Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary literature’

continuing the discussion on Roth

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Let’s continue this discussion on Roth because there have been a number of thoughtful comments made on my last post.

First, Mike raises a really interesting question.

Since an enormity of books written before 1960 (and much later in some instances) were overtly racist, do we stamp them all, fine lit, classic mysteries, humor, all of it, as shameful?

I think we could discuss the word ‘racist’ first, in the same way that I’d like to get down to the nitty gritty of the word ‘misogynist’. These are words that involve the notion of active contempt. Which I think is very important for this discussion.

First, I agree that most American literature written before the civil rights era did nothing but uphold the status quo so in that sense it simply reflected the inferior position of black Americans at that time. But I don’t think the good stuff, the stuff we study now, the big ‘greats’ actively promoted the inferiority of one culture vs. another. I could be wrong here and I’d love some input on this but I think the difference between active and passive is worth discussing. Yes, perhaps many of these writers could be faulted for including a passive acceptance of the racially imbalanced world they lived in, but an active, contemptuous promotion of racist attitudes seems much graver to me. But also much rarer. I am trying to think of an example of this among my repertoire of great American writers – McCullers, Wharton, Steinbeck, Twain….

I want to clarify one last thought on this. I would hope that in today’s world, where we have finally crawled out of our cave and at least pretended we agree that all cultures and all humans are equal, a writer would get called on the carpet for either passive or active racism.

Okay, so let’s go back to the word misogyny, a word I do not throw around lightly. If I’m reading Roth and identify this active, palpable contempt toward women, why does it matter? I do believe that literature is not meant to be Good, so why does it bother me so much? I think Jacob Russell’s excellent comment gets to the heart of this.

When a book goes wrong, what matters is aesthetics. When a good and experienced reader like you finds yourself drawn in, made to feel complicit in a failed moral universe–not because you recognize that you are, complicit in the world outside the fiction, (as can happen)… complicit in some comparable way–but because you cannot fully engage with the book without feeling as though you are being invited to confirm, not merely understand or sympathize with, but confirm what is vile and hateful–then I think the problem is aesthetic, a failure of aesthetic distance.

This is exactly true – Lolita is one of the best examples for comparison (I can assume The Kindly Ones is right up there – but I haven’t had the courage to read it yet), exactly because the reader is never asked to confirm what is vile and hateful. Humbert Humbert tries every trick in the book to get the reader to sympathize and understand, but never once to confirm.

Jacob continues: What is it then about the misogyny in Roth’s novels that breaches the aesthetic borders, that draws the reader in as a kind of enabler of his misogyny? Is there such a fault? Or has the reaction to the narrator’s attitude and behavior perhaps overwhelmed the reading, created a situational blindness to aesthetic elements that might redeem both the novel and the reader’s sensibilities?

I think that the misogyny in Roth’s novels breaches the aesthetic borders simply because it is not a part of the novel’s thematic project (like HH’s obsession for Lolita was the entire project of that novel). Roth’s misogyny is a side element, a part of the decoration, it is entirely beside the point of what else is going on. As far as I can tell, he isn’t exploring the idea of misogyny through his misogynistic characters and/or narrator. So the breach is huge, because it’s unintentional.

So that’s my answer to the first question, but the next bit is going to have me racing back to reread The Human Stain and perhaps take up a few more of Roth’s books because now I am curious whether my gut reaction to the narrator has created a situational blindness to any redeeming aesthetic elements. I’ve stated very boldly that Roth isn’t exploring the idea of misogyny in his writing but am I really sure? I haven’t read all of his stuff. Does anyone think he might be doing this? Exposing and critiquing the inherent misogyny in American culture? This has not been my experience with him, and I’ve never seen anyone claim this as one of his preoccupations. But I’m going back to the texts and I’ll be reading very carefully, very carefully….

And will be back with more thoughts!

thoughts on Philip Roth

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‘The work of a genius at full throttle’.

Generally, I hate blurbs like this on books and I can usually overlook them. But these lines, printed in eye-catching type on the bottom of my copy of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, keep coming back to me. And they don’t sit well. Despite his publishing success and the sheer breadth of his overall literary project, I am hesitant about granting Roth this label, mainly because I feel his work contains a fatal flaw.

