, 2011).

An Interview with A.S. Byatt

October 23, 2011
Interviews

To the novelist A.S. Byatt, studying history is partly a way of understanding her own time. “In many ways if you write a novel about the past,” she has said, “you find yourself saying more about the habits of mind of the present than if you take the present head on.”

In novels such as “Possession” and “The Children’s Book” Byatt has blown the dust off historical fiction and made it relevant. The historical novel, which has been associated with words like “escapism“ and “nostalgia,” has become a new way of looking at contemporary questions. In Dutch literature, where practitioners like Arthur Japin and Stefan Brijs have helped to revive historical fiction, history itself is the subject of renewed interest, as the Dutch retrieve their national identity from the dustbin.

As one of the best-known and most popular writers of serious historical fiction, Byatt is regularly asked to speak in the Netherlands. She gave the Huizinga Lecture in 2004 and received an honorary doctorate from Leiden in 2010. Last month, she gave a talk on “science and fiction” in a packed Aula of the University of Amsterdam. Saturday, at the Nacht van de Geschiedenis (“Night of History”), she will speak on the art of historical fiction.

What aspect of history is most on your mind right now?

I’m trying to research a novel which will begin at the end of the First World War and go as far as the Second. And it will have psychoanalysts in it, as a group, and Surrealists in it, as a group. It will take place in Germany, France, and England, so it’s already very ambitious. I have some of the characters now but not all of them.

One thing I’m looking at is tight groups of believers who frequently and systematically eject rebels or the inconvenient. Also I’m interested in the discovery of the unconscious. And how the First World War was behind the beginnings of some forms of psychoanalysis, and the wildness of the Surrealists.

So I sort of sit about reading biographies and history and making notes. The thing I’m looking at now is that a lot of both the Surrealists and the psychoanalysts were working with shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War. There’s a wonderful story about André Breton and Louis Aragon when they were working in a mental hospital. The patients were locked up inside, and Aragon and Breton sat down outside, on the landing, and read the poetry of Lautréamont to each other. And the patients came to the door and they said, “For god’s sake, we can’t stand this, it’s mad, stop reading this, go away!” I think the Surrealists really were madder in some ways.

When people write about the rise of the historical novel, I feel like what they’re really asking is, “May I? Am I allowed to like historical fiction?”

When I was a girl, historical fiction was very much romantic fiction. I read “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” Georgette Heyer, all those very stylized Regency romances. You wrote it and read it in order to lose yourself in it.

But I think the kind of historical fiction people are writing now is an attempt to understand. You know: we can find out who we are by finding out where we came from. I’ve now reached the point of researching the period when my parents were alive and I wasn’t. If I write this one I shall have gone from 1859 right through to about 2000, if you add all my books together.

I think there has been a huge change in the seriousness of historical fiction, a sort of sense that there are things that might be better to describe in a fiction than in a history—because in a history you get gaps. You can use fiction to find out the shape of the world a bit, just as much as if you were a historian.

I began “The Children’s Book,” for example, with an interest primarily in children and children’s writers. But one thing led to another. I researched the City of London because of a metaphor I was using about gold and silver, and found a whole new world – including the fact that no one there seems to have anticipated the outbreak of the First World War. I researched the fight for women’s education, and came to feel what it must have been like to be an intelligent, frustrated woman in those days. I found I was understanding the world which made my parents who they were – my mother was a working-class girl on a scholarship at Cambridge. I discovered the unexpected roots of many of my own pleasures and prejudices.

Historical fiction now often deals with the people who used to be left out of history: women, blacks, gays, the formerly colonized. There’s Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and Arthur Japin’s “The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi,” and “Possession.” Does that play a role in your current work?

As I said, I found great pleasure in researching the early days of women’s university education. But I am mistrustful of writers with a mission. My own inclination is always towards agnosticism – I begin writing with a thought and an image and look to see what I find.

The Dutch don’t really trust history, partly because they connect it to nationalism.

Yes. That’s one of the reasons I love the Dutch, because they’re not nationalistic. I remember talking to a Dutch person who said, you know, we haven’t got a literary history like you’ve got; and I blew up and said, but you’ve got a visual history infinitely more interesting than anything we’ve got.

And then you come across [Dutch] novels that are just about historical, like “The Assault” [by Harry Mulisch, partly set during World War II].

Does it count as historical if you lived through the period [as Mulisch did]?

The thing about Mulisch is that he’s got both the immediate experience and the distance that makes it history. And that makes it very, very interesting. I like that in a book, that kind of double focus.

