The vastness of confinement

I remember what's not here. An island of men who are searching for beauty and find it only in the vastness of confinement. I admit I'm sadistic. I'm always saying that nothing is possible without the soul, just as no image is possible without its other. But I have no other. I have no soul. A young lover once promised to write the fatal sign on my womb and take me away with him to fertile lands. What became of him? That night is a hundred thousand nights ago and that lover is lost. I'm still waiting for him to appear among the smoky spirals that emerge from my mouth. I've had a series of smells burnt into me: a pair of hands in the twilight, the soft skin of somebody's back, a bewitched throat. Then it was over, and they were all gone. I'm still a witch who's waiting to cast spells. Our neighbour died of a heroin overdose with his baby in his arms. The woman in the house with the boarded-up windows suffocated on the smoke of her own fire. The animals die out before reproducing. That's what death looks like in these parts. Whereas my sun-soaked nights on the island were filled with stimulating chats, daydreams, furious kisses. Whereas in those golden years of my life, everything was an ecstasy of sexual reawakening. A wave of antipathy to the world wells up from deep within me. I don't know what these animals are up to. They're forming a circle around me and watching me, dumbfounded, their jaws practically unhinged from their bodies. I fall to my knees before them. If a local were to pass by now, basket in hand, gathering mushrooms and berries, they'd think this was some kind of pagan ritual.

I ordered this book for myself in the early pandemic days, I'd read a review, maybe this one, and I thought, perfect, a book about a woman who's dying inside, a victim(?) of all-consuming lust, that's relatable, I wonder how she takes it out on her world, does she interact with her world?, but by the time the book arrived it seemed like too heavy a read, maybe I'd found a way to cope with objectless lust by then, and later I was too happy, then too fragile, but lately was just right for it.

Reading Die, My Love, by Ariana Harwicz, is a descent into the maelstrom.

Not even digging a hole, a pit, would be enough. It needs to be thrown into the desert and devoured by wild beasts. Desire, that is.

The jacket copy goes like this:

In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons – embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but at the same time wanting to burn the entire house down. 

That seemed to encapsulate lockdown and all the contradictory impulses it elicited, I would battle demons, I didn't need to be trapped in a marriage or by responsibility to small child (again!). Trapped at home, home was the entire world, and I would tear it down around me. 

These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there's more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can't see out of anyway. As soon as all the others had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I'd do it.

(All figurative artists, I note. Why? Because the body, I guess. And the physicality of Glenn's art too.)

I have to say, though, that there's nothing to ground this story in the countryside of France. I believe there may have been a vineyard, possibly a road to Switzerland (my memory is hazy). Someone smokes a Gauloise. A reference to the punishment for adultery in medieval France. By this evidence, the novel could be set in my hometown. So it irks me that this "forgotten patch of French countryside" is mentioned in every review, adding colour where none is needed. We know she is a foreigner (I forget how we know, but we know, and we sense it firmly).

I woke up when she crashed through the glass, a scene worth the price of admission, I picture ribbons of blood. I need to start paying attention. "Everything is one big distortion." The fights and the jealousy, the pretense and resentments.

This is a madwoman's story (that's what it was like to be a new mother). A few times it shifts perspective to that of her lover, only now I wonder if it might be his perspective as imagined by her. By the end, I felt like things were told in the wrong order. No one dies, not really. Well, a little. Crazy, desperate, sad.

The ignominious mysteries of her life as a woman

The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the public stage all along, entertaining people with their grandiose and self-destructive behaviour. Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms. It was tempting to consider, she said, that Bourgeois's talent relied on the anonymity of her experiences; in other words, that had she been recognised as a younger artist, she might not have had cause to dwell on the ignominious mysteries of her life as a woman, and instead would have been partying and posing for the front covers of magazines along with the rest of them. There were a number of works, she said, executed when Bourgeois was the mother of small children, in which she portrays herself as a spider, and what is interesting about these works is not just what they convey about the condition of motherhood — in distinct contrast, she said, to the perennial male vision of the ecstatically fulfilled madonna — but also the fact that they appear to be children's drawings drawn in a child's hand. It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child's perception. Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful, or perhaps simply because they have chosen not to fulfil their biological destiny and therefore have had more time to concentrate on their work. It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms; yet the image of Bourgeois's spider, she said, seems almost to reproach the woman who has run away from these themes and left the rest of us stuck, as it were, in our webs.