He is a misogynistic writer and I find that this element of his work interferes with my appreciation of anything else he does. There is a difference between exposing social issues (a misogynistic character, for example) and colluding with them (a misogynistic narrator who is often not much more than a stand-in for Roth). Roth is hailed for his dissection of American life, and he does get into the nitty-gritty and often-unpleasant aspects of human behavior, something I usually applaud in literature, but I find that his portraits of male-female relationships are overwhelmingly caricatural. Yes, sex does come into the equation between men and women and their dealings with one another, but it isn’t the entire equation and it isn’t always such an ugly, angry, unbalanced equation.

I read an article about Roth over the weekend from The Guardian and it said this:

This perceived misogyny is seen in some circles as Roth’s Achilles’ heel, the ugly stain on his greatness. Like Bellow and Updike, he belongs to a generation of male authors whose coming of age predates the coming of modern feminism, and who share a tendency to create female characters who are either emasculaters or victims.

‘One must resist the urge to psychoanalyse,’ says Grant, ‘or to conflate Roth with his male creations, but the palpable sense of disgust towards the women characters has certainly intensified in these last great books. He has no problem with intellectual women, it’s their sexuality that he finds difficult. It’s deeply rooted, and almost medieval. But, it’s not a defect. It’s an element of who he is as a writer, and it does not for me diminish his greatness.’

At first, I found this description of Roth’s misogyny as an Achilles’ heel useful. An effective metaphor to remind me that perhaps I could separate the rest of his fictional gifts from this one, important flaw. And yet, I can’t. Imagine if Roth’s flaw ran in the direction of an incredibly powerful and compelling depiction of white supremacy or pedophilia. A writer with an obvious tendency toward inappropriate depictions of relationships between adults and children would not be considered a genius. And no one would say – it’s not a defect. It’s an element of who he is as a writer, and it does not for me diminish his greatness.

It does diminish his work for me. It impels me to dismiss a lot of what might be revelatory, because I become deeply suspicious of his capacity for insight, his ability to engage in objective critical exposure of other aspects of human nature.

K. B. Dixon – A Painter's Life

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K. B. Dixon’s novel A Painter’s Life is a portrait of the fictional artist Christopher Freeze created by blending purported journal excerpts, interview snippets and reviews. This collage technique seems a fitting medium to get at an understanding of an artist’s mind – their particular mix of public persona (necessitated by the public nature of their work) and private individual.

The novel has a definite patchwork quality, and yet much of the book’s thematic preoccupation centers on Freeze’s yearning to find some level of satisfaction with his painting, with the ongoing tension between artists and critics, with an artist’s conflict between their public and private persona and about the artistic temperament in general.

I found the most compelling aspects of the book came from the journal entries and especially those moments when Freeze mused on what art meant to him, how art functions and how his work, in particular, was a challenge.

I am working on a guest commentary for Moment, the local art mag. It looks like it’s going to be an argument in favor of beauty. It’s blasphemous. What I’m trying to say is that art doesn’t have to be diverting, but it can be if it wants to – and at no cost to its truthfulness – that we in the arts community should think about being a little more ecumenical I our biases.

He also discusses the problem of knowing too much about the artist and how it might skew a viewer’s interpretation of a particular piece. I find this true with both art and literature, there is a lot to be learned through biography, but sometimes it is also important to separate the artist and their work.

Spent an hour looking at a new Kinsley picture – The Sleeping Dancers. It’s big and beautiful and one of the best things I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I found myself wishing I didn’t know as much as I did about Kinsley though (for instance, that he is a religious fanatic – a cultist) because it kept getting in the way of my experiencing the thing. I found myself becoming suspicious of its simplicity – wondering if what I took to be a charming allusion to innocence might not be a cynical pandering to the theological base.

I enjoyed A Painter’s Life but it also frustrated me at moments. Mainly, I think, because it wasn’t enough of one thing or another. It heads in the direction of experimental literature, asking the reader to accept a lack of linear progression (the journal entries are not dated, and there are not many clues about their order) or unified narrative (in the sense that the reader is not given any clear picture of Freeze heading toward or away from one thing – he remains a static character for the entire book with the same wants and desires), but at the same time the novel follows a quite conventional structure. Each chapter options with a journalistic style blurb about Freeze and his life, and these move forward linearly, this is then followed by the undated journal excerpts and then each chapter concludes with samples from interviews or critical analysis of Freeze’s work.

I found the aesthetic of the undated journal entries a convincing and interesting method of creating this portrait, and I was willing to accept and even welcome their meandering until the opening and closing of each chapter made me wonder if I shouldn’t be looking for more connection between the three. Much of what was mentioned in the journalistic blurbs, for example, was never addressed by the journal entries. These blurbs tell the reader that Freeze struggled with excessive drinking, with psychological breakdown…but neither of those topics was ever explored within the journal entries except for some off-hand references Freeze makes about his therapist. I found that inconsistency weakened the novel’s overall project.

