In this episode of Private Life, “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” is read by writer Alissa Bennett. This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Oates discussing her novels, essays, and the improbability of her life. You can also read “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” on our website here. 

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They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life. 

Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,”  about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year.

The post Joyce Carol Oates on True Crime, Her Improbable Life, and Joan Didion appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Murderland is Fraser’s first book since her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017). The product of vast research into the correlation between violent behavior and neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants (lead, asbestos, arsenic) in the blood, it is an amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and a startlingly candid memoir of Fraser’s girlhood in the Seattle area in “the time of serial killers”—both individual and corporate. Its theme is simple and terrible enough to be repeated time and again through four-hundred-plus pages: “More lead, more murder.”

Fraser isn’t shy about identifying the progenitors of “America’s killing fields”—those areas of the United States most polluted by mining, refining, and heavy industry that have also, surely not coincidentally, spawned a nightmare cast of sexual sadist–psychopaths, including the notorious Ted Bundy (Tacoma, Washington), Dennis Rader/BTK (southeastern Kansas—part of the “lead belt”), Richard Ramirez (El Paso, Texas), the unidentified Zodiac Killer (somewhere in California), and many others best relegated to a footnote.¹ But these killers are small fry, mere amateurs set beside the multimillionaire purveyors of environmental toxins: “It takes two great American family fortunes to build a city of serial killers: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims.”

The focus of Murderland is the poisonous legacy of the Guggenheims, owners of the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO). Acquired in 1901 by Daniel Guggenheim and his brother, the Tacoma-based ASARCO eventually expanded into “a behemoth operating as a near monopoly, one of the most economically and politically powerful entities in the world, governing 90 percent of American lead production.” It has also been one of the world’s largest producers of arsenic, “one of the most hazardous substances known to man.” As early as 1913 it was understood that smelter smoke (which contains sulphur, arsenic, lead, and zinc, among other emissions) is poisonous to living things; the industry defended itself by building higher smokestacks. (Engineers promised that the taller the smokestack, the less it would pollute the environment: “‘Sulphurous fumes’ will blow away in the wind.”) For a time ASARCO’s Tacoma smokestack was “the tallest stack in the world and the highest industrial structure on the West Coast.” By the time of the Depression, Fraser notes, Tacoma was so steeped in pollution, corruption, and violence that the ex-Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett used it as the setting for his first novel, Red Harvest (1929), calling the city “Poisonville.”

Even as the Guggenheim family expanded its highly profitable business through the Pacific Northwest and points south, including South America (Peru, Chile, Bolivia), and “bought its way into culture” through the establishment of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925, unchecked ASARCO smelters spewed lead into the air:

What is lead? It is a poison, second in toxicity only to arsenic…. It burns with a white flame. It’s resistant to corrosion…. It enters the world in many ways, including but not limited to “oil-processing activities, agrochemicals, paint, smelting, mining, refining, informal recycling of lead, cosmetics, peeling window and door frames, jewelry, toys, ceramics, pottery, plumbing materials and alloys, water from old pipes, vinyl mini-blinds, stained glass, lead-glazed dishes, firearms with lead bullets, batteries, radiators for cars and trucks.”… Lead is a vampire. Invite it in and it will drink your blood and live forever.

In Philadelphia in the late 1940s, where Ted Bundy lived as a small child before being brought by his unmarried mother to Tacoma, there were no fewer than thirty-six lead smelters:

Along the rivers, in crowded residential neighborhoods, furnaces burn raw ore until it flows, and their smokestacks pour the leftovers of that combustion into the air for all to breathe: tons of ultrafine particles that float and fall out and settle on the roofs and sidewalks, in the backyards and on the brick stoops and windowsills of the city. These clouds are poison, and their benign white visage cloaks the ghostly forms and features of uglier phantoms. Cadmium, mercury, and arsenic. Benzene, naphthalene, anthracene. Cyanide. Burned in the hellfire of private enterprise, set free on an unsuspecting world, they will have their revenge.

Not surprisingly, so-called experts in the pay of the poison industry have always denied that toxic air, water, and earth can harm people. A Washington State Health Department epidemiologist insisted as late as 1972 that there is “absolutely no evidence that the amount of arsenic people are being exposed to around the smelter has caused any acute health effects at all.” The US Public Health Service assured citizens that though workers and their children bore high levels of lead and arsenic, there were no “adverse effects.” (At that time the federal limit for lead levels in blood was set so high that even heavily exposed children did not appear, on paper, to be poisoned.) Toxicologists argued that lead in the environment and in human bodies was “natural,” until in the 1950s it began to be acknowledged, thanks to researchers at Caltech, that Americans were likely suffering from “enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality.”