— from Kudos, by Rachel Cusk.

It's a remarkable coincidence that I should be reading this just weeks after having discovered Louise Bourgeois and with a couple of volumes of her art and writings now at my side.

This passage is key also to my understanding of this novel, as Cusk's narrator vanishes before our eyes.

Malice, saved up against the day

I am unable to concentrate on work this past week. I sit and stare at my laptop for hours. Not cooking or cleaning or distracting myself with productive (if personal) endeavours, I sit and I stare, and I stew about it.

I continue to learn German on Duolingo. I haven't missed a day in a over a hundred days. But even this I don't do during work hours. Diese Katze ist mein Chef, nicht mein Haustier. 

Something catches my eye at the base of the large houseplant, I've had it for years, like a crocheted cat toy that might've flipped into the pot. Only we don't have such cat toys. It's a mushroom, slender-stemmed, pale yellow. My research yields conflicting information — it's dangerous to the plant and the immediate environment and must be eradicated versus it's a healthy symbiotic relationship that should not be disrupted. Where did the spore come from? Did it pry its way through the window screen? Did it sneak in one morning when I opened the front door to greet the day? It puts me in mind of a passage in Tokarczuk's Primeval, and I wonder if it came purposefully to slow down time for me. Perhaps it imbues my tiny queendom with a magic power I've yet to discover, perhaps it will lull me into a quiet death.

I don't read much. I don't blog. Occasionally in the evenings my eyes wander over the jigsaw puzzle — Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in 2000 pieces. I look at each piece as it constitutes the whole, and marvel at the weirdness of tangled limbs and futurist architecture. Why would birds care so much about these naive humans to feed them? 

On Thursday I went for a walk. It was windy. The wind makes me restless, so I walk and walk. When I walk around the lake in the park, the trees bow down to slap me. Early afternoon and the park is reasonably sparse. Some people sleeping on benches. Some people staring into the void. 

It's hours before I return home. I give up on work for the day. I sit on the balcony and read Gnomon. The wind roars along the ruelle like a sea monster, I feel like I sit just below the current, barely safe. I want to take off all my clothes and let the wind ravish me, but the wind doesn't even know I'm there. 

Across the way, a woman is yelling into a void, what would you do without me, how would you take care of her, you do nothing, you think lawyers' fees are more important than spending time with your daughter, you should be fighting to spend time with her, you come and go at your convenience, what if something happened to me, what would you do. I saw him once on the balcony with the baby. It's heartbreaking, and I cry for her, and for me too, thanking her for saying the things I should've said years ago. 

I lean across the table and kiss him lightly upon the brow in benediction, and feel something unknot in me that I hadn't know was tied. Malice, saved up against the day, but never really anything I wanted. I let it go. 

Benedicite, Augustine. You silly arse. 

It's like releasing a heavy sack. I feel muscles in my chest open and unlatch: freedom. I catch my breath at the feeling.

The mothers of all calamities: screw Paradise anyway

"Why are they so sad?" my daughter asks at the museum in front of Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise. Because they've been expelled from Paradise. Who expelled them? God expelled them. Why did he do it? Because Eve gave Adam a forbidden apple. And who gave it to her? A serpent who was the devil. And why did he give it to Eve and not to Adam? It's an important question. It's the question. For a moment, I am stumped. The Book of Genesis may be more far-fetched than Sleeping Beauty, but a feminist mother should still be able to answer a question of that caliber. Lena looks at me with her expectant seven-year-old eyes twinkling the way they do every time she works her implacable logic against me.