Dixon has several other novels. I’m particularly interested in his Andrew A – Z which looks like it pushes the experimental envelope as far as I wish A Painter’s Life had. This novel is again a character portrait but assembled from alphabetic entries on various words that Andrew himself comments on. I’ve ordered this one and look forward to reading it.

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Kamila Shamsie – Burnt Shadows

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It is rare to encounter a novel that is both historical as well as acutely contemporary. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows begins in Nagasaki in 1945, moves forward to India on the eve of British departure in 1947, then to Pakistan in 1982 and eventually to New York in 2001. The element linking these four geographic locations is Hiroko, a spirited and courageous Japanese woman with an incredible gift for languages and a sorrowful past.

The book has all the elements of a family saga but none of the tedious details which usually plague that genre. It is essentially the story of two families and how their lives intersect across fifty years of experience. Embedded inside that domestic narrative is a meditation on political violence and its effect on the individual and daily life. For many people political violence, or war, its most explicit form, is an abstract concept – something that occurs elsewhere. Burnt Shadows brings war and its hundreds of thousands of contingent ripples into a closer, personal focus.

Shamsie’s writing is also excellent. It has a strongly lyrical element – it’s clear Shamsie enjoys playing with language and rhythms – but it never goes too far, never trades a straightforward depiction of events for an impressionistic approach. And thankfully, because the book makes a lot of geographic jumps as well as shifts in point-of-view, the entire story is contained in a neat, airtight structure.

Aside from the writing, I think the reason I’m tempted to consider this book one of the best, if not the best read of 2009 is the way Shamsie builds toward her ending. There are several tragedies at work in this novel, the greatest of which is the ending, and when I finally realized a few pages from the end where Shamsie was heading, I was quite impressed. Part of me was screaming for her to change things, to make it work out differently, to wave her magic writer’s wand and make things better, but the rest of me was silently applauding her for forcing me to consider the truth contained in the book’s conclusion.

 

Alexander Trocchi – Young Adam

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Oneworld Classics, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishing programs, recently republished (2008) a novel by the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. The novel, Young Adam, was originally published in 1954 and features a highly-unreliable narrator named Joe.

Young Adam is divided into three parts and it isn’t until you turn the page to Part 2 that you realize that Joe has just spent eighty pages distracting you from the real story. The novel actually opens with Joe and his employer Leslie finding a dead woman floating in the river next to their barge. They fish her out, call the police, mull over the event a bit and then the novel changes direction completely, detailing Joe’s obsessed attempt to have an affair with Leslie’s wife.

But when Part 2 opens, you realize that Joe and the dead woman are much more intricately connected than he ever let on. And that the novel is actually about this relationship and Joe’s role in her death. You also realize that Joe’s interest in Leslie’s wife Ella dates from almost the exact moment the other woman’s body was removed from the river and that previous to that moment, he hadn’t much considered her worth his time. 

Although quite a short novel, Young Adam packs a bizarrely powerful punch. On the one hand, the writing is often awkward. Joe’s narrative style is as inconsistent as his fact-telling. He moves from a gentle, poetic lyricism to using stilted, clumsy sentences – often in the same paragraph. The introduction tells me that Trocchi did this on purpose, and links it to his proto-postmodern style. I must admit that it created a bumpy reading experience, although I eventually accepted this as part of Joe’s camouflage, a way to deceive or at least confuse the reader. On the other hand, Joe’s attempts to disentangle himself from the responsibility of the woman’s death are psychologically rich and complex and gave a lot of meat to this very slim story.

Joe’s relationship with the different women in the novel is where Trocchi seems to provide most of the analysis for Joe’s character. Joe is profoundly misogynistic. Although this may be oversimplifying things, since he also seems to be just as misanthropic. I couldn’t find an example of Joe enjoying the company of any other single person in the novel. But he uses the women in particular, which makes it easier to examine this aspect of his personality.

Trocchi is considered a member of the Beat generation and Young Adam reflects that tradition, although I found it much darker than other samples of Beat literature I’ve come across. I wonder if this is a cultural difference, since I often find that Europeans allow for a more cynical and somber worldview than Americans. In his literature, Trocchi seems to be experimenting with both form and content, but there is no joy, no heady giddiness in that experimentation.

