Samhain’s Hangover
The season of the witch in review:
All the narrators want autonomy. When they get it, all they want is to squander it on love. They’re clear-eyed on the humiliation of that. They understand the cyclical cosmology: that any affair, given time, will become the thing from which the affair was supposed to free them. This knowledge helps very little.
What is the aim of philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. A play-by-play of the fly-bottle: is that the aim of art? Verisimilitude isn’t always the thing.
Annie Ernaux does it best because sparest. This subject matter leaves you grasping after any trace of form, intelligence, lucidity. O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown, etc., but with Ernaux you’re never actually in doubt that it’s going to right itself.
Confidential to Miranda July: a woman doing Philip Roth is not any less obnoxious than Philip Roth just because it’s a woman doing it.
Queerness is present in most of these books but as a sidelight: a passion that is not the governing passion, or represented by a daughter or friend. A gesture at a broader canvas, but also comparative reassurance: it’s not like they have it any better.
Children in these books are unsolved problems. All of the mothers protest their love. Something about the structure of the protest is not right.
Rachel Cusk (not pictured) ends up more appealing than most of these because the narrator of the Outline trilogy is post-crisis and in many ways post-eros: it may still come up in her life but not as a terrible god. The divorce story, whatever it was, is complete, and has left her with as much autonomy as any of us could hope for. Reassuring to think it’s possible. And that the use of this autonomy, as far as we can see it, is not to lay claim to anyone, nor to exercise any power, but just to observe.