When she was only two, she stole my pads and, dying of laughter, stuck them on her back like two fragile wings before running off. She had no idea her pale wings would one bear her own blood. Now she's better informed, especially since I was foolish enough to show her a video of a natural birth. Since then she is adamant that she will not have children. I tell her that if having children ever makes any sense to her, the pain will be the least of her problems, but that if she really doesn't want to, she will absolutely be within her rights not to do it. And then I drag her to pro-choice marches or protests against gender violence, and when she gets bored of my proclamations, I remind her of our conversation in the museum in front of the painting. I remind her of the absurd story they've been telling women for generation after generation — a story that casts us as the witches, the ribs, the confused ones, the guilty ones, the weak ones, the mothers of all calamities. That's why, I say to my daughter, we need to tell each other different stories, ones that are truer, fairer, more ours; like the story where we are friends with the serpent and screw Paradise anyway.

— from "On Motherliness," in Sexographies, by Gabriela Wiener.

The painting pictured here is not the one Gabriela and her daughter looked at, but the sadness persists. It's imbued with naivete, a childlike wonder, and mystery that, to my eyes, makes it sadder.

Today the United States Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as justice of the Supreme Court.

We need to tell each other different stories.

A bigger, much harder kind of pea

The first few years of Helena's life, I used to imagine her dying. All the time. It was exhausting. Not senseless, horrific deaths, exactly. Well, yes, that, but very possible senseless, horrific deaths.

In the beginning I thought they might be premonitions, but it didn't take long to realize they were warnings.

For example, pushing her stroller down the sidewalk, I'd imagine — very vividly, I might add, almost hallucinatorily, like a glimpse of an alternate parallel existence — a random car swerving up onto said sidewalk, putting us — most importantly, her — in mortal danger. I'd imagine throwing myself in front of her, or maneuvering the stroller out of the car's path. Or I'd glance away and she'd be face down in the wading pool. Or the approaching dog would turn out to be rabid and think of her as an easy meal. Or she might decide to put a pencil up her nose, all the way up her nose. I'd see blood, all over my flesh and blood, and my breath would catch in my chest, and I'd replay the instant, over and over — how could I save her?

Now, it wasn't "obsessive/compulsive" in the sense that it didn't affect how I lived my life (our lives). I still walked down the sidewalk, went to the wading pool, sat in the park, left her unattended (for seconds, minutes?) at a time. It's only effect was to make me hyper-vigilant. And that's a good thing. I was constantly rehearsing deadly scenarios and optimizing my responses. The hormones of new motherhood fed the ninja instinct. Ninja for mommies.

The older, more self-sufficient Helena got, the fewer and farther between my imaginings. But I still have them, these dark visions.

It took years to realize I wasn't alone in this experience. It's a hard thing to talk about without coming off as crazy, but I've heard other mothers talk about imagining the worst, and how they learned to use it as a tool for creating a safe environment. It's a safety mechanism regarding the child, but also, perhaps counterintuitively, a sanity mechanism for the mother self, to assure that you have considered all possibilities and are doing everything you can for a potentially endangered child. That you are a good mother.

This is the closest I come to understanding what Samanta Schweblin means by "rescue distance" — an algorithm involving the actual distance from one's child in some measure against all potential dangers in the vicinity (calculating number, distance, severity). Distancia de rescate is the original Spanish title of her first novel.

Why do mothers do that?
What?
Try to get out in front of anything that could happen — the rescue distance.
It's because sooner or later something terrible will happen.

There's not much I can say about Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin, other than wow.

It's an intense reading experience, and creepy, but blessedly short. It reminds me most of The Other, by Thomas Tryon, possibly only because of the creepy children, but maybe also the vaguely rural setting, the hint of something occult.

The pacing is exquisite. The urgency is masterful.