In fact, it could be argued that his portrayal of sexual freedom results in a heartless, unfeeling situation where both partners are locked inside their own experience, without access to the other. If Trocchi was interested in exploring the Beat themes of rootlessness, non-conformity and free expression, his assessment of the power granted in that freedom seems overwhelmingly pessimistic.

 In total, Trocchi has ten novels, although it seems most of these are dismissed as experimental erotic fiction with little literary merit. His other “serious” novel, Cain’s Book, is a chronicle of heroin addiction and caused quite a sensation when it was first published in 1961. Apparently, critics are still undecided as to whether Young Adam or Cain’s Book should be considered his finest work. I’ll be interested to see what I think when I can get my hands on a copy.

a review up at The Quarterly Conversation

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I mentioned a while back that The Modern Library will be coming out in August with a long-awaited translation of one of my favorite novels – Amour, Colère et Folie by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Well, it’s time to start ordering people! The book is available directly from The Modern Library but can also be found on Amazon.

If you need any encouragement to sample this excellent offering of Haitian literature, check out my review of the book just up at The Quarterly Conversation.

Arnost Lustig – Lovely Green Eyes

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Back in early April I put together a list of books for a culture clash project but I’ve been very slow getting the project off the ground and just read the first of these titles over the weekend. However, my first book was definitely worth the wait – Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes (translated from Czech by Ewald Osers).

I don’t think I could have started this project with a more perfect (and unfortunately, by that I mean tragic) example of cultural conflict. Lustig’s novel is set during the last few months of WWII, at a military brothel in Poland, and describes the experiences of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who manages to exchange death at Auschwitz for life as a prostitute.

For a number of very obvious reasons, this was not an easy novel. The task Lustig set himself, if indeed that is how he conceived it, seems to have been to create a stunningly, achingly beautiful narrative out of a subject more suited for nightmare. The physical landscape of the novel is fashioned from a meticulous collection of horrific and specific detail – ash from the gas chambers at Auschwitz floating through a wintery sky, the scrapings and rustlings of rats in the brothel, a constant inventory of eye color and hair color, the visible signs and symptoms of malnutrition and chronic dysentery, the sounds of physical violence.

That landscape is bleak and cold and horrible, as it is meant to be. But Lustig takes great care to integrate an abundance of humanity to his narrative. Skinny, as she is called at the brothel, alternately condemns and forgives herself for choosing to become a prostitute to escape death. She wonders continually at her desire to survive – Is this a sin? Would it have been better to die?

Aside from Skinny, Lustig’s humanity comes from the faces and stories of the other prostitutes, from the Madam, even from the soldiers which arrive by truckload for the girls each day. One of the more fascinating expressions of Lustig’s vision comes from the juxtaposition of two officers who come for Skinny – Wehrmacht Captain Henschel and Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin from the Waffen-SS. Both of these men are her enemies, both would kill her on the spot if they suspected her true ethnicity. They are each a part of the vast and frightening Nazi machine, yet Lustig renders each so carefully, gives each a unique and complicated identity, they become one of the many faces of the war. Sarazin, in particular, presents an intricate portrait of Nazi psychosis.

Through Skinny’s encounters with these two officers, Lovely Green Eyes goes courageously deep into the psychology of what it meant to believe in the war from the German perspective and what it meant to understand that belief and know you were on the wrong side of it.

Of all the books on the Holocaust that I’ve read, this has to be one of the very best, along with George Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la Vie, which I felt treated the subject in a similar way – how do we live with the memory of a tragedy of this scale, on both a personal and more collective, or national, level?

Lustig has three other novels, all of which have been translated. His first novel, A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa, was published in 1974 and nominated for a National Book Award.

André Brink – The Rights of Desire

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Before I go back to Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, I’ll pause today to write about the book I finished last night, André Brink’s The Rights of Desire.

I mentioned earlier that I had some trouble with The Rights of Desire and I’d like to write about that, mainly because I’m still working out what exactly bothered me about this beautifully-written book. Certainly the writing was a pure pleasure to read, thoughtful sentences and precise but poetic description. The first-person narrator in The Rights of Desire reminded me of a John Banville narrator except less guarded and much less apologetic for any melodramatic expressions.

The story is simple – a widower living in Cape Town with a full-time but live-out housekeeper is forced by his two sons (who live far away) to take in a boarder as a sort of protection against illness, violence etc. He grudgingly agrees and then settles on a 29-year old woman, Tessa. The situation is made a little more complicated by the fact that the house is haunted by the spirit of a young slave woman, killed some 300 years earlier. The book accepts the presence of this ghost and so the reader must as well – the truth of her existence is never called into question, at least not as one of the book’s essential questions.

