Another post where I
find myself thinking about women, and other things, through the lens
of a couple of female artists and an anti-heroic female protagonist created by a
female author.
I wanted to like Olive Kitteridge, for reasons having to do with womanness. The miniseries is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a woman, Elizabeth Strout. It stars a woman, Frances McDormand, who also served as executive producer, and one feels for the position of the woman in her late 50s in Hollywood, who may have to turn producer to get good roles. It was directed by a woman, Lisa Cholodenko, and the screenplay was written by Strout and another woman, Jane Anderson (who has the distinction of having written an episode of Mad Men and three episodes of The Facts of Life). And when the story started and it quickly became clear that Olive was thoroughly unlikeable, I thought that maybe all of these women were trying for a female anti-hero, a laudable goal.
There were so many
womany reasons to like this miniseries, which was met with universal
critical ecstasy. Unfortunately, Olive Kitteridge is
absolutely ridiculous. It could almost be camp, except that it's in
such good taste (restrained, full of pretty Maine scenery) that it
squanders that opportunity. This slice of misery porn is like a
Newbery Medal-winner for an adult audience, or like Precious
for affluent white people in their 50s and 60s (i.e., HBO's
demographic). Full of scatology and both random and deliberate
violence, and every bit as misanthropic as its eponymous protagonist,
Olive Kitteridge manages to mock both the hick inhabitants of
the small town where it takes place (like the woman who sings Olivia
Newton-John's “Magic” while accompanying herself on the grand
piano at the family restaurant) and the more modern, worldlier
outsiders (Olive's son's uptight blonde California princess first
wife and his New Age-y second wife, who indulges her bratty little
boy). The miniseries has contempt for every human type – except
maybe Olive herself. But its affection for her is mysterious.
Longing, Repression,
Suicide, and Poop in a Small Coastal Town
I
already knew it wasn't going to get better for me after the first
(and, in my opinion, best, because least focused on Olive) of the
four segments. But after the scene early in the second segment in
which a suicidal young man who fears he may be “bipolar,” like
his mother, hallucinates (courtesy of CGI) that Olive, seated on the
car seat beside him, is an anthropomorphic elephant eating peanuts
out of a bag (not a type of hallucination I've ever heard of being
associated with bipolar syndrome), I had to keep watching in
fascinated horror, to see if the series could really sustain that
level of blindness to its own ludicrousness. And to be sure, the most
ludicrous bits occur early on: the elephant hallucination and, in the
first segment, Olive getting turned on, maybe for the only time in
their marriage, by her husband when he boasts to dinner guests that
as a boy he could track deer when dad took him hunting by smelling
fresh doe droppings to tell if the doe is in heat. But there are
subtler gems in the two last segments: Henry and Olive, facing the
emptiness of their future when they learn that their son is getting
divorced and therefore they probably won't be grandparents, only to
go out for dinner with friends their own age and hear what
disrespectful little shits grandchildren are, so that life is equally
empty either way; or, in the last segment, where after Olive does
this show's version of a “meet cute” with an ever-charming Bill
Murray and you're waiting for whatever extremely horrible thing is
going to immediately happen to him, she learns at the start of their
first date that he listens to Rush Limbaugh.
Feces
plays a supporting role in two of the four segments and a starring
role in one. We also get treated to: an accidental death; an
accidental near-death; an accidental death that may be a suicide; a
father who committed suicide; a mother who commits suicide (a
“bipolar” woman who thinks there are purple snakes in the
appliances); two near-suicides (the woman's child and Olive); a boy
who commits murder (a former elementary school student of Olive's,
glimpsed only once in the series, in detention, drawing a picture of
a person holding their severed head); two young drug addicts who
brutalize and threaten to kill the sparse staff and the couple of
elderly people at the hospital they're robbing; the sudden death of
an elderly woman; the bipolar mom taking advantage of the distraction
of the elderly woman's sudden death to score some extra Valium at the
pharmacy; an elderly man's stroke; and an elderly man's near-stroke.
Dying or coming across someone who has died or is dying is apparently
as common as breathing in Crosby, Maine. I'd feel safer in Twin
Peaks.