There's not much I can say that wouldn't be considered a spoiler; however, I'd skimmed through a discussion of the book and didn't feel my experience was diminished by it. But if that kind of thing worries you, stop reading now.

The story (but not the book) really starts about 6 years previous to the current narration. A 3-year-old (or thereabouts) boy, David, appears to have been poisoned. His mother, Carla, takes him to the woman in the green house, and agrees to her conducting a migration of his soul into a healthy body, bringing an unknown spirit into the boy's body, something of each of the souls remaining in the other's body. Spread over two bodies, the poison could be vanquished.

Six years later, Carla relates this to Amanda who is vacationing with her small daughter Nina...

The novel is billed as eco-horror: the ecological implications are hinted at early on but are only manifestly clear relatively late in the story. It's also a story of maternal bonding.

In my initial reading, the supernatural factor is primary; that is, the nature of David and of the transmigration process is top of mind, ever present with every turn of the page. Knowing the original Spanish title, however, changes the thematic emphasis.

Riffing on a fever dream...

1. What are the worms? When do the worms start? Are these worms signalling decomposition of the body? Or do they come earlier, in the poison that bring death? Or I they related to soul migration? They come toward the end of David and Amanda's conversation, but too soon for bodily decomposition, I think. The exact moment of the worms is significant.

2. Is David — the leading, questioning David — real? Does anyone else ever really see David? Is he inside Amanda's head? If so, is he a voice conjured out of her delirium, or did his soul migrate there?

If he migrated there, how long has he been there? Was it after his poisoning, or after Amanda and Nina's poisoning?

3. If the original David's soul was split, who else lives/lived in David's body? Could it have been Amanda? That might explain her obsession with him (Not exactly an obsession: attraction to? She is drawn to him and the story of him. Is that only because of her proximity to him now?). Would that imply her own soul/body was previously weakened.

4. Did he or did he not have all his fingers when he was born? What Carla would give for that first David, an imagined David.

5. Nina speaks in the royal "we." David likes that. (I like it too.) The self is plural.

6. Why is Amanda even vacationing in this godforsaken place? Why did her husband not come with her? She claims he was to join them later, but perhaps she was running from him. Why do I think this?

7. Why are the men so absent? Except for fleetingly, in a dream, and at the end. They are so external, powerless in the face of all this ... motherness.

My husband takes the can and turns it so I can see the label. It's a can of peas of a brand I don't buy, one I would never buy. They're a bigger, much harder kind of pea than what we eat, coarser and cheaper. A product I would never choose to feed my family with, and that Nina can't have found in our cupboards. On the table, at that early-morning hour, the can has an alarming presence. This is important, right?

8. Did Carla orchestrate the poisoning? Certainly she had no control over whether Amanda came to call before leaving town, but it seems like she was looking, waiting, for an opening. She's killing them.

9. Does Carla really take Amanda to the clinic? Why do I feel Carla may have taken Amanda to the green house? "The edge of the neck of her white shirt is stained a light green. It's from the grass, right?" But no, there's a nurse, with blister packs.

10. What's with the dirty hands, dirty with mud? First David's, later Nina's. How is this an effect of migration?

11. David pushes Amanda forward. Forward in time? Just like he pushed the ducks, the dog, the horses. Pushed toward death? A spirit guide? Is he even alive?

12. Carla's gone at the end, her husband says so. Not there just at that moment, or gone for good? Where did she go?

13. The ropes. Amanda feels a rope emanating from her stomach joining her to Nina, but it's metaphorical, an umbilical cord of sorts. David is tied down with ropes while migrating — to make sure the body stays, only the spirit leaves. At the end, rope ties most everything together, except bodies or souls, maybe just representations of them. The rope is for hanging. But when it's finally slack, the rope is a fuse.

14. What is the important thing? Really important? Why is David pushing her toward it? What does Amanda need to understand? Listen to David's father. What does he say that's so important? What did I miss?

