I'm reading Happy Are the Happy (Yasmina Reza) in the metro and feeling down, because it's cutting and harsh, if sharp. And I imagine somebody asking me what it's about, and I would say it's about husbands and wives, and mothers and sons, and lovers, and it's not about happiness at all, none of them are happy, everything is dissolving.
But maybe that's what it means to be happy: to dissolve, when the past and the future dissolve.
Apologize, she says. If she said Apologize in her normal voice, I might comply, but she whispers, she gives the word a colorless, atonal inflection I can't get past. I say, please. I remain calm. Please, I say mildly, and I see myself driving down a highway at top speed, stereo turned all the way up, and I'm listening to a song called "Sodade," a recent discovery I understand nothing of except for the solitude in the singer's voice and the word solitude itself, repeated countless times, even though I'm told sodade doesn't actually mean solitude, but nostalgia, absence, regret, spleen, so many intimate things that can't be shared, and all of them names for solitude, just as the personal shopping cart is a name for solitude, and so is the oil and vinegar aisle, and so is the man pleading with his wife under the fluorescent lights.
It was with unreasonable joy that I discovered the latest IKEA catalogue in my mailbox the other week. My daughter and I made an event of it.
But what keeps us coming back to this long-standing series, year after year, awaiting each new edition? Is it the characters? The narrative structure?
A German literary critic reviews the publication:
"Happiness is a super-comfy sofabed, a few side tables and a strong wifi connection." But happiness, according to Freud, was never intended in creation's plan as a permanent state.
"You're mistaking happiness for unhappiness. That's why the French are so melancholic. Everything beautiful makes them cry. They invented existentialism as an excuse not to love their wives."
— from The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O'Neill.
The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self — Not Just Your "Good Self — Drives Success and Fulfillment, by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, is not the sort of book I usually read. I'd call it pop psychology. Its tone was such that I was ever afraid of it veering toward self-help territory, but I think that's more an artefact of how it's marketed than the intent of the actual text.
It was given to me as a gift, because I've had a lot of dark looming up in my life lately, in both my home and work lives.
Its starting point is the American obsession with positive thinking: the right to the pursuit of happiness has been confused with an obligation to be happy, all the time.
I've been obsessed with the notion of happiness since I was in grade 7. Not that I wanted a direct path to it. I just wanted the idea of it defined. (Were we reading Brave New World?) I wanted to establish the difference between thinking you're happy and really being happy. Cuz goddamit I know there's a difference. And real happiness is an elusive, if not altogether imaginary, beast. I've known all my life that it is not possible to live in a state of constant joy. Contentment is another matter. Which is where the problem of definition comes in. In fact, for some 30+ years, I've been a proponent of happiness being just one aspect of living a full life. Which is what this book is about. (Gosh, I was a smart kid.)
So the fact is: people get angry, or sad, or bored, or frustrated, all the time. When we experience physical pain, we tend to take it seriously. But we're generally pretty dismissive of emotional pain and view it simply as wrong, without ever listening to what that pain is telling us about ourselves or our environment.
The upshot: it's OK to feel angry, sad, mean, selfish, whatever, in certain contexts, and it's better for us to acknowledge those feelings, even indulge them, than to mask them because we're supposed to be happy all the time. These "negative" feelings are shown to fuel creativity, heighten awareness, and enhance performance.
But you already knew that, right?
Regarding one study conducted in a workplace setting:
The take-home lesson is simple: do not create a culture based on the assumption that positivity must reign supreme. Instead, create a culture where everyone knows that it's safe to be real, and that depending on the situation it's sometimes better to feel something other than happiness.
I worked for a company some years ago where the gung-ho, go-get-'em, go-go-go all-American attitude just didn't fly with us Canadian counterparts. So I can see how HR departments could learn from this book, to build the right corporate culture for the right skills to flourish.
In addition, the book is full of little insights on sprawling topics, like:
Love is about adopting another person's perspective of the world, and when overvaluing your happiness gets in the way, it leads to unfortunate by-products such as loneliness.
And:
Research suggests that you, like everyone else, think that you are better than other human beings. This so-called better-than-average effect shows that most people believe that they are above average, which, of course, is a mathematical impossibility.[...] The average person lives inside a narcissistic bubble, a self-serving bias that gives most of us the confidence we need to face a complex and uncertain day.
So I don't think I learned anything, but the book is full of interesting research studies, and it's nice to have my intuitive thinking validated. A pleasant-enough way to while away a train ride on a wintry afternoon.
The amount of data humanity will collect while you're reading this book is five times greater than the amount that exists in the Library of Congress. Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes — which means we're never caught up with our lives.
"Finding what feels like real life, that changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection."
