On Difficult Heroines, or, Why We Read (Novels)

This summer, I was asked to give a book talk in Chatham, Massachusetts, hosted by the bookstore Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is owned and run by a lovely mother and daughter, Joanne and Caitlin Doggart. What follows is a version of that talk—a hodge podge of ideas I’ve been mulling in recent months. I’ve been thinking a lot about difficult heroines, and I decided to talk about them, and on a somehow—I hope—related note, the question of why we read.

My first novel, Perfect Reader, explored both; Flora Dempsey, my central character, is perhaps not easy to love. I hesitate to describe her any more than I’ve already tried to do by letting her live in the novel, as whenever I hear myself describing Flora I picture her rolling her eyes and saying something like, please spare me your patronizing authorial crap. Upon the sudden death of her father, Flora finds herself his literary executor, and in this role, in charge of an unfinished manuscript of poems he has written. She is both flattered and burdened by the designation (ambivalence her primary mode of being), and spends much of her time avoiding reading her father’s work. She wonders why her father has chosen her. She calls herself the literary executioner. She wrestles with the question—one her academic father wrote on during his life—of what a reader owed a text. How should a reader, a blatantly imperfect reader, with her own complicated relationship to the material and its author, read a work?

I first fell in love with difficult heroines when, in a high school English class called Great Novels, I read Jane Austen’s Emma. Emma is of course spoiled and self-centered and meddling. And, I thought, totally enchanting. At the end of the book Mr. Knightley declares her to be “faultless in spite of all her faults”; I found this not only the world’s most perfect praise, I also concurred wildly. When I got to class on the appointed day of our discussion, I was then shocked to hear that my classmates found her spoiled, self-centered, meddling, and not at all enchanting. She could not, it seemed, be the first three, and the last, all at once. More, they seemed not to have liked the book as a result—they didn’t like Emma, they couldn’t relate to Emma, and so they felt uninvested in the novel, her story.

I reacted to this news that I saw things so differently as any angst-fancying teen might: with a sense of disappointment, and alienation. But also interest. It was interesting to me that these readers read that way. That they wanted to identify with a character, and that they found it easier to identify with a more obviously likeable character. Would they accept difficulty in a hero more easily than they would in a heroine? (How else to explain the career of Philip Roth, whom I adore, but one hardly wants to identify too deeply with, say, Alexander Portnoy?) Were they all so impeccable themselves, these readers—as to identify with spirited, and prejudiced but always-decent Lizzie Bennett, but not the more flawed and complicated Emma Woodhouse? Were these the kind of people, who when asked to describe their worst qualities, announced themselves to be “perfectionists” or “too giving”? And what did it say about me that as a reader I preferred the less likeable character? Was I simply more flawed?

A writer should never respond to her reviewers. Impossible not to sound defensive. And yet. Several of the early customer reviews of my novel on Amazon dealt with the problem of Flora as a difficult heroine, or in the words of one reader, “an overgrown baby,” a trait that interfered with their enjoyment of the novel. Again, my interest was piqued. Was Flora so unlikeable as to be unsympathetic? Could a character be an unlikeable overgrown baby and still elicit sympathy? From where, exactly, did sympathy emerge?

True, reading fiction is often confusing. Do I dislike the character, or the author, or both? Reading Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar, I caught myself wondering, who is the smug one here, McEwan, or his character, Michael Beard? (I've long loved McEwan, and chose to conclude it was the latter, but some reviewers decided the other way.)

In my novel, I stole an idea from a brilliant Columbia professor, Edward Tayler. His notion is that there are two types of readers in the world: the Reader as Narcissus, who goes to the page looking for his own reflection, and the Reader as Understander, who goes to see what the writer is up to, what the words themselves are doing. Add to this binary (why not?) the Reader as Life Coach, who when confronted with a difficult heroine (or maybe even hero) feels an irrepressible instinct to reform, and to scold. The Reader as Life Coach does not brook ambivalence; this reader stumps for mental health, and impeccable-ness. It's as if there's something unsettling, hell, something downright un-American about unlikeable heroines—they don't inspire or encourage or buck up.

