Dear readers,
Back before the memoir boom, when the barbaric neologism “autofiction” wasn’t yet in vogue, a more remarkable vocabulary was used when works of fiction flirted with personal revelation. The events of life were “covered with a thin veil.” The stories were “semi-autographic”, their gossipy value indicated by the French term roman à clef. You could imagine someone, possibly the author, whispering in your ear, “But you know who that is Really supposedly…“
Some degree of self-exposure—not fully naked, but not fully clothed either—was part of the work of the novel. Rewriting personal experience as fiction can be a way of processing trauma, getting revenge, or asserting control over emotional chaos. Some novels work hard to transform the material and show the work. Others, like the two below, wear the mantle of artifice lightly, creating an intimacy with readers that carries a hint of prism. Are we supposed to really know about it? In this age of perpetual TMI, it’s good to be reminded that decorating can be its own kind of transgression.
And who doesn’t love someone’s family secrets being told – especially if said someone is witty, stylish and brutally honest? Other people’s parents can be wonderful monsters, and the act of portraying them in this way combines Oedipal rebellion and filial loyalty. In these books, dutiful children turn the tables on their parents, spawning them as awesome, pathetic, unforgettable characters.
—AO
Merrill gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s as a poet. His father, Charles, was the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, a man of enormous wealth and influence whose marriages and divorces were the stuff of society pages in the first half of the 20th century. In this slim novel, the first of two published by James Merrill during his lifetime (both included in a 2002 omnibus along with Merrill’s works), Charles becomes Benjamin Tanning, a charming bluff with acute heart problems and chronic women’s problems.
His son, Francis, interrupts his stay in Rome to help care for his father, joining a Hamptons club full of cocktails, generational resentment, and high-stakes sexual intrigue. What follows is a comedy of manners of a superior nature with decidedly sinister undertones, as if Edith Wharton, Patricia Highsmith and the Marquis de Sade had sat down to a roundhouse game.
Readers of Merrill’s memoir A Different Person (1993) or Langdon Hammer’s comprehensive biography will recognize many of the characters and incidents. Perhaps most impressive, aside from the patriarch himself, is Guitou Knoop (Xenia in “The Seraglio”), a flamboyant sculptor commissioned to create a the heroic bust of Pope Merrill. But beware: A shocking act of self-inflicted violence catapults the novel from proto-autofiction into the realm of gothic psychodrama. Although that was probably all along.
Read if you like: Chintz, Cinzano, cold lobster, chinoiserie
Available from: Your uncle’s rich bachelor’s cottage. a well-curated used bookstore in a not-so-rundown New England beach town
“The Furies”, by Janet Hobhouse
Novel, 1992
On the back of my hardcover copy of Hobhouse’s posthumously published novel is a sweeping quote from Philip Roth, praising the book as “an important moral and literary achievement.” About two-thirds of the way through, the narrator, Helen, newly married and living in New York, has an affair with a downstairs neighbor, a well-known novelist named Jack, who bears a strong casual and idiosyncratic resemblance to … Philip Roth .
“I admired his fasting,” Hobhouse writes, winking at Kafka, one of Roth’s heroes. “I admired his stony detachment and self-sufficiency. I admired the smallness of his needs, the stability of his routines: his exercise weights, his evening runs, his early nights. I read all the symptoms of his current loneliness and depression as choices, heroic and exemplary.”
Their yearning – Helen and Jack’s, just to keep the thin veil in place – is a short, memorable chapter in a bildungsroman wrapped up in a multi-generational matriarchal saga. Hobhouse traces the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes by focusing on its women, the wives and mothers who might be consigned to the margins of official history.
It begins with Mirabelle, Helen’s great-grandmother, the kind of imposing New York governess that Edith Wharton might have appreciated (even if Wharton might have found her Jewish demeanor distasteful). The central figure, however, is Mirabelle’s granddaughter, Bette, who raises her daughter in precarious circumstances, going from job to job and man to man, squandering her potential, even as her own mother and her aunts had let the family fortune go to waste.
Bett’s story is terribly sad and told with a surprising mixture of pity, rage and affection. Hobhouse’s story is also a sad one: The author of three other novels and two books on art, she was in her 40s when she died of ovarian cancer, leaving “The Furies” unfinished. Helen, her alter ego, shares her illness, as well as a kind of intense clarity that goes far beyond resilience, the default word for people who have suffered. Roth calls this quality estrus — the italics are his — and I don’t know many books that show so many of them, in such distressing circumstances.
Read if you like: Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, Eve Babitz. Compare and contrast with ‘Asymmetry’, by Lisa Halliday.
Available from: A good used bookstore or from New York Review Classics, which reissued it in 2004, with an insightful introduction by Daphne Merkin
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