Murderland makes no claim to originality in its basic premise that companies like ASARCO have poisoned countless citizens and may be responsible for the sort of prefrontal brain damage that characterizes serial killers. It is Fraser’s strategy to bring these revelations together and to hammer home what has been known but too easily forgotten. She cites the early, bluntly titled article “Does Lead Create Criminals?” (1974), which argued that lead emissions may be a factor in the rise of juvenile delinquency, adult crime rates, and aggressive behavior generally; children exposed to lead in utero or during their first years of life might display a dizzying array of symptoms: “Some are mentally dull, suffering from difficulties in reading and writing…. Others are bright but hyperactive, with short attention spans. Some are impulsive, some violent.” Fraser writes that in 2005, in the journal Biological Psychiatry, it was noted that

structural deficits in the prefrontal cortex…can be seen in so-called unsuccessful psychopaths….

[Researchers] find that lead exposure in childhood is linked to brain volume loss when their subjects reach adulthood, and that the effects are particularly notable in men.

(“Unsuccessful psychopath” is the term for a psychopath who gets caught.)

How unexpected is it, in what has been a damning inventory of rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers, that in the concluding chapter of Murderland the revered names Roger Straus Jr. and Farrar, Straus and Company abruptly emerge, linked to the Guggenheim family fortune and foundations “devoted to subsidizing culture” or, less romantically, “whitewashing the family name”? Fraser is scathingly ironic in addressing this “whitewashing” in the figure of Straus, a “storied publisher, one of several Guggenheims who’ve managed to slide off the slag pile and cover his coattails in cultural glory.” The cofounder of Farrar, Straus and Company in 1945, Straus was the publisher of Metal Magic: The Story of the American Smelting and Refining Company (1949), “a tribute to the ‘romance of mining,’ dedicated to the memory of Daniel Guggenheim.” In a 2002 New Yorker profile titled “Showboat: Roger Straus and His Flair for Selling Literature,” much is made of Straus’s sartorial extravagance and the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning authors his firm has published, but the origins of the family fortune are never acknowledged, Fraser writes:

Daniel Guggenheim’s name floats by, but the American Smelting and Refining Company is never named. Not a word about its suppurating Superfund sites, its asbestos lawsuits, its free hand with arsenic, or the lung cancer it has bestowed on communities all across the American West. Nobody wants to remember where the money comes from.

Whatever the Sackler family is trying to do by collecting art and endowing museums, lifting their skirts away from the hundreds of thousands addicted and killed by prescription opioids manufactured and sold by their company—Purdue Pharma—the Guggenheims have already stealthily and handily accomplished.

Though Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner. Folded into the charges against corporate polluters like ASARCO are passages that fairly spring off the page:

As [World War II] rages to its conclusion, monsters are coming to life, animated. The greatest generation of serial killers comes out of the war: Richard Speck and Fred West are born in 1941; Ted Kaczynski, John Wayne Gacy, James Homer Elledge, and the rare female lust murderer Carol Bundy (no relation to Ted) in 1942; Gary Heidnik and Rodney Alcala in 1943; Dennis Rader, Joseph DeAngelo, Randy Kraft, Leonard Lake, and Arthur Shawcross in 1945; William Earl Cosden Jr., Ted Bundy…in 1946; Herbert Mullin in 1947; Ed Kemper in 1948; Gary Ridgway, Robert Pickton, and Warren Leslie Forrest in 1949.

(Fraser might have added Randy Woodfield, born in 1950, another in the litany of serial killers in Murderland who as a child lived in the spume of airborne toxic waste.)

Commemorating the many victims of serial killers, many of them unnamed, unknown, Fraser’s prose is lyrical, elegiac:

There are so many. Skulls, skeletons. The disarticulated. Delicate bones cast in the leaf litter. Vine maple threading through the eye sockets. Silence in the duff. The recently dead waiting patiently in rivers, rigor long passed, facial effacement, hair weaving with the current. Bows, flows.

The places where these turn up make a map all their own.

But it is, for the true crime aficionada, the perpetrators of atrocities who excite the attention, for these are the active agents of horror. Ted Bundy, for instance, the very emblem of the long-successful serial killer, is, in Fraser’s striking language, “that productive son of Tacoma [who] leaves women dead in his wake the way ASARCO blows smoke.” It is Bundy, and others similarly poisoned by the air they breathed as children, whom she is determined to record in what she calls her Great Domesday,

a ledger tracking those permeated with heavy metals, volatile chemicals, tar, creosote, chromium, arsenic, carcinogens, mutagens, and whatever’s leaching out of pressure-treated lumber. Dr. Jekyll has been at work here for a long time, nearly a hundred years, and his experiments are about to yield results. Spectacular results.

