Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Siri Hustvedt’ category

Tuck and Hustvedt

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There is a stack of books on my desk glaring at me. Seven books to be exact. All deserving a much better review than I am about to give them. But in order to move forward – I’ve waited too long – here we go with a first round of bookish thoughts to clear away two books:

I read Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men almost in tandem with Lily Tuck’s I Married You for Happiness and so the two books are linked in my mind. There are some notable similarities between them. First, the timeline factor – Hustvedt’s book is about one single summer in the narrator’s life while Tuck’s is about a single night. Second, both books offer somewhat controversial endings. And third, both books are concerned with reviewing a marriage. I Married You for Happiness is about the night the narrator’s husband dies unexpectedly. She sits with him for that one night and thinks back over their thirty-some years together. For Hustvedt, narrator Mia’s “Summer Without Men” comes about because of her husband’s infidelity and so they separate for several months as each works out what has happened.

I discussed I Married You for Happiness with my book group last month, and the book improved upon discussion. I enjoyed the book on my own while reading it but I overall a little ambivalent. Much of what Nina, the narrator, remembers is unpleasant—the unhappy moments in her marriage, for example, or moments when she failed him or he failed her—and she paints her husband in a somewhat unfavorable light. Not that this is automatic grounds for my not liking the book. On the contrary, I liked the unexpected nature of what she chooses to remember and discuss and what it says about her and especially “our” expectations of a successful marriage. At the same time, however, Nina’s negativity distorts a little how I perceived and experienced her grieving.

In the book, Nina’s husband was a mathematician and Tuck uses this bit of information to filter the narrator’s memories through certain mathematical constructs and ideas. Albeit a tiny bit gimmicky, this was one of the most interesting parts of the book. I say gimmicky because I feel that certain scientific ideas (i.e. quantum physics) get a lot of play outside the realm of hard science and not always correctly. There is something very romantic about quantum physics and difficult math, but we don’t always understand exactly what we’re transposing into a metaphor used in another discipline. So I was wary of Tuck’s project in that sense, but I should say that she doesn’t ever go too far. Nina isn’t a mathematician or a physicist and she doesn’t understand much of what her husband often talked about. This is perhaps something she regrets; at least she is fixated on his inner life and how she negotiated it or matched it to hers at the moment of his death.

The science idea Tuck uses the most is Schrodinger’s dead/alive cat-in-the-box thought experiment, which is essentially about the nature of observation and reality. She does something interesting with this idea at the end of the book – a “trick” that certainly divided the opinions in my book group.

All in all, I Married You for Happiness is a thoughtful book and one worth revisiting in ten or twenty years time, for example. It will undoubtedly affect readers differently at different stages of their life and I like that. The mark of a good book. Tuck’s writing is also quite lovely—easy but elegant. The book reads quickly and yet contains much to think about.

Writing style seems to be a good enough bridge then to cross over to The Summer Without Men. Hustvedt is a different kind of writer, although she isn’t directly opposite in terms of style. Her prose is not dense, but it is a little thicker than Tuck’s. If I weren’t afraid it would sound too negative, I would call it more academic.

In any case, The Summer Without Men throws quite a challenge at the reader with its premise. Mia’s husband Boris (husband of thirty years) asks for a separation because he has fallen in love with a young woman and wants to explore this new development. This news is so shocking to Mia that she ends up in the hospital with a kind of psychic collapse, where she stays for a week or so before coming around and heading back to her hometown for the summer. The book then details her grieving (how else can you call it?) as well as the relationships she makes while there – with her aging mother and mother’s friends living at an old folks home, with a group of teenage girls to whom she teaches poetry and with her next door neighbor, a young mother with a possibly abusive husband.

As you can see, the book attempts to embrace a woman’s entire timeline. In this, I think, it is incredibly successful. Mia’s discoveries about the lives of the older, widowed women, her negotiations with the teenagers, her support from and to the young mother next door are all really well done. Of course all of this is framed against her own understanding of herself in relationship with Boris and what it means that he has thrown her off. There is a lot of feminist thought in The Summer Without Men and never does she offer any cute or easy answers.