The book is about Ruben falling desperately in love with this young woman, and then spends its time in a kind of meditation on the ups and downs of their relationship. Ruben and Tessa are products of their respective generations. So in that sense they are presented as opposites – Tessa is sexually promiscuous, free with drugs, fairly irresponsible and burdened with a fatalistic, if not negative, outlook on the future. She is also full-of-life, unafraid and beautiful. Ruben is quiet, reserved, awkward with people he doesn’t know and represents a way of life no longer relevant to the contemporary situation he finds himself in. But he does appear to have a firmly anchored moral compass.

The situation in The Rights of Desire reminded me of something Nadine Gordimer took up in The House Gun – this idea that contemporary society has lost its purpose in a whirlwind of violence, that violence (both outward and inward) has become a means of expression for individuals of recent generations. And Brink explores this notion carefully and respectfully, without positing any easy answers or trying to solve what reveals to be a complex dilemma.

My fundamental criticism of the novel comes from the fact that I found Tessa unworthy of Ruben’s unconditional love and so as I was reading, a lot of the novel’s tension eroded out from under me. Right from the start, I could not understand what Ruben saw in this young woman and so why should I care so much about how much he cared for her. Everything about her persona was constructed – she lied consistently and manipulated Ruben (whether consciously or not) and Ruben was aware of this but somehow didn’t care. Their conversations seemed utterly one-sided and yet Ruben unequivocally declared that he’d met his soul mate.

I can easily see how a 66-year-old man could fall in love with this kind of 29-year-old woman for his own reasons (not saying there aren’t some exceptional and deserving 29-year olds out there, but this particular one was not) and so I tried to look at the book from this perspective. What was Brink trying to express about Ruben, and about this idea of consuming violence, through this lopsided relationship?

The story of the slave girl runs parallel, I think, to this. She was involved in a dangerously obsessive relationship with her master and now haunts the household as a kind of spy. Which is exactly how Ruben behaves with Tessa. So here are three individuals, exercising their “rights” of desire – Ruben in indulging his complicated lust for a woman who should technically be off limits, Tessa in accommodating her various lovers, and the ghost by reminding the entire household of the perilous undercurrents of passion.

I’ve always believed that rights come with responsibilities, at least from a socio-political perspective, and this is a book very much about South Africa’s socio-political brokenness. Looking at the novel this way, Ruben’s unbalanced relationship with Tessa and Tessa’s compulsive promiscuity are examples of a deeper collective distortion.

So despite my frustration with how Ruben’s attachment to Tessa is represented, I’m willing to believe it served a larger purpose and that it was actually meant to disturb me. Regardless, I’d like to look further into Brink – especially in relation to Gordimer and Coetzee.

Jean-Louis Fournier – Où on va, papa?

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For those of you who read my post from Friday, I did manage to get through Où on va, papa? over the weekend. It turned out to be a relatively smooth read once I could take some personal distance from the book. This was really the only way for me to read it – to take myself and my own intangible, half-defined worries about impending parenthood away from my reading experience. And really, I think Fournier’s story deserves to be treated on its own terms, without putting any of the reader in there. Eventually, as I read deeper into his experience and began to understand how difficult it must have been for him to write the book, there was simply no room left for any consideration about me. As it should be.

As I mentioned before, Où on va, papa? is a memoir about what it was like to raise his two mentally disabled sons. His honesty in terms of his experience is one of the most disarming elements of the book. A combination of anger, disappointment, guilt, frustration and a complicated love. There is humor in the book, but his humor is the uncomfortable kind, a humor of grief. He uses humor a bit like a weapon, a kind of protection. I think as long he says the worst thing first, no one can take him by surprise.

The book is really a collection of tiny little flashes, short reflections or anecdotes that move more or less chronologically from the birth of his first son, Mathieu, followed two years later by the shock of having a second son, Thomas, with essentially the same level of handicap. They eventually have a third child, although they considered terminating the pregnancy until a doctor advised them otherwise. The doctor actually tells them that having a third handicapped child won’t change much for them in the long run, but that the chance to have a normal child would mean they wouldn’t have ended on a failure. Can you imagine? Fournier tells this short story without condemning the doctor, yet I think it’s clear how he felt when you see how acidic his narration becomes and how he ends the anecdote with an uncomfortable joke:

Notre chance s’est appellé Marie, elle était normale et très jolie. C’était normal, on avait fait deux brouillons avant. Les médécins, au courant des antécédents, étaient rassurés. Deux jours après sa naissance, un pédiatre est venu voir notre fille. Il a examiné longuement son pied, puis, tout haut, il a dit, « On dirait qu’elle a un pied-bot… » Après un petit moment il a ajouté, « Non, je me suis trompé. » Il avait certainement dit ça pour rire.