But there is pleasure in bad behavior, isn't there? Watching thrillers, we relish the stomach coiling feeling of wishing disaster averted: Don't Go In There. With a difficult heroine, there is a corollary pain/pleasure: For God's Sake, Don't Do That. Throughout The House of Mirth, much of the agonizing joy comes from wishing the impossible upon Lily Bart—beautiful, vivid, and difficult: a life of decadent dullness. We know the alternative will be catastrophic. Buck up, Lily! Just marry the rich bore! But we don't really wish it—such an urge is nothing if not ruinous to the plot, it nullifies the very book. Lily can no more buck up than Janet Leigh can drive past the Bates Motel, and as many a heroine seeking liberation from her fate, she seals it instead, punished for wanting more.

The character of Flora started sharply, and sharpened with subsequent drafts. I did not set out to make her appealing or unappealing, but human and flawed and in a constant struggle with her least generous self. I allowed her to act in ways I might not allow myself to act and I tried to understand why she had come to act thus. At one point in the writing process my agent suggested I move the third person narration closer to her point-of-view, cutting “she thoughts” or “she wondered” and instead slipping into her perspective. In this way, as in first person narration, a reader suddenly finds herself inside a character’s mind, though unlike the first person the reader also has moments of distance, of watching the character at work. But being close to Flora, or merely observing her—proximity or distance or some combination of the two—is clearly not enough to earn a reader's sympathy.

As a reader, I tend to feel sympathy for a character, however difficult, so long as the author does. Austen is not overly forgiving of Emma, nor is she disdainful of her. Rather, she lets her do her worst and be punished and rewarded. It is in the novels where I feel a writer’s contempt for his or her characters where my sympathy is thwarted. I can admire these novels, but they leave me cold. If the writer seems not to enjoy spending time with his or her creations, why should I? When a writer shows compassion, or sympathy, I tend to as well.

In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy writes that upon learning the news of a colleague’s death: “Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I” (Pevear & Volokhonsky, 40).

In this passage, dark and hilarious in its under-statedness, the blatantly unsympathetic response of the characters is blunted by the writer’s matter-of-factness and absence of judgment. The crucial phrase, “as always,” shows, if not compassion, then at least the certainty that such behavior is human and universal. And the graceful sliding into the first person at the end of the sentence, “that it was he who was dead and not I,” implicates the reader, too. Tolstoy tells us, not unkindly, that we would behave no differently or better were we in their place. As a writer, he does not condemn the behavior, so as a reader, I don’t either. And more, I begin to question myself. Is that true? Would I, too, feel joy? This is why I read, to meet characters I might not want to be, and through them to ask larger questions of myself, and to see the world in a more complicated, darker light. Somewhere between Narcissus and Understander, maybe, but nowhere near—I hope—the Life Coach.

On Being a Housewife

Last week, I went to see David Remnick interview Tom Stoppard at BAM. A production of Stoppard’s translation of The Cherry Orchard will be on there in January, and the conversation concerned Chekhov, translation, London theatre versus New York theater, the possibility of Remnick sending Stoppard to Kabul as a foreign correspondent, censorship, Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and other Russian matters. My first thought leaving the Harvey Theater was Remnick was a thoughtful and rigorous interviewer, and Stoppard so charming and wry, and both of them so knowledgeable, there was just a lot of stuff they knew and I wondered nostalgically if anyone in my generation—read, I— would ever know so much.

Later that night, as I reflected on the interview it began to look a little different. The conversation had been designed as an intellectual duel, a score-settler: Who knows more about the Russians? Who has read more translations of Chekhov, of Tolstoy, of the apparently near-untranslatable Gogol? Who could better pronounce Russian words? Eugene Onegin, anyone? Herzen? Not as easy as you might think. They were on the cusp of a debate on the state of Russian thinkers and writers—Remnick arguing that there were none today near to the generation Stoppard writes of in his trilogy, Stoppard countering with the journalists who risk their very lives writing in Russia now—when the talk turned. But maybe it had been more than a debate. Maybe they disagreed about almost anything, on principle.