The
only moments that might almost be good occur in the first segment,
which focuses on the only nice characters in the miniseries, Olive's
husband, Henry, and the woman half his age (at least) with whom he
becomes infatuated, played by Richard Jenkins and Zoe Kazan. Once
upon a time I had the idea of doing a sort of Wide Sargasso
Sea version of Madame
Bovary that retold the story
from Charles's point of view, and the first segment of Olive
Kitteridge sort of does that.
It's completely baffling why, instead of following the titular
character's infatuation with a Scottish (or something – Welsh?),
alcoholic fellow schoolteacher, which is made to bear a great deal of
the weight of accounting for her subsequent nastiness and bitterness,
and which could give us a sense of the person Olive might have been
if she were happy – instead we're taken into the inner life of
Henry. Which – thanks to the astonishing warmth and openness
radiated by Jenkins and to Kazan's delicate performance, both of them playing
characters who could otherwise have just been caricatures – turns
out to be a beautiful place. I think it's Jenkins, not McDormand, who
deserves the acting kudos in the miniseries, although that's perhaps
because he's at least given the basic materials for playing a human
being.
Yet
we don't need to know
anything about Henry, so the story of the nobly asexual relationship
that develops between him and his naive little employee (namby-pamby,
Ned-Flanderish Henry would never be unfaithful to his wife, or take
advantage of such a young woman) is pointless in terms of the larger
story. Strout's portrayal of Olive has a chic postmodern opacity:
even on the rare occasions when she convulsively shows her pain, it
doesn't make her more sympathetic (to me, at least) because neither
the writers, nor the director, nor the actress is able to show its
connection to her compulsion to hurt. (I'm thinking, by way of
contrast, of Bette Davis's miraculous William Wyler-directed
performance in Jezebel.)
And if it's not in the performance, it has to be in the writing. We
know that her father committed suicide, but knowing what has happened
to an unlikeable character in the past isn't as important in making
us understand and (ambivalently) root for them as knowing what they
want. Emma Bovary wants her life to be beautiful and exciting and
meaningful, and can't face the fact that life is not like that; Hedda
Gabler wants control over the destinies of other people because, as a
woman in the late 19th
century, she has no control over her own destiny; Regina Giddens
wants to be rich and have fun in the big city, and knows, as a woman
in the early 20th
century, if she were a man she could get the things she wants rather
than having to go through her brothers and husband. Olive, however,
isn't even allowed to really want to run away with her Romantic
Scotsman (or whatever): when Olive's husband tells her that this was
only a fantasy of happiness, she seems to believe him, and so do we,
if only because it's impossible to imagine Olive getting along with
anyone.
But
then, part of the way through the final segment, it suddenly struck
me that McDormand was, consciously or not, playing the character as“autistic,” in the pop media sense, and that was why her
relentlessly monotonous performance (the same note over and over, as
with her character in Fargo,
but with the opposite mood) made sense, contrasting unfavourably
though it did with the nuances of Jenkins's characterizations. People
seem to love this – critics, cult audiences. Although Olive is a
kind of pop-autistic sociopath, however, she's neither a genius nor a
badass – let alone both, a la Walter White. She's not completely
devoid of decency; she's not prejudiced against the mentally ill; and
she's not a bigot. But she's a teacher, wife, and mother who appears
to have done everything in her power to make her students, husband,
and son as miserable as she is.
There's
an interesting subject amidst all of the pointless violence and
ugliness: how the repression that once kept incompatible couples
together, and sometimes does even now, resulted not only in mutual
misery, anger, and resentment, but also in entangling them in each
other's lives to the extent that they truly were each other's closest
companion, albeit perhaps only as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in
which the more passive partner is in thrall to the more aggressive
one. Although, this show being what it is, the message is that all
you get in return for even that boon is the loss of your companion,
either directly to death or to stroke or dementia or ongoing
illnesses and then to death. And more people than we'd like to think
are in Olive's position when that happens: estranged from family and
isolated in the midst of a community. At the end the show, like
Olive, loses heart, and gives her a fake happy ending, gesturing
toward the possibility that she'll get a new boyfriend, repair her
relationship with her son and daughter-in-law, and develop a
relationship with her grandchild. And in fact sometimes such people
do redeem themselves as grandparents. For others (and I couldn't help
but think of the Vivian Maier doc, watching Olive toward the end),
the isolation only worsens.