Yet Fraser interrupts her narrative frequently to speak of herself, growing up on Mercer Island, near Seattle, breathing smelter air only slightly less toxic than the air breathed by Bundy in his boyhood. “I have a grid of the island I lived on with a pin in one serial killer’s house, 1,232 yards from where I grew up,” she writes. Within the dense pages of Murderland such memoirist passages are appended, sometimes rather awkwardly, to the book’s less personal concerns. They glitter like small precious gems within a slag heap of ugliness, giving us fleeting glimpses of a precocious child, a girl, a young woman coming of age in the 1960s. The precocious child likes “reading about bad things happening to other people.” She is morbidly fascinated by movie monsters, TV vampires, serial killers. Years later, on leave from graduate school at Harvard, she finds herself living in Los Angeles “in the providential span between the Hillside Strangler and the Night Stalker” with a boyfriend she describes as “almost catatonically silent” who has once tried to strangle her and may well try again.

As the chronicler of Murderland Fraser doesn’t identify herself as wholly alien to Bundy et al. in the way that writers usually detach themselves from subjects as horrific as hers. And she doesn’t detach herself from the instinct to kill, not serially but in her girlhood wish to murder her father and, perhaps most surprisingly, her disappointment as an adult that she never did. So tyrannical and perpetually angry is this father who seems always bent upon punishing his daughter and everyone else in his vicinity that the reader can sympathize with the child Caroline, fuming with hatred of him and plotting his death, initially with a letter opener, stabbing him right between the eyes, and more practicably when he insists on taking his family out, in “freezing gray rain,” in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the thirty-foot sailboat he has forced them to help him build by hand:

My plan is to push him. Choose the right spot and no one will see. It will require split-second timing, careful consideration of distance from shore and of speed, momentum, and other boats: We will have to be moving fast enough to get far enough away from him before my mother can figure out what’s happening…. A crack on the head wouldn’t hurt either. He can swim. We all know he can shout. It must look like an accident.

One shove. And overboard. He’s my problem, and that’s how I should solve it.

Later in life, one phrase will come to mind, after my father has died without much help from me. I’ll think: I should have killed him while I had the chance. For years, years in which he does a lot of damage. I have means, motive, and opportunity. Yet I lack an essential quality: a single-minded commitment. Unaccountably, I fail to act. I am still sorry.

But not everyone holds back. Not everyone fails.

Not everyone fails. Fraser’s cast of serial killers do not fail.

Of these, it is Ted Bundy who best embodies the single-minded commitment to kill, kill, and kill again. Not for Bundy (once called a “terrific looking man,” an “all-American boy,” and “Kennedyesque” in The New York Times Magazine) the timidity of holding back. It might be said that devotees of true crime are as familiar with his sordid life story as devotees of boxing are with the triumphant life story of Muhammad Ali—must it be recounted yet again? And at such length, with such unsparing details? Fraser seems to think so, reimagining Bundy’s rape-murder sprees in a sort of hyperventilating prose, providing a painstakingly precise record disproportionate to the larger project of Murderland, and often quick-cutting to the rape-murder sprees of Bundy’s contemporaries Dennis Rader, Richard Ramirez, the Zodiac Killer, and the Green River Killer at exhaustive length. If the thesis of Murderland is that there’s a lethal connection between environmental contamination and violent crime, it is probably not necessary to evoke sexual-sadistic murders one by one or to appear to be vicariously reliving Bundy’s most thrilling moments, especially since thousands of pages have been published about him, starting with Ann Rule’s now-classic The Stranger Beside Me (1980).

Bearing the ignominy, in the 1940s, of being “illegitimate,” Bundy seemed always to be in a polluted environment. In 1953, for instance, when he was seven, he was living close to the Ruston smelter near Tacoma, where in a single year 630 tons of arsenic and two hundred tons of lead were released into the air—“more airborne arsenic than anywhere else in the country.” Soon he began to exhibit antisocial, violent behavior, particularly directed toward girls. It is likely that he committed his first murder at the age of fourteen, of an eight-year-old girl who disappeared from the neighborhood; her body was never recovered.