Last night we went to an absolutely lovely restaurant called the Five Flies. And it’s sort of like Holland really. Someday I’ll write a short story about it. A waiter came and said, you are sitting under a self-portrait by Rembrandt. And here was this tiny, beautiful print of Rembrandt as a youngish man in his hat.

Then opposite us there were rows and rows of archive books. And we said, “What are those?” Because books always interest us. And they fetched them down after we’d finished the meal and showed us. There were press cuttings and letters written by Winston Churchill.

And so we asked, “How far back do they go?” And it turned out that the piece between 1939 and 1946 had been burnt. It’s gone. That piece of history is unacceptable. That’s a very Dutch way of dealing with it.

 

A Child of the 1950s

Antonia Susan Byatt (1936) published her first novel in 1964, but won fame, and the Booker Prize, with the 1990 novel “Possession.” Its plot of researchers discovering a hidden history has been much copied since—not least in “The Da Vinci Code.”

A child of the serious 1950s, Byatt had trouble with the 1960s, when her students—she was teaching literature to artists—rebelled by refusing to read at all. “In England I think the whole thing was particularly a nonsense,” she comments. “My little country was too comfortable and too small.” Her 2009 novel “The Children’s Book” is set among utopian socialists in the early 20th century, but her critique of the 1960s is not hard to read between the lines.

Her latest book, “Ragnarök,” a retelling of the Norse myths, will be published in translation in November by De Bezige Bij.

 

Trouw, October 22, 2011.

Clearing the Wilderness: Mary McCarthy’s “The Group”

June 18, 2011
Essays

The best-known section of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group” involves a young woman from a good family and a contraceptive device. Dottie has just lost her virginity to Dick, a drunken artist she does not love, and who does not love her. She has spent the night trying to work out the etiquette of sex. How does one undress, what to say over breakfast, what is the polite way to have an orgasm?

Then, just as she’s leaving, Dick tells her she should get fitted for a diaphragm. Here’s another question of manners: does this mean he wants to see her again? Dottie’s friend Kay’s husband Harald confirms that the request indicates commitment. “No man of honor,” he explains, “would expect a girl to put up the doctor’s fee, plus the price of the pessary and the jelly and the douche bag, unless he planned to sleep with her long enough for her to recover her investment.”

So Dottie boldly goes to a woman doctor, one of the early campaigners for birth control. Dottie feels she is in the presence of a hero of female sexuality. “To hear her talk on the subject of her lifelong mission was an honor, like touching the mantle of a prophet.”

But in practice, the doctor’s visit is just as awkward and embarrassing as Dottie’s “defloration.” Dottie struggles to insert the contraceptive. “Though she was usually good with her hands and well co-ordinated, she felt suddenly unnerved by the scrutiny of the doctor and the nurse, so exploratory and impersonal, like the doctor’s rubber glove. As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room.” Eventually, embarrassed by the whole business and stood up by Dick, she abandons the package under a park bench and goes back to her mother in Boston.

Universal themes are clearly in evidence here: self-deceit, loss of innocence, class differences (poor women are the doctor’s “real” patients), heroism and disappointment. But in the “Mad Men” era, when “The Group” first came out, many readers were merely horrified. McCarthy was fifty, one of America’s most sophisticated essayists and critics. Her wit and sublime literary style had made her widely respected at a time when few women were admitted to the literary top. “The Group” was funny, true, but why on earth was McCarthy mucking around with the most vulgar aspects of female experience? Was this the best we could hope for from women’s literature?

Readers ate it up. “The Group” spent two years on the best-seller list. The same women who devoured “The Feminine Mystique” and “The Golden Notebook” in the early Sixties recognized themselves in McCarthy’s young, educated women struggling to understand how to live. But many of McCarthy’s intellectual friends found it embarrassing. “The Group” made her famous but nearly destroyed her career.

In more recent years, “The Group” has acquired a new life, influencing a new generation of frank writers on female sexuality. When Candace Bushnell wrote “Sex and the City,” her own manual of sexual etiquette, she took her inspiration from McCarthy. For the book’s recent reissue in the UK, by the feminist press Virago (it has never been out of print in the US), Bushnell wrote a new foreword. All the themes that matter to modern women, she said, McCarthy had anticipated. “Sex before marriage, lousy men, career versus family—they’re all here.”

The British reissue inspired a new Dutch translation as well, and it couldn’t come at a more interesting time. This bothersome, discomfiting, embarrassingly honest book is the work of fiction that, more than any other, engages the question the Dutch literary world keeps asking itself. What is the proper subject of women’s writing?

