This novel drives home for me that my reviews here on goodreads aren't in any way recommendations to read, or not to read a given book. They are just This novel drives home for me that my reviews here on goodreads aren't in any way recommendations to read, or not to read a given book. They are just my thoughts about what a book has meant to me.
Here is a novel where I can see the merit on every page. The novel is thoughtful and full of surprises and new revelations, and it even has a thesis or two about women and creativity, and how creative women survive, or not, in a repressive patriarchal world.
But here's what happened to me when I read it. I felt no connection, as I read, with the mind and works of the women I was reading about. Late in the book I realized that there is almost no attempt in the book to enter the interior mind of any of these women--the story trots along from one exterior fact to the next. It feels like a missed opportunity. It leaves each woman a cypher on the page.
I think, in this way, that Schwartz's nonfiction roots for the novel show through--she doesn't allow herself to speculate beyond what can be observed from the outside of each historical figure she surveys. Surely any novel with Virginia Woolf as a character would venture inside her mind and give her passages a rhythm not unlike what Michael Cunningham imagined for his modern Mrs. Dalloway? In some passages the women's voices join in a sort of greek chorus, or to answer one another wittily, but I was more interested in the solitary interior truth of each of these women.
Fiction allows you to speculate about what someone was like on the inside, and to take the most intimate and audacious liberties about what people think and how they feel. Another reader will love the novel for exactly what it does so well and be glad it doesn't do what I'm craving for it to do....more
Here is one of a string of books I've read lately that exquisitely accomplish what they set out to do, and yet leave me feeling dissatisfied and troubHere is one of a string of books I've read lately that exquisitely accomplish what they set out to do, and yet leave me feeling dissatisfied and troubled.
I'm wondering why this novel was something Pheby felt compelled to write in the first place. Over and over again I read about horrific abuses being done to Lucia Joyce, written from the point of view of a man who is abusing her, including her brother and her father and her passing-lovers and her caregivers at the institution. It's a disturbing experience.
And I'm not sure how I feel about the absolute requirement put on the reader to research and to understand the swirl of fact and rumor surrounding Lucia Joyce, if you want to make any sense at all of what is written here. For instance, at the beginning there is a scene of a man burning letters. I get the idea of someone being erased, but it's all very oblique without the context, without knowing that Lucia Joyce's letters and papers were destroyed by the Joyce estate.
Most of all I'm troubled that Lucia Joyce is silenced in this book just as surely as she was in life. Pheby has talked in interviews about his moral choice to not act as a "ventriloquist" for Lucia--he felt that would be disrespectful to her, especially since he is a man. But the result of his moral choice is the sense that Lucia Joyce has no inner life or agency at all.
So I fully admire the exquisite craft of this novel, while at the same time wondering if I should have let the novel into my head at all....more
A lot of stuff happens. The novel is somewhat Garp-like in the way it is stuffed with events. Even so it felt cold to me. For me there is a good deal A lot of stuff happens. The novel is somewhat Garp-like in the way it is stuffed with events. Even so it felt cold to me. For me there is a good deal less connection to humanity in this novel than there should be; the characters felt manipulated like chess pieces in a game without rules. The characters in Larsen's novels feel driven by the first creative thought that came into the author's admittedly creative brain, rather than by any intrinsic need of the story's. I consistently related to John Irving's Garp characters, however outrageously drawn and however ridiculously exaggerated the plot became, and I don't feel similarly connected to human happenings in the case of Radar's equally event-filled story....more
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