Reviews
The Guardian: Terrifying but brilliant
The Mookse and the Gripes
The New Yorker: The Sick Thrill of "Fever Dream"
NPR: Brief But Creepy, 'Fever Dream' Has A Poisonous Glow
The Washington Post: A haunting story by one of the best young Spanish-language writers

The rope between Helena and me was pulled to its fullest when we lost each other on a hike in a foreign country. The summer she was 12. We survived this. The rope is there and not there.

Other people's babies

In her short essay "The Beginning of Misunderstanding," Rivka Galchen observes:

It's as if babies don't grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception.

Babies are all potential. Their acquiring the ability to communicate shatters this illusion of endless possibility. Their personhood is limited and delimited, made concrete. They become someone specific.

Helena is now very much someone specific. This fills me with relief, pride, astonishment, trepidation, and a little sadness. She's a teenager now.

Every so often, I realize she's grown, she's someone different. It's like I meet her anew, and have to reestablish a rapport; I have to get to know her all over again. Obviously, we don't continually restart from zero. But every day she's something more than the day before, and I spend the day identifying what the more is and determining how to deal with it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Little Labors. The book's beauty is in its juxtapositions: Small things, like the orange snowsuit, nosy neighbours, The Pillow Book, and Lucille Ball's pregnancy. And big things, like women writers and a whole world of maternal anxieties and deeper truths.

Little Labors warped time a little for me, and made me meditative and introspective. Which is, in my view, one of the best things a book can do.

Reviews
Feministing
NPR
Slate

Her fearlessness

From Little Labors, by Rivka Galchen:


My own little labor of 23 hours, now a work in progress of thirteen and a half years, is away on a school trip for a few days, so when I'm not working long hours, I'm reading little things.

This little book makes me unreasonably happy, just looking at it, all orange joy with pink and yellow, so small and tactile and easy.

I bought this book on the basis of having read Galchen's essay in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

So it's about motherhood and the creative process, and the intersection and interruption of those things, their juxtaposition, and the ambivalence of feeling in Galchen's relationship to those things.

I'm surprised by how strongly I relate to this book, being that I'm no longer the mother of a baby, that that experience is not immediate. I want to buy this book for nonmothers to say, this is what it's like, but for mothers too, to say, remember?

It's about creation, and other things. Fresh and lovely.

Envy

A friend brought to my attention this wonderful "essay" by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

I write "essay" after looking for how the magazine labels it. It's a memoir (probably) but it reads like a short story, with wit, poignancy, and unexpected twists.

She starts off discussing "women writers" and I expected her to envy men that they hold the default position. This is true in part, but it runs much deeper that; it pokes gentle fun at our gender biases, but then picks away at the biological basis for how men and women form different emotional attachments.

Let me tell you why I love this "essay." Go read it first, I don't want to spoil it for you. It's short and lively.

First, doesn't it make you want to read everything? Helen DeWitt, Dorothy Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Even Virginia Woolf. The joy of recognition: yes, I've read Natsuo Kirino.

For many years, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only "woman writer" I had read. Then, around age twenty-five, I had the blunt experience of looking at my bookshelves and noticing that my bookshelves were filled almost exclusively with books by men. Which was fine, I wasn't going to get in a rage about it, I loved those books that I had read. But I was unsettled, since my bookshelves meant either there were no good books by women, or I had somehow read in such a way as to avoid them all. I had never had my Jane Austen phase or Edith Wharton phase or even George Eliot phase, I associated those writers with puberty, or "courting," both things that repelled me. (I now know I was stupid to feel that way.) But, like I said, I wasn’t going to rage at myself, or at the world, I was just going to try to read some books by women. But where to start?

Second, it turns the issue of gender biases in literature and publishing on its head. What makes the writing of a woman writer so womanly? What makes Walser and Kafka sound "female," in Galchen's opinion? I love how she persists in believing Denis Johnson is a woman, even while being surprised that his book was written by a woman.

