Dear Sarah, In your debut novel See What I Have Done (2017), we are brought inside the dysfunctional household of the Border family, only to be trapped, along with the characters, in a suffocating atmosphere of sweat, sweltering heat, mutilated pigeons, rotten food, a plate of leftovers, and ripening fruit. It’s claustrophobic. It’s salty, dirty,…
Category: Scarlet Letters
The delicacy of one’s intellect, one’s sanity, when it is laid open to the specialists
Dear Mary Jane, In your autobiographical novel The Snake Pit (1946) you throw us right inside the mind of a woman struggling to recover mental health. You make us feel in the heat of things, trapped in her delusions – to the point where it is very difficult for us to know where exactly, in…
It was her portion in that dower of genius which belonged to all her kindred; she carried it like a torch
Dear Margaret, In your novel The Constant Nymph (1924), you left open some carefully disguised questions you later explored once again in your book The Forgotten Smile (1961): can society truly accommodate art and genius? Or does it inevitably destroy it? Yours is also a question about where to locate true morality: is value created by social…
For this book is the talking voice that runs on,
Dear Stevie, Once I entered your Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), I immediately noticed three things: that I was being held captive; that I was complicit in my captivity; and that the thing that held me inside was neither plot nor character, but something less tangible. I had fallen in love with a voice. Yours,…
The taste of the fog was at the back of their throats
Dear Elizabeth, Do you know this feeling we have when we quite unexpectedly understand why a particular book is a classic? When we understand what it means; when we suddenly get to know what it feels like. Have you ever felt it? When a book draws from a tradition it so thoroughly understands that it…
Home is a place in the mind
Dear Maeve, If your novella The Visitor (2000, originally written in the 1940’s) had a face, it would be one of a trapped animal, diverted from its burrow, silently showing its teeth to its predator. A strange and moveable mask that would convey a mixture of fear, loneliness, and ferocious anger. The story opens with…
From now on I shall only wear white,
Dear Nuala, Sometimes I feel that your novel Miss Emily (2015) is haunted by the ghost of something – a bird? – it distractedly let slip out of its realm of possibilities. It centers around the relationship between the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson and a fictional Irish housemaid named Ada Concannon. The story is set…
his plunging spirit had got stuck in the glue of convention and hypocrisy
Dear Vita, You begin your novel The Edwardians (1930) with a very curious note: “No character in this book is wholly fictitious.” It gives us a hint to what the book will taste like: melancholic and ambiguous, both an imaginative expansion upon the life you knew well and a deep immersion on its contradictions. The…
Shut the noise out with your own noise
Dear Patricia, WHILE READING your novel Deep Water (1957), I felt as if you had gradually thrust us into the muddy waters of your protagonist’s troubled mind. The book is narrated in third person through the perspective of Vic Van Allen, an inhibited man in his late thirties, who runs a small press in the…
And it could have been any street in the city
Dear Ann, How can one write a naturalist novel and still convey strong symbolic effect? I don’t know the answer, but I think you achieved that. The Street (1946) in your first novel is both a concrete space and a distorting mirror for a perverse version of the American Dream, a thin surface impossible to…
I do know how to behave – believe me, because I know. I have always known.
Dear Molly, If I had to describe your novel Good Behaviour (1981) in one word I would say: merciless. As merciless as the code of conduct in which your characters lock away lies, family secrets, sex, power struggles, and grief: the social mores, the rules of caste and patterns of good behaviour. Underneath this etiquette’s…
I don’t know what my limits are anymore
Dear Irmgard, The eponymous heroine of your novel Gilgi (2013, tr. Geoff Wilkes. Original title: Gilgi, eine von uns, 1931) is a twenty-one-year-old German middle-class girl who lives in Cologne, during the rise of fascism, in the 1930s. Gilgi, short for Gisela, is independent, matter-of-fact, and ambitious: she is determined to climb the social ladder and…
