With the time that I am dedicating to the novel I’m working on, it is hard to set aside time for articles and essays beyond these reading guides. Instead, I am trying to incorporate some of the same cultural and technological analyses in these brief introductions, so they are worth reading even if you did not read the book. Once the first draft of the novel is completed (hopefully this month), I’ll re-dedicate myself to those pieces.
As always, if you want to discuss the book with me 1:1, you can choose a time here. If you prefer to send me your thoughts via the written word, you can respond to this email with a letter of your own. Last month, I really enjoyed chatting with Ranjit, Valentin, Annalisa, and Ben—amongst many others—about The Trial. I’m looking forward to more of those conversations in the coming days.
Dear Friends and Family,
I hope you all are well, especially those of you may be under some sort of alien attack. From my little corner of the world—where the news no longer exists—I only hear about such events from friends who recount them to me as if they are their own strange dreams in which I happened to have made an appearance. This effect makes me even more grateful for my respite: following the ephemeral troubles of the world—specifically those that are out of my control or have little to do with me—is feeling more futile by the day.
Instead, I am scratching my intellectual itch with more rehabilitating mediums: writing, visiting museums, and having conversations with people from different walks of life. But most of all I have been reading voraciously, actively choosing dramas and tragedies that have passed through the generations over those that are here today, gone tomorrow.
To encourage this habit, I have taken to walking through cities without my phone, only with a novel in hand. The experience has been nourishing across every dimension.
Last week, I walked through Recoleta and lay in the parks of Palermo where I reread Tender is the Night. My attention wandered from its pages to the rustling of the trees to nearby ponds and back. Such distractions are not distractions at all—the slow pace of nature rejuvenates where the iPhone depletes.
After dusting off the park’s grass, I walked down tree-lined boulevards to a restaurant known for its Asian cuisine. While I waited some twenty minutes for the table, I dove back into Dick Diver’s harrowing world, untroubled by a pace infamous for driving me and every other New Yorker mad. By the time I reached home, I was full of the quiet tired exhaustion that follows a golden afternoon on the beach before I slipped off into peaceful dreams.
Who would have thought such a simple trick could be so impactful?
§
This month’s book—as hopefully all of you know—was The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath. Since my cousin, Maya, told me about this book last year, I’ve been yearning to read it, and now I have finally satisfied my longing.
All novels at some level are autobiographical, which is to say that even when JK Rowling and Salman Rushdie—two heroes of mine—write fantastically, it is still coming from their own perspectives and real-life experiences. As Rushdie puts it:
My books reflect the different states of consciousness through which I have gone at diverse periods in my life. With the passing of time, your ideas and your relationship to things change. Also, there’s physical change. I’ve moved from countries twice, first from India to England, then from England to the United States. That has shaped my books, which make up a truer autobiography than if I had written one literally. My books are the autobiography of my imagination.
While I enjoy such novels at times, my favorites are roman à clefs, which is why I was so excited to read a lightly fictionalized version of Plath’s experience of New York and Massachusetts. I wanted to walk through Plath’s mind, feeling her pains and submerging myself in her troubles, though I did not know how monstrous they would turn out to be.
Although there is nothing quite as lovely as a tragedy, Plath’s bleak world was of a darkness I had never experienced—a terminal inescapable sinking black hole. Where others offer segments of the heroic tale, she offered almost none, which made it difficult at times for me to connect with the story, at some level, while still being moved to her worlds through her sensory descriptions:
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
These descriptions were complemented by her proficiency with manifold metaphors that pushed one all the way into her mind:
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
However, at times she casually—almost carelessly—used ineffectual ones where none were necessary:
Doreen's breasts had popped out of her dress and were swinging out slightly like full brown melons
The tropical, stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a last insult.
I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Other writers, such as Fitzgerald, rarely descend from beauty to mere prettiness in this way. Even his simplest metaphors have layers of poetic and psychological depth:
The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste.
A vast persuasive quiet stole over him, and he abandoned sickness to the sick, sound to the motors, direction to the pilot.
— from Tender is the Night
Of course, Plath’s style is more modern and less ornate than Fitzgerald’s; and in many ways, her voice was easier to follow than his in Tender is the Night. She showcased a phenomenal ability for storytelling on each page that gives you the sense that you are sitting with her in a park, listening to her as she would speak in conversation. She moves you through the story fluidly, the way a close friend might over beers after time apart:
These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.
Just as she is unafraid of moving from simple to florid language, she is unafraid of touching taboo subjects and describing the difficulties of the human and female experience—rape, sexism, and depression—in explicit detail. In The Bell Jar, Plath solidifies her contribution as one of the pioneering members of confessional poetry in which personal trauma is examined in detail. With little difficulty, one can trace the influence of her work directly to the highly popular A Little Life, which I have not read on account of it being described as The Bell Jar on acid set in Hell.
By discussing the details of both her mental illness and her treatment, Plath gives us an insight into what medical institutions were like at the time, and from our modern perspective they appear awful and cruel, begging the question: What will our current therapies look like to men and women in fifty years? Should thousands—if not millions—of children be prescribed Ritalin? Should doctors give out SSRIs as freely as they do? How effective is modern therapy?
Novels give us a unique opportunity to understand history and compare it to modernity; and Plath’s flowing rhythmic voice makes the world of the 1960s more accessible—and perhaps more accurate—than what is found in historical textbooks. She pours the female experience into readers, and she floods them with the type of suffering that causes someone to take their own life. Plath deserves tremendous credit for painting these pictures so well.
I’m looking forward to reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner next month as well as hearing from those of you who want to share your thoughts on this piece.
Warmly,
Arjun
Review:
I thought it was funny, until I got to the 40-odd pages of suicidal ideation. Those were creative, but distressing.
1. I intended to read this quickly. [Pro-tip: It's easy to read if you just read the first sentence in each paragraph. You'll pick up the important bits of what you missed later.]
2. She focused on fashion, clothes and appearances. At first, I thought this was just a stylistic trait for the book Later, I felt it had much more to do with the underlying narrative arch.
3. Jewish/Catholic. Is this a thing? Probably more of a think when she was writting than right now.
4. At the beginning, I was trying to skip to the madness. Then, I realized it was there already. Visually. Already there.
5. Idioms?
6. Yale?
7. And Constantine. What's up with him, right? User or loser?
FYI: R/ I'm reading this as a non-woman.
R
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