Body Bildung
Sometimes
glancing back over this blog makes me proud, and other times it makes
me cringe – depending on the post, and depending on my mood. There
are times when I can't even imagine what I was trying to do, like when I posited a parallel between the HBO comedy Bored to Death and Madame Bovary – something about
boredom moving from the provinces to the urban centers – which
managed to be both dubious and pretentious. I thought of that dubious
and pretentious parallel, however, when I was listening to Lena
Dunham read the audio book of Not That Kind of Girl.
Although
only in her late 20s, Dunham affects a bored, world-weary tone, both
as a writer and in her vocal delivery. It's especially striking when
she discusses sex, which she does often. She has been presenting
herself this way since she was in her early 20s: that kind of irony
and detachment is her schtick, present even in her physicality in
front of the camera, which is what made me think of Woody Allen and
Elaine May when I first saw her, in the first episode of Girls.
It didn't come as that much of a surprise, then, that Dunham actually
quotes from Madame Bovary
as the epigraph of NTKOG.
The passage (beginning “Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting
for something to happen”) does not describe Emma's boredom, but
rather her febrile state of waiting, as a young woman, for the
adventure of her life to begin. I think we can gather from what
follows that the reality of womanhood, for Lena as for Emma, is a lot
more of a mixed bag than she anticipated.
Although
I know it's a thing that people do regularly, I seldom buy a book by
a comedian I like. Exceptions include a Jerry Lewis craze and
Roseanne Barr's My Life As a Woman,
which I think I found second-hand somewhere. I bought both Russell
Brand's My Booky Wook
and Craig Ferguson's American On Purpose,
but didn't get around to reading either of them (or did I just
seriously consider buying American On Purpose
but had learned my lesson after Booky Wook?).
I gave in and bought the audio version of NTKOG
because the online controversies about some of the sexual stuff in it
made me madly curious. I'll save my take on the Barry chapter, about
what she has taken to calling in the media her sexual assault, for an
upcoming epic post about feminism. As for her polymorphously perverse
early relationship with her younger sister, it's illustrative of
Dunham's dilemma: she thinks like a serious writer, drawn as she is
to the murky ambiguities and uncomfortable areas of human sexuality,
but she is a celebrity, and one who is best-known for working in the
medium of TV, which has never been able to handle much ambiguity. In
fact that's the reason for Dunham's unique cultural position: she's
bringing to TV a darkly comic, provocative sensibility to a medium in
which envelope-pushing always stands out because it is so rare.
Girls,
although only a cult show, has undoubtedly brought Dunham to the
attention of a much wider audience than any novel by a person in
their 20s could have reached, and Dunham, while not considering
herself an actress, uses herself – her persona, her body – in her
work to great effect, so I don't consider it a great loss to the
world that Dunham's celebrity probably will never now allow her to
develop into the introspective prose writer she might have been. As
with many of the brighter men and women in pop culture (e.g.
Morrissey, Courtney Love, Russell Brand, Roseanne Barr herself), I
think we see in Dunham a need not only to make art, but to be famous;
to have an audience react to and think and talk about not only her
art, but her, and to
make her relationship to the audience and the culture part of her
art.
Nevertheless,
Dunham's sense of herself as a public person, in NTKOG,
often seems to be in conflict with her sense of herself as a writer.
She can't just present a series of personal essays, interesting for
their insights; as the quasi-self-nominated Voice of Millennials, she
has to present herself (as per publisher instructions?) as giving
advice to other Millennial women. At the same time, she's forced to
be humble and use quotation marks in the self-helpy subtitle, “A
Young Woman Tells You What She's 'Learned,'” knowing the kind of
shit she'll catch as a famous Millennial with literary pretensions
who was raised by rich artists for daring to suggest that she has any
wisdom to impart. I guess that's not so bad – why did Brand call
his first book My Booky Wook
if not to try to deflect criticism for having the audacity, as a
person famous primarily for his drug addiction, sexual exploits,
erratic public behaviour, and big hair, to think he had anything of
interest to say?