Third, it goes where good girls don't. It considers the possibility of (female) sexual behaviour without bearing the burdens of its consequences. It considers motherhood without the burden of children. The possibility of covert babies.

Fourth, it makes me wonder about the metaphorical children, the creative works that authors nurture and give birth to, letting them make their own way in the world. Do men and women relate to those offspring differently? Are women held to task for these children, while men more easily dissociate from them?

The essay comes from Galchen's book, Little Labors, due out in May. I'll be checking it out, along with everything else she's ever written.

Colour

I love colouring.

I've known it for some time — maybe it wasn't evident when Helena was in her scribbling phase, but certainly later, when we embarked on colouring projects together and I was still at it an hour after she'd left the table, it was obvious that I was finding some peace in it.

Over the last year or so, I've fully assumed it. I find it's the perfect accompaniment to Netflix-bingeing. I find so much joy in it that I insisted on giving the gift of colouring books (and felt tips or coloured pencils as appropriate) to several grown-up loved ones at Christmas (although, it only really caught on with my sister).

So I feel somewhat vindicated to learn that colouring books are now outselling cookbooks in France. Although also, I'm a little sorry that my little hobby has become so mainstream.

The best place to buy colouring books: art supply stores and museum gift shops.

Milestone

Helena develops highly elaborate scenarios in her play. This has been true forever. For example, she keeps a notebook of all her Playmobil characters — their names, traits, family relationships, back stories. She develops multifamily camping trips, schoolyard gossip, sibling rivalry, flu epidemics, crime scenes.

It's no wonder then that (for several years already) she enjoys playing The Sims. She spends more time building her characters and their homes, though, than she does "playing" the game, i.e., letting her characters "live." (Arguably the set-up is as much playing as is running the simulation.) Certainly I played in a similar way, and most intensely, those months I was pregnant with her. Practice for parenthood, I rationalized. Trying to create some semblance of control.

So this weekend, she showed me her new Sims family: a single dad who's a doctor, a supergenius, and he's rich, with two kids, also supercreative geniuses, and well-behaved and neatly dressed too. So the dad has met a woman (also a mom) whom he's going to marry, only she's not a genius; "she's just normal, like you."

I am torn apart, flung down, crushed. Just weeks ago I would hear, "Mommy knows everything." Suddenly, I'm normal.

We have achieved normality. And I'm not sure I like it.

An education in love

Maria Popova presents a lovely overview of Leo Buscaglia's ideas — she focuses primarily on the topics of education and labeling — as presented in Love: What Life Is All About.

She notes:

Buscaglia ends with a reminder of how our disembodied illusion of separateness contributes to our inability to inhabit our own selves and how the pathologically overlooked gift of human touch reconnects us not only with each other, but with our own deepest humanity.

(I think Buscaglia might be horrified by today's socially mediafied culture.)

The excerpts Popova chooses bring a nostalgic tear to my eye. Believe it or not, I've been thinking a lot about Leo lately. I think because Helena is about the age I was when my mother and I would spend hours watching Leo Buscaglia's lectures together. Every few months, the PBS pledge drive ensured a marathon of Leo love.

I can't say I enjoyed it exactly. My mother had control of the television (one television, and just the two of us). I'd sit pyjamaed with a Shirley Temple. I wouldn't've done it if it were just to make my mother happy. Part of me must've found it interesting. But it's not anything I told my friends about.

But my mom and I. We'd laugh. And cry. And hug.

I'm not the sort of person to dole out Iloveyous unthinkingly; I won't say it, or anything, if I don't mean it. Sometimes I think of Leo, even these days. Like he's wormed his way into my conscience, or is sitting on my shoulder, entreating me to tell people how much I love them.

I see a lot of myself in Helena; when she turns a certain way, her demeanour, it's like I'm watching myself. Only she's prettier, and kinder, and more loving. I can't believe she loves me so much.