Now, when I say that the premise is a challenge, I say it because of the narrator’s break down and hospitalization and the fact that her husband of forty years, knowing how she suffered, continued with his affair. I knew that the book would ultimately involve the question of reconciliation and I knew that if she went back to him, I would probably hate the book. I will not reveal what happens, nor will I say how I felt about the ending. The book is good enough for all the other reasons mentioned above to withstand what might be controversial about the ending.

 

 

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Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows of an American

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I have a special admiration for books that take on the emotional complexity of the human psyche, and then successfully and without melodrama, reveal something novel about personal interaction. Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American is a dense and thoughtful little book about a variety of human relationships – siblings, lovers, children to parents, friends, doctor to patient.

The book is about Erik, a divorced psychiatrist in New York, who becomes attached to the woman (and her child) who rent half of his house. The woman has a troubling relationship with the child’s father, an artist, who often pushes the boundaries of sane, rational behavior. Personal boundaries and emotional/mental health are big issues in this novel. The main story focuses on Erik, his work, his loneliness, his memories, but there are several other stories involving his widowed sister Inga (who was married to a famous writer) and his niece (who witnessed the fall of the twin towers).

One of the more subtle but very powerful stories in the novel revolves around Erik’s grief for his recently deceased father. A small mystery arises when Erik and his sister go through their father’s papers. I’m tempted to say that the mystery in and of itself becomes superfluous (and that would be an accurate statement) but it isn’t superfluous to what the novel has to say about grief, about its painful, disorienting perplexity. I appreciated the intricacy of Erik’s grief for a father he loved, but ultimately never understood or was able to be close with.

The dialogue in the book caught my attention. Hustvedt allows her characters to speak, really speak. Saying things to each other with actual substance. I believe this is often difficult to pull off, our reader’s ear finds falseness very quickly in dialogue that tries to sound too profound. Here is an example of what I mean, taken from a conversation in which Erik is speaking with his sister about his work:

“I miss the patients. It’s hard to describe, but when people are in desperate need, something falls away. The posing that’s part of the ordinary world vanishes, that How-are-you?-I’m-fine falseness.” I paused. “The patients might be raving or mute or even violent, but there’s an existential urgency to them that’s invigorating. You feel close to the raw truth of what human beings are.”

 I like the risk Erik takes in saying this. He’s admitting something about his emotional need to be exposed to the rawness of other people. This doesn’t come in the middle of a long, serious conversation. He says this a little out-of-the-blue while he and his sister are discussing something unrelated. I like the authenticity in that. Sometimes people say things like this, meaningful confessions in the midst of common conversation.

There were two elements of the novel, however, that kept me at a distance. The first was the narrative voice. This is such a difficult thing to quibble with…and I suppose Erik convinced me of his maleness by the end, but I couldn’t quite shake my original impression of the voice as distinctly female. Putting the book down and rereading the first pages helped (and I note that we learn Erik’s first name in the third paragraph, but somehow I managed to overlook this) but the shadow of a female narrator hovered over my entire experience with the book.

I dislike when this happens because I hate to think of myself as a prejudiced reader, one that assumes a female writer can only write in a female voice. Some of my favorite authors routinely write from the perspective of the opposite gender and I’ve never had any trouble with it. Now, on the other hand, I loved most of the other elements of the narrative voice.

The only other thing that niggled at me while I was reading was the sizeable amount of psychoanalytic theory or imagery. On the whole, I really enjoyed Erik’s thoughts about the mind and how fragile it is, but there were a lot of dreams in the book, most of which had quite in-your-face symbolism, and I’ve never found this revelatory in literature. Also, some of the “troubling” behaviors from the daughter of Erik’s renter were too facile. I believe that children under stress do exhibit behaviors which can be clarified and understood through a psychoanalytic lens, but in literature it often strikes me as contrived.

Despite these two small criticisms, I was overwhelmingly impressed with Hustvedt – the eloquence of the prose, the nuances of the characters, the dense but artful layering of the different stories.