[We named our non-failure Marie. She was normal and very pretty. Which was expected, we’d made two rough drafts first. The doctors, aware of our history, were reassured. Two days after she was born, a pediatrician came to see our daughter. He examined her foot for a long time, and then announced, “It looks like she has a club foot…” After a short moment he added, “No, I must be wrong.” He certainly said this to get a laugh.]

Some of the book is written like a conversation between Fournier and his two sons. It’s clear he harbors a huge amount of guilt for what he imagines their life must have been like. His oldest son, Matthieu, dies at the age of fifteen. His younger son, Thomas, fades away in an institution. Fournier can’t seem to forgive himself, or fate, for that matter, for putting the three of them through this difficult experience.

Où on va, papa doesn’t have little gems of wisdom for anyone in a difficult situation. It is intensely personal, avoids any and all platitudes, and doesn’t come to any satisfying emotional wrap-up. I can’t help approving of the honesty in that. There simply aren’t answers to most of Fournier’s questions.

I often think of memoir as a means to catharsis. I envision the writer sitting down at the end of his or her life, or after some significant experience, and going back over the details of what happened, mining that time period for what it taught them, what it brought to their understanding of their life and purpose. Fournier’s take on this exercise doesn’t come with any real sense of catharsis; it is so much more raw and unprocessed. Less a meditation on his experience and more a testament.

Just a last note to finish up, the rights for Où on va, papa? have been sold to an American publisher, so hopefully in the next year or so an English version will become available.   

 

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Nancy Horan – Loving Frank

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I’ve got politics on the brain these days and a large translation contract this week so I haven’t had as much time as I would usually have for keeping up with my reading projects. But never fear – I do manage to squeeze in a few hours here and there!

 

Last night my Swiss bookgroup met for a really involved discussion of Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank. I suppose I should admit right away that I did not love Loving Frank, but I didn’t dislike it either. What I did love was our discussion – so many questions, so many different opinions. Loving Frank is the retelling of an affair the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had with a woman named Mamah Borthwick at the turn of the century. The story is told from Mamah’s perspective and deals mostly with what happened to her personally, and intellectually, as the result of falling in love with someone other than her husband – and a famous someone to boot.

 

The book deals with the reality and consequences of infidelity and this is what fueled most of our discussion – especially because the story took place at a time when Mamah had little options for getting a divorce without ruining her own life as well as the lives of her children. Although I think most of us in the room enjoyed reading about Mamah’s struggle to assert her own intellectual and emotional identity, we all had a hard time understanding her willingness to abandon her children for a life with Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Our discussion went round and round but we ended up going back to one fundamental question – does motherhood trump everything else? Even selfhood? (I’d like to pose that question using the word parenthood, but Horan’s book is focused specifically on Mamah, and I think it’s also fair to say that men are unfortunately not held to same standards when it comes to involvement in their children’s lives.) The answer to that question is obviously entirely personal but it’s a hard one for me to sort through. Horan portrays Mamah’s husband as a kind, generous man who loved her. But he wasn’t an intellectual match for her and she was slowly suffocating in the life they lived. She had two children and she loved her children. Along came Frank Lloyd Wright (married with six children of his own) and her entire world turned upside down.

 

So is there a way to correct an error like that? Should Mamah have been punished for the rest of her life for choosing the wrong man? There is an interesting moment in the book when Wright receives a letter from his minister, urging him to return to his wife and children with the implication that it would be all right to keep Mamah as his mistress. And at least in the beginning of their affair, Mamah’s husband is willing to forgive her if she would only decide to come back. Is that the solution? Should she have stayed with her husband, continued some charade of a family unit and kept up her passionate affair with Wright on the side? Would that have been better for her children? Horan creates a Mamah who couldn’t do that – who wanted all or nothing but who ended up with all and nothing.

 

The ending of the book comes as a horrible surprise and if anyone knows the true story of what happened to Mamah Borthwick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Real life doesn’t ever follow a neatly packaged narrative and so the book is forced to strike out into territory that doesn’t have much to do with its central question. I couldn’t help being somewhat disappointed by that, even if I realize Horan was just trying to stay true to the facts. It’s just the book was written very much like a novel, so that sudden derailing seemed to significantly undermine what I felt was the heart of the story.

 

 

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