Through the 1960s and 1970s Bundy was continually in motion: “He is buying gas, leaded gas, virtually every day of every month.” He moved about restlessly in Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Florida (after escaping from jail in Colorado), sexually assaulting and brutally murdering young women, often raping their bodies after their deaths. He was romantically involved with young women in apparently normal relationships and even engaged for a while to a young divorced mother named Elizabeth Kloepfer, who as early as December 1975 contacted Salt Lake City police to alert them that her fiancé might be a killer they were looking for and was assured that they’d already checked him out—“nothing to worry about.” In one of his numerous jobs he was an affable, well-liked staffer for the Republican Party of Washington state. (Is it surprising that Bundy was a staunch believer in law and order and a counterprotester after the Kent State shootings who railed against “radical socialist types”?)

Fraser’s accounts of Bundy’s many stalkings and killings suggest that his behavior was near-robotic, compulsive; most of his (more than thirty) young women victims resembled one another closely enough to be relatives, with long dark hair. His assaults were usually opportunistic, a matter of chance. In May 1973 “he picks up a hitchhiker near Olympia and murders her and doesn’t catch her name.” In February 1974, “on an isolated mountain hillside, where there is no one within screaming distance, [Bundy] removes her from the car, rapes her again, and strangles her. He spends the night with her body.” (Fraser’s euphemism for necrophilia.) In October 1974 “he spends the night raping her. He murders her the next day, dumping her body somewhere in the vast Utah wilderness…. Her remains are never found.”

Eventually, like many compulsive killers, Bundy becomes more reckless. Fraser calls it “riding a doomsday high”:

After years of sporadic attacks on stewardesses and hitchhiking teenagers and random strangers, he is graduating to ever riskier pursuits, assaulting women in his own neighborhood, on his own street. His sorties are growing ever more complex as he enters the giddy-making higher atmosphere of the true aesthete, the collector, the marathon killer…. He is becoming addicted to these activities, and, like any user, he is finding that it takes more and more product to meet his needs.

Fraser evokes Bundy’s acts as if in a dreamlike present in which the scrim between author and subject vanishes as in a David Lynch film of surreal yet becalmed nightmare. In one passage Bundy is driving his doomed victim across Mercer Island just “a few hundred yards from where I am asleep in bed in my room next to the carport and our own VWs”:

He pulls her out of the car. She’s “quite lucid,” Ted will recall, as he strips off her clothes…. Either before or after he takes off her clothes and rapes her, he hits her again with the crowbar and breaks her jaw and strangles her with a piece of rope, raping her body all night until the sun comes up, although the only witness attesting to this sequence of events is wholly unreliable.

Rarely has a true crime chronicler entered so ardently into the imagined consciousness of her subject, who in his “sunny daylight guise” can pass himself off as purely normal, indeed the preppy, handsome Republican Party staffer. But, more thrillingly,

when the chemical finery comes into play, he morphs into another being, wordless and barely human: he’s the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm. He’s a modern monstrosity who, “for all his energy of life,” is something “not only hellish but inorganic.” A sexual virus masquerading as a person, usurping “the offices of life”…as [he] rejoices in beating and choking females to death, ejaculating in every orifice of their unconscious bodies.

In speaking boastfully of himself in various interviews, Bundy was never so eloquent as Fraser in describing his actions.

Sharing 1970s serial killer celebrity with Bundy in the more sensational pages of Murderland is the far cruder Dennis Rader, aka BTK (“Bind, Torture, Kill”—Rader’s nickname for himself), a Christian, churchgoing family man of Wichita, Kansas, who in a letter sent decades before he was caught attributed his penchant for sexually sadistic murders to “factor X”:

You don’t understand these things because your not under the influence of factor X. The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, Havery Glatman [sic], Boston Strangler, Dr. H.H. Holmes Panty Hose Strangler of Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of the West Coast and many more infamous character kill. Which seems senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure, except death or being caught and put away. It a terrible nightmare but, you see I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Very likely, BTK speaks for all his serial-killer cohort, including Ted Bundy. Nothing lyrical or romantic about it—just factor X. (An X-ray of Bundy’s skull at the time of his first trial, in 1976, was reported to show “some nonunion of coronal suture” in his brain; the coronal suture normally fuses by around age twenty-four, but this was not the case with him. Very possibly, Fraser hypothesizes, the result of “a little too much lead.”)

True crime documentaries and podcasts are said to be particularly popular with women. Though women are the victims of most of these “true crimes,” they are usually solved and the perpetrators punished, which is often not the case in life, particularly where sexual crimes are concerned. Readers unfamiliar with the life and career of Ted Bundy, even readers sympathetic to revoking the death penalty, will be relieved to hear that after years of police blundering and incompetence and the sort of sexist laissez faire that allows prosecutors not to pursue charges of sexual assault if they can avoid it, especially against all-American types like Bundy, he was finally captured for the last time in 1978 in Florida, where, in two trials, he was found guilty of murder and received three death sentences; after appeals, he was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in 1989. (“The person who throws the switch, never identified, is said to have been a woman.”)