Something deep and dreadful and full of sorrow

If Teddy ever cried when he was younger, Ursula could never bear it. It seemed to open up a chasm inside, something deep and dreadful and full of sorrow. All she ever wanted was to make sure he never felt like crying again. The man in Dr Kellet's waiting room had the same effect on her. ("That's how motherhood feels every day," Sylvie said.)

— from Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson.

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.

The smell of secession

The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner, has a couple really interesting things going for it. Namely:

1. A nose. One of the main characters works as a nose.
2. A secessionist movement.

But it turns out that this is a novel with a breast fixation. This book is all about the breasts. Large, or too small, fleshy, pillowy, ample, lactating, infected, hard, soft, sharp, droopy, pointy. We know all about the characters' breasts, and the characters' mothers' breasts, and the characters' lovers' breasts.

On the other gendered hand, we know very little about what the men look like. Apart from one male "milky torso," there is little indication whether the men are fleshy, flabby, sinewy, sculpted.

A little imbalance doesn't usually faze me. But this book is top-heavy to the point of tipping over. It's too much.

And breastfeeding. The pressure to breastfeed. The romance of breastfeeding. The bond that results from breastfeeding. And such issues. Is it OK to be breastfeeding 4-year-old girls? (Boys?) How about grown men?

Not that I'm a prude or anything. But there's a lot in this novel that made me uncomfortable. Maybe that's the point. But I don't have a good (constructive?) feeling about it.

The characters are all pretty messed up, and none of them particularly likable. They're all pretty selfish actually.

There's Scanlon, a poli sci prof specializing in mass movements and radicalism. His wife Naomi is a former professional "nose" (perfuming and such), but she posttraumatically lost her sense of smell some years ago. Baby on the way, they're moving from New York to Oregon for Scanlon's work.

Naomi's sense of smell comes back, and along with it a hormonal flood — resentments and memories and worries about (in)dependence and career fulfillment and striking a family balance and reclaiming one's body, one's self — issues not uncommon to new mothers.

They befriend a local anarchist. Angry young man. And this relationship I don't see as credible. I just don't see what Clay gets out of it, why he would stick around. Whatever. It's kind of essential to the plot that there be an anarchist, and that he be entwined within this family. So there he is.

And the leader of the secessionist movement, Sequoia, is a near-ideal, free-loving, all-giving vegan earth mother goddess. But I can't really like a character who's chosen to call herself Sequoia. Plus, in complete contrast to her usual policy of openness, she lets her past drive a wedge between her and her daughter.

Scanlon needs both these locals for his work. He tries to convince himself that he's not a bourgeois slumming it for the sake of his research, he tries to walk the talk, but really, who's he kidding?

And it all ends very badly, making me think much the worse of all the characters.

Somewhere in its heart this book is about leaving a life behind, running away from your past, it catching you up even while you yearn for it, ambling toward a life you think you're supposed to be living. Maybe outrunning your past, or just forgetting it.

Somewhere toward the end, the book purports to be about love, the bonds of family, and betrayals thereof. But there's very little real love here. Maybe that's the point. But I can't shake the feeling that this book was written by a man with a superficial grasp of what love is, who just plain doesn't understand women. It makes me angry, and sad. Maybe that's the point.

I'm reminded a little of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, for the street-level view of a movement, the day-to-day practicalities that weigh the lofty ideals back down to earth. Also, Annette Gilson's New Light, for it's Americanness, for putting the commune back in community.

It's also a very olfactory book, though it's neither Proust nor Süskind; only when the smells of fear and danger crop up, I'm afraid the nose has some rehabilitation to go before her alleged genius specificity fully returns.

So, there's some pretty heady stuff in here, but it didn't come together for me. I may or may not pick up Keith Scribner's next novel, depending on its subject matter. I'm sure he'll be fine; his wife must have quite the rack.