In
the one interview with McDormand about Olive Kitteridge that I read,
she mentioned that one thing that drew her to the part was that Olive
was a "full" and "messy" character – who belches, for example. One can see where an
actress might get the impression that to portray a “real woman,”
in contrast to the kinds of women we normally see on our screens and
on magazine covers, means to portray a woman who is both aggressively
flawed and aggressively corporeal – even though I can't think of
any examples of being treated to a male character's digestive
maladies where it's not played for laughs. Dunham's interest to me
as a voice and a performer is centered on her obsession with her
corporeality: with nudity, with her body's aches and pains and
potential diseases, with food, with sex between clueless young people
and all of the ways it doesn't resemble its depictions by either
Hollywood or pornography, perhaps especially when it's influenced by
the latter.
The
reaction of many men to Dunham's use of her body as a
writer-performer is a reminder that while men's imperfect bodies –
like men's bodily functions – are the stuff of comedy, women's
imperfect bodies – like women's bodily functions – easily elide
into the territory of horror. Olive Kitteridge,
too, borders on body horror, in this case not the horror of the
young, nude female body that should be desirable (that's it's only
function), but isn't, but the horror of the elderly female body,
which inspires revulsion because it can no longer inspire desire.
Dunham's use of body horror in her comedy, however, unlike Elaine
May's, gives no indication of masochism. She doesn't show us the
too-corporeal female as an object of revulsion; her offence seems to
be, rather, that she doesn't presuppose a male gaze at all. (Nor does
she give us a female gaze in its place: there are no sex objects in
Dunham's work, except Patrick Wilson in a one-off episode that seems
to take place outside the normal universe of the show.)
Don't
Be That Girl
In the prologue to NTKOG, Dunham writes about the derision that greets young woman who try to talk about their lives but who, by virtue of their youth and gender, are thought not to have the “gravitas” to make their stories art-worthy. One of the phases I went through as a teenager was an infatuation with Anais Nin and her diaries, probably sparked by the release of the movie Henry and June in 1990, when I was 15. In that movie, Nin takes up, in both a literary and a sexual fashion, with Henry Miller and his wife, June (played by Uma Thurman). Nin is famous for being exotically pretty, for the lifelong project of her diaries (on a volume of which the movie was based), for being part of literary and artistic circles whose members show up in her diaries, and for a general interest in sexual experimentation that included the claim that she had an incestuous relationship with her father as an adult.
Like other teenagers
who want to be writers when they grow up, I kept diaries, and the
example of Nin made me think that this was a worthy enterprise, up
until I read one essay on Nin and her cult that dismissed her with a
single word: “narcissistic.” I tended to like the idea of
narcissism; I was a fan of Oscar Wilde, who (as in the quotation from
which this blog takes its name) used it to push back against
bourgeois sentimentality and the cult of self-sacrifice and duty. Yet
it was the particular way in which the author (a man, I'm sure)
backed up his dismissal of Nin that made me back away from her
example. It wasn't just that she nattered on about herself; he
pointed out that she couldn't bear to not repeat a compliment. I
understood the implication that was she just another vapid, shallow
woman who believed that every event that happened to her or thought
that occurred to her was fascinating because she got attention for
being pretty, and – since I didn't stop keeping a diary (and have
intermittently kept one of some kind throughout my life) – for
years I tried my best to never record a compliment, at least about my
appearance, even when I really, really wanted to.
I thought of that
author's comment when, years later, Camille Paglia dismissed Naomi
Wolf's Vagina by calling her a “compulsive diarist.”
Between the stereotype of the narcissistic woman, left over from when
women did not have access to the public sphere, and lingering sexist
doubt that women are able to write as well as men do, we have this
notion that when women write about ourselves it's because we're
incapable of creating art. All we can do is scribble like silly,
self-obsessed teenage diarists. De Beauvoir herself provides a good
example of this suspicious take on female literary activity. “Thus
it is well-known,” she writes approvingly in The Second Sex,
“that [the woman] is talkative and a scribbler; she pours out her
feelings in conversations, letters, and diaries. If she is at all
ambitious, she will be writing her memoirs, transposing her biography
into a novel, breathing her feelings into poems.”