By the next morning I’d decided the two men despised one another—why was Remnick always interrupting, and content to end their conversation on a rare inarticulate moment from Stoppard on contemporary American theater? Why did Stoppard insist on replying to a series of questions from Remnick on influence, “The premise is wrong,” as though his questioner were an illiterate who knew nothing of art? They began to seem not two dazzling intellectuals, but two steaming vats of neurotic psychology. They were Bill Clinton on Barack Obama. They were gorillas, smacking the ground in front of them and bearing their considerable gums.

But still, I felt impressed. It was impressive, having what lurks below on display. After all, we’re all steaming vats of neurotic psychology (or, at least, we should be: my mother taught me young that if you weren’t neurotic you weren’t interesting so what hope did I have? Unfortunately, the corollary doesn’t hold—you can also be neurotic and uninteresting, the lethalest of combos). Hence the problem of interpretation. No doubt my evolving reading of the evening told more of my vat than either Stoppard’s or Remnick’s. It’s hard to see for all the murk.

I keep thinking about this night of men being knowledgeable about Russians in concert with the way in which the media has written about Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama of late. I keep thinking of the debate over Michelle Obama’s victory-night dress (googling this phrase brings me to an article on MSNBC’s website, which tells me that though “Critique wasn’t universal,” according to a USA Today poll, 65 percent of those surveyed thought she’d “had an off day”). I keep thinking of the endless reporting on Sarah Palin’s spending spree.

I like clothing as much as (maybe more than) the next girl. I have opinions—strong ones, even—about Michelle Obama’s Narciso Rodriguez dress, and Sarah Palin’s Valentino jacket. And yet.
Perhaps I’ve been thinking about gender roles (a vaguely repellent phrase) more than usual because I am currently a housewife. My mother gets upset when I use that word (more evidence of its complexity—as though we needed it), and I am not only a housewife: I read and write and contribute to society in modest ways. But for now, my husband works a lot, and I work a little; he makes a nice income, and I do not; he leaves his underwear hanging by his towel in the bathroom, and I put it in the laundry. I take a certain comfort in this domestic labor, and in a Marxist sense our household is functioning efficiently and well.

And yet. Am I, in worrying over the state of my home, in folding, and washing, and analyzing piles of clutter with great intensity, guaranteeing that indeed I will never know as much as David Remnick and Tom Stoppard? In this time of under-employment, why am I not studying the multiple translations of difficult Russians, but rearranging my furniture? Why am I not becoming expert in anything beyond my own little realm? Am I hiding my murky vat of psychology—which really might serve me well in the hostile world—under a bushel?

When we talk about Virginia Woolf’s feminist writing we remember the room of one’s own. Less so, do we recall the accompanying 500 pounds a year she urged as a necessity for women writers (and that was 1929—in 2008 pounds, no mean sum). Perhaps this is because rooms are easier to come by than generous, sustaining stipends, particularly stringless ones. Woolf writes, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.”

Of course, more women do write poetry now. But have we, in light of $150,000 wardrobe overhauls, overcome the material poverty, while maintaining the intellectual one? Or do we still have both to contend with? In recent days, mothers on the social messaging website Twitter took arms against an online Motrin commercial, and by opposing, ended it. The seemingly innocuous ad featured a woman's good-natured, harried voice complaining of back pain from carrying her child in a sling—I was going to add that within this community slings are as debatable as Russian thinkers, then stopped myself for the snark of it, then decided the observation was also factually accurate. As one “tweeter” quoted in The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Aren’t there more substantive and meaningful issues where you could direct your combined will?” For women, the refuge and the trap of domestic work is easily all consuming, and has a way of obscuring the outside world. Perhaps it does come down to the vulgar matter of coin. If the world does not reward one’s pursuits, one begins to feel a reciprocal indifference to its affairs.

By beginning with Stoppard and Remnick I do not mean to suggest that they are complicit in some sort of repressive sexual politics (though a glance at the Table of Contents of my Election Special edition of The New Yorker reveals the name of one woman, Joan Acocella, among a slew of brainy men). Rather, I hold them up as good examples of men of the world being men of the world. From this well-kempt apartment, it seems something to aspire to.