I apologize (to the cosmos) for my recent lack of presence. I have things to write about, but no time for writing. Melancholy has little to do with it, though there's some of that today. Sigh.
Clever people have been pointing out for a long time that happiness is like good health: when it's there, you don't notice it. But when the years have passed, how you do remember happiness, oh, how you do remember it!
Some books I'd ordered arrived yesterday. Coincidentally they're all Russian, setting off an olympic marathon of Russian literature.
I've yet to read past the first paragraph of Bulgakov's short story Morphine, but I love the design of this slim volume, the feel of it, it's whiteness, it's lightness, like a sheet of ice. Happiness.
I loved Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs. It's been a while since a book resonated with me in such a meaningful way.
I've recommended it to bunches of people, mostly women but not exclusively, but in one case I spontaneously advised, "But wait a few years, you're too young." I'm not one to prescribe reading, and certainly not on the basis of age, but I do believe that every book has its time and its place. The fact is: I read The Woman Upstairs now, being of a certain age and having faced certain disappointments, fumbling through some parts of my life and assessing my life in a different way than I did, say, ten years ago. [And! I will never have read Sylvia Plath as a teenager (but more on this in a future post, soon).]
Some call it a feminist novel; in some regards that's true, but mostly it's a human novel, about the anger that comes of betrayal, (and not, that I can see, by the patriarchy that is our society, but) by friends — people turning out not to be the people you thought they were, your mother also turning out not to be the person you thought she was (at least, having facets beyond those shown you), and life generally turning out not the way you thought it would. Doing what you thought was expected, and not only not getting the anticipated payoff, but discovering that you'd misconstrued those expectations from the beginning, or that those expectations of you hadn't ever existed outside your own head (OK, maybe that's more me, and less what's actually in the book). Still, it's not a scenario exclusive to women, though possibly women are more likely to fall victim to it. It's a midlife crisis, plain and simple, isn't it?
"Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through."
So Nora's mother told her.
The anger
There's the issue of Nora's anger. The book starts and ends with it. But there's very little of it in between, as she relates the events of five years previous. She talks about the anger that she would develop, but she is a relatively normal — and normally emotional — person. Which makes it all the more mystifying to me why an interviewer would comment that she wouldn't want Nora as a friend.
Nora does have friends who see her through her troubles — they are good friends to her.
Didi is more comfortable in her skin than anybody else I've ever known, and I've always felt that being friends with her makes me closer to the person I imagine myself to be: someone who doesn't care about all the wrong things, like money or fashion or status, but who ferrets out the genuinely interesting.
I'd love to have Nora as a friend. She's smart and feeling and interesting, if troubled.
The story
Basically, not a lot happens. A family comes into Nora's life, a new student of hers (third grade) and his parents — an artist and an academic — and she gets swept up and away by them. They awaken something in her, the possibility of a different kind of life. Nora is inspired and motivated by them, to resume doing her art in a meaningful way, to think of herself and fulfill her own needs while they reignite her interest in the world outside of her daily grind. Nora acts like a woman in love, and she is in love with this exotic family, both as a unit and individually. This may sound a little perverse when stated blankly (and in some summaries of the novel it's made to sound quite unnatural), but I think it's a reasonable way to describe the excitement, the rush, the flurry of activity, emotion, energy, when you make a new friend and are exposed to new things.
I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see.
Then there's a betrayal.
The problem of experience
This novel drives homes the point that shared experiences are experienced differently. For example, I recall some experiences from my childhood as greatly important, yet they barely registered with my mother or my siblings, if they remember them at all. And they speak of other events involving me in such a way that I wonder if I was even present. Or like how when you meet someone and it makes an impression on you, but at a subsequent encounter, the other person doesn't remember you at all — the event simply hadn't registered on them in the same way. This novel's all about that. An experience may be in common, but every perception of it is unique — filtered through individual knowledge, emotional makeup, bias. You can never get inside somebody else's head.
The art
Nora's art, previously relegated to the spare bedroom of her apartment, attended to on evenings and weekends, is upgraded to a studio, shared with her new friend Sirena. It strikes me that their art is almost exactly opposite.
Sirena creates installations, "lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse," and videos of people experiencing the installations, of "this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage." Sirena's work requires wild abandon. She is fashioning Wonderland.
Nora envisions a series of dioramas, tiny replicas, of Emily Dickinson's Amherst bedroom, Virginia Woolf at Rodmell, the sanatorium suicide ward of Alice Neel, Edie Sedgwick's room in Warhol's Factory. Dollhouses. They require painstaking detail. Yet despite the gloom of these personalities, Nora insists that Joy has a place in their rooms. For example, for Alice Neel, Nora wanted the colors of the future, "in the interstices, outside the windows, high up the walls, like shoots coming up through the earth, the promise of spring."