Meanwhile, the
Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard has riveted the international
literary community by documenting his life in the form of six
autobiographical novels published between 2009 and 2011. If ever an
author might fairly be called a “compulsive diarist,” surely
Knausgaard would be it. De Beauvoir herself wrote four volumes of
memoirs and a couple of romans a clef. Nevertheless, even today the
female author who writes about herself exposes herself to the
suspicion that she is doing it not as a possibly misguided artistic
choice but because she cannot, by virtue of her gender, create art.
New Yorker
fiction critic James Wood frequently bestows the highest praise on
female authors, so there is presumably some reason other than sexism
that caused him to write a review of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? that is deeply distrustful of its interest in drawing
directly and openly from the author's life (although he did later claim, bafflingly, that the review was a recommendation), and then, a
mere two months later, write a favourable review of the first of
Knausgaard's autobiographical novels. It's probably obvious to many
that a silver-maned Norwegian guy in his early 40s has more gravitas
than a North American woman with whimsical bangs in her early 30s
(Heti was 33 when HSAPB? was published), but not to me.
Although she's a Gen-Xer like me, not a Millennial like Dunham, the
Gen-X Peter Pan (or “puer,” the more exotic term used by Sheila's
Jungian psychoanalyst in the novel) probably has more in common with
Millennial hipsters than with boomers, which, however, naturally
hasn't stopped many Gen-Xers from taking up a stance of hatred toward
Millennials. Maybe it's self-loathing.
I
thought it was absolutely hilarious that the New Yorker
fiction critic distanced himself from the main characters in HSAPB?
on the basis of their “privilege”: “They are writers, artists,
intellectuals, talkers, and they sit around discussing how best to
be. This sounds hideously narcissistic. It is. Who cares about a
bunch or more or less privileged North American artists, at leisure
to examine their creative ambitions and anxieties?” Really? Is this
the same James Wood who went to Cambridge? Is contemplating the art
of the novel, which Wood has been doing for his entire adult life,
somehow less of a “privileged” enterprise than discussing how
best to be? And is Wood upset because Heti's stabs at answering her
“religiously important question,” as he calls it in the first
paragraph, are shallow, or because having the time to contemplate it
is shallow? He doesn't seem to know, but it all makes him
uncomfortable.
Two
Serious Ladies
Yet
this is one of the major questions engaged by the book – and in my
opinion, one of the least interesting aspects of it. HSAPB?
is deeply concerned with the question of whether the people in it
have a right to be making art; whether even making really good art,
as Heti's friend, the painter Margaux, does, is a good use of your
time in such a troubled world, or whether it inevitably makes you a
monstrous narcissist. When an artist takes herself as her subject,
she exposes herself (like Francesca Woodman) to accusations of
narcissism as an ethical failure and aesthetic limitation; or as an
aesthetic failure (as in the case of the female talkers and diarists
De Beauvoir describes), meaning that she is shallow, a lightweight.
Heti takes on these connotations of narcissism in relation to art,
and to the kind of art she is engaged in, but also addresses the
possibility that the whole enterprise of art-making is the
self-indulgence of the privileged.
At
bottom, HSAPB? is the
story of two artists, Sheila and Margaux, their friendship and their
relationship to art. Warning: spoilers ahead. Sheila, who is spending
years trying to write or avoid writing a play that has been
commissioned, is having a crisis of faith regarding not only her own
abilities but her medium – fiction. Her crisis eventually infects
Margaux, who, we have learned, enjoys painting but does not trust the
medium: it is not, for her, an inherent good. Wood is right to detect
a note of anti-art puritanism in the real Heti's comments in
interviews about the motives behind the book's form. Whereas Margaux
(as depicted in the book) seems to worry that she should do something
useful in the world, however, Sheila is convinced that her own life,
and especially her relationship with Margaux, is far more interesting
than any fiction she could manufacture.
At
one point early in their friendship, Margaux mentions how she has
always pined for “a girl as serious as I am.” I found this
annoying since it promotes the sexist fallacy that it's difficult for
smart, thoughtful women to find similar members of their gender to
befriend, which is not a problem that I've ever had. As the book
proceeded, however, it became starkly evident that Margaux and Sheila
were indeed “serious” in some fundamental, elemental, and rather
frightening way (although, interestingly, not in a way that conflicts
with finding them “shallow”). Both women seem spectacularly
neurotic, though it's Sheila's breakdown we witness. There were
moments where Sheila, with her towering writer's block, her
indecisiveness and impulsiveness, her simmering self-loathing, and
her “puer” syndrome, made me think that this is what it would be
like to read Jane Bowles write about herself if she had ever done so
in a directly autobiographical way.
