It ran out of my arms and eyes like lightning

First, let me say that this is my favourite of all NYRB Classics book covers to date. The image (Susan Bower, Downhill in a Pram) is wonderfully eerie and funny and wicked all at once (kind of like the novel itself).

I'd love to recommend this book — The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer — but, honestly, I haven't the foggiest to whom. I suspect that those people who would find it engaging and relevant are also likely to find it emotionally difficult, and I'm not sure I want to wish that on anyone.

I took my time with this novel; 222 pages but it took me a couple weeks. Having reserved it for my commute (A Dance with Dragons is a bit cumbersome to be lugging about on the metro), I read it in 15-minute spurts here and there, and since I've spent several days working from home lately because of my knee injury, well, it took even longer. This book bears the distinction of having ruined my day, on at least two occasions. I'd come home fuming: I can't believe Jake, what a jerk! So it's a book that manages to spill its emotions over into real life.

We never know the narrator's name. She's on her fourth marriage and has a lot of children — we don't know how many, and Dinah's the only one of them with a name. And she wants another one.

The novel starts off on her therapist's couch, and through flashbacks and choice glimpses of her day-to-day, Mortimer touches on not only (obviously) marriage and motherhood, but also depression, (in)fidelity, sexuality, abortion, sterilization, death, fulfillment (all kinds), and the Cold War. Throw in some complicated relationships with her own parents. Oh, and the nature of happiness. Heavy stuff, but the voice is honest and witty.

Bear in mind that The Pumpkin Eater was originally published in 1962, and it still feels a bit scandalous. It reads a lot like Doris Lessing, and maybe a little bit like Sylvia Plath (but without so much hysterical exuberance).

I realized that for the first time in my life I could make love without danger. Danger? For the first time in my life I could make love. It was an amazing thought, as though I suddenly had the gift of tongues, the ability to fly. I could hardly contain my love, it ran out of my arms and eyes like lightning. "Be careful," Jake said, "You'll hurt yourself." I laughed till the tears came and it really did hurt. "You're crazy," Jake said. "What's the matter with you?" "Nothing. I love you. I've been such a fool."

This novel asks what more do people want — from marriage, from life, from other people. What more can you possible want when there isn't any more? This is it, it's all there is. Some people derive happiness from that; others...

It's said that we're born alone, and that we die alone. The fact of the matter is that ultimately, no matter how many lovers or children, or friends or parties or marriages, we also live alone, though some of us by our natures feel it more keenly than others, and some circumstances make it more keenly felt.

Reviews
– Daphne Merkin's introduction to the NYRB Classics reissue, in Slate
– NPR

I learned from Emily that this novel was made into a movie. The introduction confirms this (I tend to save these for last, as I've been burned a couple times, by if not exactly spoilers then too much information), and informs me that the screenplay was by no less than Harold Pinter. I'm betting it's worth looking up.

Restless as maggots

When Jake and I were first married — after the three eldest children had been taken away — we lived together in the evenings. Like actors, our lives began when the curtain went down. We ate and quarrelled and made love, cooked and drank and talked through the night, while the audience slept. Then, beginning with Dinah, the children began staying up later. They needed help with homework. They needed food. They needed conversation. They needed more and more of our lives. In a useless attempt to keep something for ourselves, we gave them bed-sitting rooms, television sets, new electric fires; but at eight o'clock, then nine o'clock, then ten o'clock they would be sitting in a patient row on the sofa preparing to talk to us or play games with us or perhaps just watch us, their eyes restless as maggots, expecting us to bring them up. My guilt and Jake's exasperation loaded the atmosphere until, to me, it became unbearable. But the children breathed it in placidly. There were now more great bored ones staying up in the evening than there were small, manageable ones asleep with their teeth cleaned. The nurse went off duty, as she called it, at half past seven, seldom failing to remark that she had had a twelve hour day. We went out, in order to be alone, to the great dirty pub on the corner, to the cinema, anywhere where we might be anonymous and behave, if necessary, unsuitably to our age and situation. That night, after I came home, there was no question of going out. We waited, with bad grace and burning impatience, for them to go to bed.

At last, lingeringly, with sad backward glances at the glorious day, they went. They could well look after themselves, but because I had been away I went about picking up socks, opening windows, telling them to hurry, tucking them in. Encouraged, they clung to my hand, each jealous of another, demanding to know about death and sex and other subjects which they hoped might interest me. When one of them pestered unduly, another would demand that I was left alone; when one of them called for me to go back and listen, another said crushingly, "You are a beast, can't you see she's tired." By the time I left Dinah, dazed by the possibility of a Supreme Being, my longing to be alone with Jake had cooled and hardened into a longing to forget, to postpone, to sleep.

— from The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer.

I'm guessing (with desperate hope that I am not alone) that anyone with children, no matter how many, will find something to relate to in this passage.