Of course, Sirena's work has critical and popular acclaim, while Nora's is unseen, unknown, small. And which of these artistic attitudes is the prevailing outlook out in the world?
Possibly Sirena's vision has been corrupted by the business of art. Possibly Nora's art is purer.
You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you're reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch — and then briefly it's as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above — a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes.
This novel's like that.
Lucy Jordan
Messud weaves the theme of the Ballad of Lucy Jordan throughout the novel. Nora associates Lucy Jordan with her mother, with what she knows of her mother, with the person she believed her mother to be. And clearly Nora is experiencing her own Lucy Jordan moment. "At the age of thirty-seven, she realized..."
We're left to wonder about the tragedy of never having gone to Paris, versus the tragedy of having gone to Paris. But I like to believe there is still Joy in the room.
Fifteen pages into Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, and wow — I am thoroughly wowed. I love this narrator, this angry woman, forty-two years old ("which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one"), single and childless, a grade-school art teacher. She's angry, on fire, and real.
I haven't read Claire Messud before, but I've been meaning to for years, and I had my on this book for months before it was released. I don't go looking for review copies much anymore, as I still seem to get far more than I can reasonably cope with, but when I read the Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud, I needed to get my hands on a copy as quickly as possible, so I asked the publisher.
The relevant, goat-getting bit of the interview:
I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.
For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? [...] If you’re reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn't "is this a potential friend for me?" but "is this character alive?"
The fury of being a woman
What strikes me from the opening pages of the novel is that Nora is genuine. Messud gets her, maybe she is her, certainly she knows women like her. It's like Messud has peered inside my head and extracted bits from the dark corners. I mean dark.
The voice, the character, is shaping up to be uncomfortably honest. In this sense, she reminds me a little of Lionel Shriver's Eva Khatchadourian (We Need to Talk About Kevin), admitting to thoughts and feelings that women aren't supposed to have.
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.
Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish.
The failure of vision
There's this bit about failure, which was truly eye-opening for me. Nora feels like she's failed, and so do I, in the sense that our current situation is measured against some once-imagined situation. Or rather, against several possible variations of a vision. Too many possibilities. Too much imagination.
She (Nora, or Messud) contrasts this with the type of success men are particularly good at.
Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: is is focused only on one thing, whether it's on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It's a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It's myopia. But that's what it takes. You need to see everything else — everyone else — as expendable, as less than yourself.
As if to say, my visions, my ambitions, have too many superfluous details. I must learn to pare them down to their essence.
The point is that these characters aren't real, even the ones wrought by a master like Updike. What is naïve and blinkered is the insistence that fictional characters be held to the same moral and behavioral standards we expect of our friends. It seems to me that part of the point of literature is to enlighten and expand, and there are few pleasures in fiction that expand our consciousness further than getting to observe the world from the perspective of characters so different from us, so thoroughly flawed, that if we were to encounter them in real life we wouldn't like them very much.
I disagree. On several points.
Of course fictional characters aren't actually real, but they are, most of them. They reflect some reality out there in the real world. If they didn't, we would dismiss all reading as purely escapist.
The problem is that we do not hold our friends to the same moral and behavioral standards by which we pass judgment on fictional characters. For two reasons:
We lack the moral rectitude to actually call our friends out on their shortcomings. It wouldn't be polite, they might not like us anymore. We are far more willing to forgive real people than fictional characters, not because we are compassionate creatures but because we are morally lazy. On the other hand, it's really easy to judge a book.
We don't know our friends nearly as well as we know fictional characters. Friends share with you only what they want to share. But when you live inside someone's head for a week or two, you discover all sorts of things about them, even unpalatable things they might rather wish the author had never divulged to us. With fictional characters we often have more information, more background, more insight — more evidence by which to condemn them.
Nora Eldridge is alive, and more real than some of my friends sometimes appear to be! The first 15 pages of this novel are fantastic! I'll let you know how the rest of it holds up.
My mother was unquestionably happy. Her bright, creative spirit, overflowing with love for mankind, floated and soared above us all, though she often said that "happiness — is when there's so much to do there's no time to think."
— from Bro, first book of Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin.
I'm in a bit of reading funk lately, and I'm acquiring books (including Sorokin's Ice Trilogy) that I feel I'm not yet at liberty to read — there's the kid's project I have to monitor, and I have my own project going on, and taxes still to file, and work, and. I have been reading Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, but it's dense, and long (and I've been reading it on my phone, for some strange reason, and that feels all wrong, yet I persist).
I have time to neither read nor think, and I'm not happy about it, Mr Sorokin.
These were the happy people of the world. They were amusing themselves. They had done nothing to deserve happiness, but they were happy. Or, what is the same thing, they thought they were. And is not the formula of oriental happiness to do nothing?
I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and become slightly less happy.