For
me the best stretch of the book occurs when Sheila, after deciding
that she has damaged Margaux obscurely but irreparably, suddenly
takes off for New York City and has a couple of banal, random
encounters with talkative men: a man in a “copy shop” who keeps
trying to gain control of their absurdist conversation about Judaism
and gender, and a man in a bar who tries to pick her up and shares a
cliched story about his marriage that nevertheless manages to be
touching and some thoughts on God. Here Heti shows her skill with
dialogue and opens herself up to other people, people who are not
like her friends, and the strangeness and opacity and pathos and
specificity of the ordinary. Yet while I could have done with more of
these sections, and with less of the short, more-or-less impenetrable
essay-chapters, the variety of forms employed by the book keep it
interesting even as the focus never shifts for long from Sheila's
psyche. There are even a couple of long descriptions of Sheila's
dreams, which I'm sure many would find obnoxious but which I found
both boring and fascinating – especially the second one, which
prompts her decision to return to New York, and in which her
relationship with Margaux – for reasons the reader will never
understand and I'm sure Heti doesn't either – becomes fodder for an
epic vision of sexual violence that would make Roberto Bolano blush.
Where
Wood – perhaps taken in by the book's marketing, which folded it
into the Reality Hunger
trend – sees formlessness, I see a tremendous instinct for
structuring. In fact, the confrontation and crisis followed by an
escape to another location and a return and resolution is the basic
structure of many 19th
century novels – notably, Mansfield Park
(which shares Heti's distrust of theatre). However much she may
hunger for “shapeless” reality, Heti can't stop shaping her
experience, can't stop finding aesthetic correspondences to her
emotions or turning the gathering and relaxation of psychological
tension into pleasurable form – just as Margaux, when she tries to
make her ugly painting, can't get away from her talented hand. I
remember reading some biography of Andy Warhol, or maybe Edie
Sedgwick, in which the biographer or interviewee produced the opinion
that Warhol developed his method of producing art in a lifelong
effort to escape his “talented hand.” Despite what Heti – or
perhaps it's only Sheila – thinks, what's fascinating about HSAPB?
certainly isn't her friends or her conversations with them, but
rather the novel's internal battle between form and dissolution.
How a Woman Should Be
Heti,
as if anticipating the kind of response she will get for writing
about herself, repeatedly begs the reader to find Sheila shallow, and
Wood takes the bait, censoriously quoting her first attempt to answer
the question of her novel's title: “I sometimes wonder about [the
question], and I can't help answering like this: a celebrity.”
Sheila goes on to say, as Wood goes on to quote, that she doesn't
really want fame, though, because she wants – in a Jane Bowlesian
turn of thought – a “simple life,” which is to say, “a life
of undying fame that I don't have to participate in.” It sounds
like a strange thing to wish for until one realizes that this, after
all, describes how we all act on the internet. The internet wasn't
really a revolution in communications technology; it doesn't build on
the phone or the printing press. The internet is really a vehicle for
giving fame to everybody. In fact the internet can't actually do
that, but what it can do is allow everybody to act like they're
famous: post pictures of yourself looking cute so friends can envy
you and strangers can admire you; blog or podcast about your thoughts
as though somebody wanted to hear them. Even if you do develop a
following, the kind of fame that the internet has to offer is, in the
vast majority of cases, not so great that your life will change. You
will not get rich, paparazzi will not stalk you, you will be able to
go to the grocery store, and you will not need plastic surgery.
Again, however, the more important relationship between the internet
and fame is not not that the internet actually makes you famous, but
that it allows you to act like you're already famous in
public.
And
that, I think, is what Heti wants, and what she achieves in HSAPB?
(The internet is more of a model here than reality TV, which actually
can make you famous enough that you have to “participate in it.”)
The quality of fame is the quality of always believing that everyone
wants to know everything about you and cares deeply about your
crises, and it is in that way, perhaps, that we give meaning to our
lives in the easiest fashion in a post-religious world. We've always
needed to believe someone was watching us and finding our lives
fascinating, and it's probably somewhat less egotistical to imagine
that that's the world rather than God. Fame, indeed, may be a large
part of how a person should be.