“The Group” begins in 1933 with a wedding and ends seven years later with a funeral. In between, it tells the story of eight young graduates of Vassar, an academically rigorous, idealistic women’s college. Women were admitted to university in America earlier than in the Netherlands—Vassar was founded in 1861—but for a long time the young women of the upper classes emerged from four years of study with no clear future ahead. The eight women McCarthy portrays, all based on her college friends (and to a large extent on McCarthy herself), enter into the world of careers and marriage idealistic, talented, and utterly unprepared for reality.

There’s Kay, who marries an alcoholic, skirt-chasing playwright she foolishly believes is a genius. There’s the would-be writer Libby, who like many young women fails at her first job by trying to do it too well. There’s Priss, who marries a famous pediatrician and becomes a guinea pig for his child-rearing theories. McCarthy looks at each woman in turn, mixing their stories and their troubles in an almost soap-operatic soup. Because the overall theme is confusion, the individual themes are many. Male impotence, female orgasm and domestic violence are all mixed up together with toilet training, breastfeeding, bad housekeeping, and hostess gifts.

One objection to “The Group” is that McCarthy is so tediously obsessed with the women’s possessions. The characters all think about clothes, worry about wedding presents, decorate apartments, wear furs. (The Virago cover shows a woman in a leopard-skin coat, a detail that’s been fastidiously removed from the Dutch cover.) When I first read the book in my twenties, I found these women with their upper-class, empty-headed materialism unbearable.

Yet if “The Group” is a domestic book, it’s also an exceedingly political one. Everyone in it is constantly reading Marx and discussing the Soviet Union or the problem of housing the poor. Characters are identified by their political views: the ingénue Polly first realizes that her boyfriend Gus is a bad egg when he disagrees with her about the Moscow Trials. (He supports Stalin’s purges, while Polly, like McCarthy, is a lonely Trotskyite.) One of McCarthy’s points in “The Group” is how vulnerable the women are. They have emerged from college utterly unprepared for the social changes to come: economic crisis, war, the postwar shift toward greater class equality, the emancipation of blacks. McCarthy’s friend Robert Lowell, who understood this side of “The Group,” commented that the college graduates of his generation had been “ignorant, dependable little machines made to mow the lawn, then suddenly turned out to clear the wilderness.”

Her novel can be read almost as a work of social realism, like Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”—only instead of describing the living conditions of migrant workers, McCarthy was describing what women had to cope with. To understand women’s literature, she seems to be saying, you have to understand the physical conditions of women’s lives. Only when you know why Kay hated Dottie’s wedding gift and Norine Schmittlapp decorated her living room with a moth-eaten polar bear rug have you established a common frame of reference, so that you can begin to comprehend what women want.

At the same time, she does for women what Roth and Updike did for men. “The Golden Notebook” and “The Feminine Mystique” may have revealed middle-class women’s intellectual discontents. But “The Group” opens up to literature the whole world of women’s sexuality. And if women’s most intimate experience is slipperier and less straightforward than men’s, concealed beneath a thin but perceptible layer of breast milk, baby shit, and slowly drying semen, then writers and readers will just have to take that into account.

“The Group” opens doors for women writers. Fifty years later, we still don’t know what’s behind all of them. McCarthy herself is too devastating in her insight—and too good a literary stylist—to descend into the reassuring familiarity of “chick lit.” But her preoccupation with clothes, houses, food and drink can lead through one door to the reassuring kitsch of “Sex and the City” or “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Chick lit is the literature of women’s new rights: work, premarital sex, and disposable income. But its self-mocking tone is generally more comforting than subversive. One explanation for the popularity of Sarah Palin is that she’s essentially a chick lit character: other women can identify with her second-rateness and her mistakes. Even McCarthy (who would have torn Palin to shreds) indulges a little too often in a love of female failure.

Another direction is to continue looking for drama within four walls. Lionel Shriver and Rachel Cusk (“Arlington Park”) examine the oppressive nature of family bonds. Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy” is a novel in which the politics of race play out at the most intimate level.

Another, and the one women are still working at, is to dream bigger dreams, to write in an ambitious style, to quit wallowing in comforting miseries of the domestic. It’s this set of possibilities that women writers haven’t yet explored to the full. If McCarthy can no longer be our guide here, at least she gives one useful bit of advice. While it may not work in life, in literature honesty will get you everywhere.

 Trouw, June 18, 2011.