On Being Told No, or, The State of the Sentence

I've thought much of late—been forced to think—about rejection. Literary, not romantic. I'm writing here now, not—I hope— to indulge my considerable self-pity on that score, but to—God, help agnostic me—transcend it. I've been thinking, too, about faith, about what it means to be faithful or faithless. I am a faithful wife, and daughter, and friend. But I lose faith too easily, suspect things will go to rot, I do not have faith that the ceiling above me will hold as I sleep in the night.

The two equal and opposing impulses of rejection: first, that one has been deluding one's self that one could ever truly be regarded as a writer (that precarious line between spending one's days writing and being a writer), or make one's living—however modest—thus, that one is mediocre at best, just not good enough; and second, that those who do manage to live and work and call themselves writers are hacks, that the people who publish and reward such hackery have become inured to cliche, to poor writing, and would not know a finely wrought sentence if it snipped them on the beak.

Neither impulse is attractive; both are irrational. And somehow these contrasting lines of thought—equally destructive—are not mutually exclusive. Like so much meanness, they each survive one another intact, pristine. The result is doubt, loathing—self, and otherwise, bitterness, resentment, torpor, and a general waning of the very thing one loves so deeply, one's former solace—books. I am writing here to rail against that waning of love, to force myself to keep faith at least with the sentence.

I've called this blog Monk's House as an homage to Virginia Woolf, who, with her husband, Leonard, started a small press in Hogarth House, where they lived on the outskirts of London. The Hogarth Press published books by Virginia and many of her Bloomsbury set (E.M. Forster, Roger Fry), her lover (Vita Sackville-West), her friends and rivals (Katherine Mansfield), that were beautifully illustrated by her sister, Vanessa Bell. They published English translations of Freud's work, too, and—how I love this detail—when the revered analyst met the revered writer in London, he presented her with the gift of a narcissus.



No delusions of that magnitude here—I am not Woolf. But if it comes to pass that to see my novels see print I must start my own press, I'd like to imagine I might do that, and call that press Monk's House, named for the Woolves cottage in Sussex, where they lived happily and unhappily, and from which sanctuary Virginia walked to the River Ouse gathering stones for her pockets.

This blog will be nothing if not melodramatic.

Of course, too, reading and writing are monkish pursuits, and here will be a devoted home to them.

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, the formidably smart and monkish Marilynne Robinson says, "In this culture, essays are often written for the sake of writing the essay. Someone finds a quibble of potential interest and quibbles about it." She goes on to explore her own reason for writing essays: "When I notice something that seems like an anomaly to me, I try to sort it out. It's an impulse. I think, Gee, this might lead me to refurnish my mind in a certain way." As usual, I feel chastened by Robinson. Reading her—in prose, and speech—is like a gentle flogging of one's flaccid brain. I think I might like essays that "quibble about" things more than she does, so long as the quibbler is idiosyncratic enough in his thinking and dexterous enough in his sentences. But I will borrow her "impulse" (I could benefit from new impulses), and take her lovely phrasing as a charge: I should try to refurnish my mind.

Few write the sentence as well as Robinson in the English language today. But one writer who does, I think, is Joseph O'Neill. This spring I heard O'Neill read from his novel, Netherland, and speak about coming to a point in the writing of the book after several years of work where he thought the whole enterprise a failure. He was away, at a cabin somewhere remote, and decided that if he could no longer write, he could at least read, and at a bookstore nearby he came across Robinson's Housekeeping. O'Neill acknowledged to his New York audience that his own novel was a very different book, but said that reading Housekeeping was what allowed him to see that the novel could go as slowly as one wanted, and with that discovery he began to rewrite the second half of Netherland, with less plotting, and fewer characters, letting the sentences build more slowly.