I
had a strange experience the first time I saw a copy of HSAPB?,
in the Chapters bookstore where I was working. It was the hardcover
version with a yellow-and-orange wraparound cover that showed Heti,
in almost-full profile, facing another young person, a man, with
spiky hair. Although we can only see her face and shoulders and one
arm and hand and a small part of the man's face, it looks like
they're sitting on a couch, and I assumed that they were at a casual
get-together in someone's house. Heti (whom I did not yet know by
name but already took to be the author and subject of the book) looks
quite young, like in her 20s, and neither pretty nor plain. More striking than the refusals of femininity delivered by the too-short bangs and the strong nose is her expression
of slightly disgusted boredom, eyes at narcissistic half-mast, as if
she's lost in thought or a reverie in the middle of the party.
I
grabbed the book in excitement and carried it all the way across the
big-box store to the cash desk to show it to my sister, declaring
that I had never before seen someone who looked so much like me. I
have had too-short bangs in my life; I have a fair-sized nose; above
all, I have worn that expression at parties, and it has been captured
in a photo, when I was around the age that the author probably is on
the book's cover. When later I learned that Heti was Canadian, it all
made sense to me. Canadian women don't look the same as American
women; strong noses sneak into
public more often; there is less pressure to fit a particular mold. Or anyway, that's the story I told myself to explain why I felt such a strong kinship for this author based solely on a photograph.
Having
now googled Heti, I know that we don't actually look much alike at
all, a general indefinable Canadianness aside (and that her book bangs are a trademark, not a mishap).
But upon further
investigation, there were other similarities besides noses and
aloofness. We both started out as playwrights, and attended the
National Theatre School of Canada. We have both struggled mightily to
complete commissioned plays. According to Wikipedia, Heti took a
decade to complete her play, and it was eventually performed, though
not by the theatre that originally commissioned it. The commissioned
play that I struggled with after my husband and I broke up (right,
Heti and I also both married young and briefly) only took me about
three years to write, but it felt longer because I spent way more
time not working on it when I could and should have been working on
it than I did working on it. The commissioning company weren't even
interested enough in the drafts to give it a workshop and we
eventually fell out of contact. I did, however, have a couple of
plays produced before giving up playwriting. Heti describes her
menial post-divorce job of sweeping and shampooing hair at a salon
while trying to write her play; I have done nothing my whole life but
go between bouts of post-secondary education and menial jobs. Heti is
a year-and-a-half younger than me. For all of that, I didn't cry out,
“It's me!” when I read the book, as I did when I saw the photo.
The thing I identified with most in the book, at this point in my
life (late 30s), was the struggle of the author – not the narrator
– with questions of form. Not for form's sake, however, but for the
sake of asking questions about life that, for a write, are
inseparable from questions about representation.
HSAPB?
gets a lot of hate on Goodreads. Heti appears to be as polarizing a
figure in the smaller world of minor literary fame as Dunham is in
the larger world of minor TV fame. It all seems to be young women –
and probably some who are not so young and ought to know better –
frantically trying to distance themselves from
narcissism-by-association, in much the same way that ex-V. C. Andrews
fans turn violently critical of her, devoured by embarrassment, when
they learn that they're supposed to regard her writing as trash. No
one is more passionately devoted to proselytizing about how women
should and should not be and think and write than other women,
especially young ones. Although there are one-star reviews by men, on
the whole the men who do read the book (the majority of reviews,
positive and negative, are by women) seem to have a much less
conflicted relationship with it – and no problem at all identifying
with the “narcissistic” author/narrator/main character.