When I read Netherland, I also found it at a time of literary (though cabin-less) distress, and it was a discovery for me; I took such pleasure in those sentences. So, Zadie Smith's essay in the November 20 issue of The New York Review of Books, "Two Paths for the Novel," a kind of literary rumble she orchestrates between the effete novel of language (lyrical Realism), and the brawnier novel of ideas (the avant-garde), has made me miserable. (Her recent essay on Forster in those same pages brought me great joy, so what to make of it all?) I love Zadie Smith, and think her one of our best critics—so brainy, and so unpretentious; such a rare and wonderful combination. I also loved Netherland, and the mocking and dismissive tone Smith takes toward the novel ("And also: grapefruits?") gave me pause. I felt almost embarrassed, as though I'd been caught in the display of dubious aesthetic taste. Was I wrong in loving this book? A hopeless bourgeois with conventional preferences? Did I somehow miss all that silly stuff she cites about clouds?

Smith doesn't only criticize O'Neill. In particular, she praises the "anxiety" in the novel: "It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill." Still, if I were choosing to be one of the two writers reviewed by Smith in this rumble, I'd choose to be the other, who comes off looking much hipper, cleverer, more original, and funnier—Tom McCarthy, author of the novel Remainder. In "Two Paths for the Novel," McCarthy's path is the ironic ill-fitting suit you might see a rock star wear, tight and short and slim-tied; Netherland's path is of the dreaded pleated pants.

Whereas in O'Neill's novel, "personal things are so relentlessly aestheticized," and "the world is covered in language," McCarthy's "is not filled with pretty quotes," or even a protagonist. Rather, there is an "enactor," who becomes a "re-enactor." Beyond ideas, we are in the robust and daunting land of theory. McCarthy has called himself the general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, and in that capacity issued, "The Joint Statement of Inauthenticity." Inauthenticity, I gather from Smith's retelling, is style. As she puts it, "while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the 'rotting flesh-assemblage hanging in his attic.'"

I have no quarrel with McCarthy, or rotting flesh-assemblages. Smith, in her intelligent praise, makes a compelling case for Remainder. But in identifying O'Neill as the apotheosis of lyrical Realism, that long line of "literary language" knotted first by Flaubert and Balzac, and then pronouncing his book inferior due to its lack of theoretical underpinnings—McCarthy's standards—Smith seems to me unfair. She ends by comparing both authors on cricket (for both the sport is a metaphor, one for life, the other for death), and the comparison seems forced.

More, I do quarrel with her final analysis that "The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what's new on the route to Remainder."

From my perspective, publishers are in fact more and more interested in novels of ideas, or theories, and more suspicious of books filled with slow-building, beautiful sentences, books in corporate-speak called, patronizingly, "small," and "quiet" (the image of a homely and sad lady librarian forms in the mind). I worry about the fate of the sentence—the kind of sentence that can make you care about things you never cared for before. Cricket, say. Unlike Smith, who argues "that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition," I read Netherland and thought, why does no one write like this? And by like this, I suppose I meant, this well. As I read Netherland, I did not wave to those comforting old ill-panted friends. Rather, I found myself seeing familiar places—New York City, my home—anew. James Wood writes of this way in which great fiction defamiliarizes our world, and this is what O'Neill's descriptions did for me. Smith questions, "do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?" I don't know if it's realism, or what realism in the novel is. But I do know I do not go to literature to see my own sense of selfhood reflected back to me. I go to see something in a different way—to refurnish my mind. Maybe even to see taxi cabs as sudden grapefruits.

Or does it come back to the narcissus? Maybe it's as Paul Valery said and all theory is autobiography. Maybe I see a prejudice against novels of language, against sentences, because the only thing of which I can be sure is that I have written a novel with some fine sentences, and I fear it will never be published. And maybe Smith in quarreling with Netherland is quarreling in part with James Wood, from whom she has famously diverged before, and who ecstatically reviewed O'Neill in the pages of The New Yorker.

But let us not waste time damning one style, or lack of style, in praise of another. It was Smith who in October 2001, wrote in response to Wood's accusations of 'hysterical realism' in The Guardian, "literature is—or should be—a broad church." Yes—more faith, not less. Let our tastes be more catholic, lest we risk tearing down the whole bloody world of fiction to stake out our ever narrower paths. We need more good novels, whichever sort they be.