In
addition to making other white women have tantrums about their
“privilege” (which I guess covers anyone white with a university
education, although Dunham is from an extremely affluent background
and became extremely successful at an extremely young age, whereas
Heti, as far as I know, is from an ordinary middle-class background
and appears to have lived in hipster poverty for much of her adult
life), Dunham and Heti also freak people out with their explicit and
deeply uncomfortable depictions of sex. If you wanted to make
diagnoses about the sex lives of women who were born after
second-wave feminism from the writings of these two women, you'd
start to be really worried. Luckily, I can neither relate to the
misery that Dunham and Heti depict nor tell you whether they're more
representative or I am. Certainly, it's laudable to depict the ways
in which the sex lives of modern heterosexual young women are not
always glamourous, as in the movies, or fulfilling and empowering, as
they're supposed to be if you're a good feminist, but the conclusions
that Dunham and Heti appear to draw about sex do have me worried
about trends. In NTKOG, Dunham presents herself as someone
who, in early youth, was hell-bent on having sexual adventures, only
to learn that this is not possible for a woman because she'll end up
unhappy and possibly abused. In HSAPB?, Heti is definitely in
an abusive relationship, and seems to be seeking some kind of
spiritual experience through her degradation, just as she does with
drugs. The question is whether it's necessary for her to seek it in
that way – that is, whether as a woman the only kind of
sexual adventurousness open to her is abuse – and whether it's
possible for her to experience it that way – that is (as
with drugs), whether she's really achieving some kind of
transcendence in that way or merely indulging her self-destructive
tendencies.
The
Embarrassment of the Contemporary
Dunham
presents herself as someone who knows better, now: to have
self-respect with “jerks” is one of things this young woman has
learned. That is part of the book's self-help language and self-help
leanings, and HSAPB? has also been marketed as, among other
things, a self-help book. This seems to be in order to avoid
cross-marketing it as a philosophy book, which would imply hard
thinking for no purpose to a general audience (or so, I guess,
publishers think), whereas “self-help” implies that the reader's
going to get something important out of the book by the end that will
help them lead a better life. This marketing ploy does, however,
reconnect philosophy with the self-help purposes it has often served
historically. What most people, including most first-year liberal
arts students, want philosophy to be about is asking the big
questions about existence, reality, values, and meaning, and maybe
even coming to some provisional conclusions. These questions remain
important to people, although our present branches of academic
philosophy are not interested in addressing them – neither analytic
nor postmodern philosophy.
Unlike
Dunham, who gamely tries out the persona of wisdom-dispenser even
though it neither suits her as a young person nor plays to her
strengths as a writer (the construction of scenes of sexual or
comedic discomfort), Heti does not come up with any clear answers.
HSAPB? isn't the kind of self-help book whose protagonist
gives you answers, but rather the kind whose protagonist asks
questions, questions that get projected onto Sheila and Margaux's
relationship and played out in that intense, Persona-like
drama. Or not even that: it's clear that Sheila is making up much of
the drama that takes place between her and Margaux. But not all –
Margaux does say some weird things, like when she compares Sheila to
a spider that she'll be forced to kill if it comes too close to her,
but it's impossible to say, from the little we're given, how she
actually sees their relationship. In the end we don't know much of
anything at all: why Sheila has such an extraordinary reaction to
Margaux; how Margaux sees and feels about Sheila; how Margaux is able
to go back to painting after her Sheila-induced vision of herself as
an evil Buddha, full of privilege and empty of empathy. But despite
how little we know, the spectacle of their relationship is
compelling.
One
of the novelistic problems that HSAPB?
seeks, awkwardly, to address, is how to depict contemporary life and
the contemporary subject. That's always the problem of the novel, and
it is never less than urgent. Our contemporary problems always seem
shallow and trivial – for example, our concern that we seem, and
may be, shallow and trivial. This is a particular concern in North
America, which is surely one reason why Knausgaard and the equally
prolific and trendy Italian novelist Elena Ferrante (who writes using
a pseudonym but whose work some have hypothesized to be
autobiographical) do not, overall, generate similar worries in
critics; that, and we probably always look sillier to ourselves; and
Knausgaard and Ferrante are writing domestic narratives, which, while
not immune to charges of self-absorption (for those who prefer
political fiction about world events, say), are less susceptible to them than a novel
about a childless woman who earns money sweeping up hair in a salon,
not because she couldn't get a better job but because she's either
uninterested in or incapable of having one, if there's a difference,
who spends most of her time worrying about the impression she makes
on others and how to improve her blow jobs and doing drugs, and who's
able to impulsively decide to move to New York City and then change
her mind after a few days. Definitely, this is not what we want to
think about when we think, with full gravitas, about “close attention to life as it is actually lived.”