Though Bundy eventually confessed to thirty murders, which included cutting the heads off some of his victims and keeping them, Fraser notes that he could not bring himself to describe to investigators the full extent of his violence, necrophilia, and mutilation of the women’s bodies.² Still, Bundy’s vanity led him to represent himself at his trial; ever the sexual sadist, he insisted on cross-examining witnesses, including police officers who had discovered the bodies of his victims, and drawing out their testimonies. Fraser notes that according to newspaper accounts he appeared to be “savoring the clinical description of his handiwork,…reliving a moment of profound sexual gratification.”

Despite Fraser’s penchant for gruesome details, Murderland does not end on a wholly pessimistic note. The reader is relieved to hear that, like Bundy, ASARCO was dealt some punishment for its crimes. In 2009 federal and state agencies extracted a landmark settlement of $1.79 billion to go to nineteen states, not much by contemporary standards but at least some retribution to help clean up the despoiled environment: “However inadequate for these Augean stables, it’s a bonanza.”

Following the suicide of the grisly serial killer Israel Keyes in Alaska in 2012, Fraser asserts, with surprising certainty, that the “era of murder” has passed—“one hour of lead.” Tacoma is still not a pretty city, she acknowledges, but after millions of dollars of industry cleanup, “there’s little of the age-old aroma.” Stricter environmental protections in the 1990s are credited with having prevented the sort of brain damage that may have resulted in the serial killers of past decades. It is true that in the 1990s there were 669 serial killers known to police in the United States, in the 2000s 371, and from 2010 to 2020 just 117, but serial killers are only one category of killers in the United States and have statistically been relatively small in number considering the population. The Supreme Court’s recent restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pollutants and the Trump administration’s efforts to rescind existing regulations, however, do not bode well for the continuing decline in those numbers.

The sympathetic reader is inclined to inquire: Why are sexual serial killers the sole concern of Murderland, rather than mass murderers, school shooters, and domestic terrorists, so much more representative of the current violence of the United States? It is likely that gun violence also springs from mental illness or brain dysfunction, whether caused by lead-spewing smelters or hate-spewing right-wing media, not to mention (as Fraser does not) the prevalence in the US of every sort of firearm and ever more lax gun control laws.

Fraser ends Murderland with a passionate plea:

Those were the days, my friends, and they may or may not ever end. But take heart: I have a plan. I have an incantation.

I curse you, you corporate scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites, rubbing your hands over whited sepulchres full of dead women’s bones. You think you’re getting away with it. Just you wait.

I rewrite your Bible, restoring the Gospel of Judith, her with a sword.

I declare this: Do not be about your father’s business. Your father’s business is rape and murder….

Now and forever, let it all be over.

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Lord, I have been more chased than chaste.
—Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

Seemingly out of nowhere, precociously aphoristic and coolly unsentimental, the debut novel Ex-Wife appeared in 1929 to much scandalized acclaim; originally published anonymously, it brought a life-altering celebrity to its hitherto unknown author, Ursula Parrott, just thirty years old, who found herself not only controversial and an immediate best seller but, more questionably, something of a spokesperson for the “new woman” of the era—a female counterpart to her almost exact contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the trajectory of her career as in its vicissitudes, Parrott is more akin to Fitzgerald than to Hemingway, whose expatriate characters and stark themes of war, manly valor, and the ubiquity of death-in-life take him far from the domestic dramas of romantic disillusion, marital strife, and divorce that preoccupied Parrott and Fitzgerald and made them, each for a vertiginous while, rich.

Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective, Parrott examined the fraying social fabric in the aftermath of World War I, the final vestiges of a Victorian era in which the place of a woman was defined almost exclusively in reference to men: fathers, husbands, ex-husbands, lovers. In the pre-war world to be a woman was to inhabit a role; the essence of the role was duty. But in the 1920s to be a woman was to find oneself with no specific role and to confront a radically altered landscape in which the confining security of the past could no longer be taken for granted. “An ex-wife is a young woman for whom the eternity promised in the marriage ceremony is reduced to three years or five or eight,” wrote Parrott in Ex-Wife.

This rueful-wise voice of Parrott’s divorcées set the tone for much of her writing from 1929 to 1947, when she published approximately 130 works: novels, stories, novelettes, and serials. (Of these, only Ex-Wife is currently in print, in a new edition.) In her prime in the 1930s Parrott was earning the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; like Fitzgerald, she found a financially bounteous market in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Unfortunately, like Fitzgerald, she managed to outspend this extravagant income, invariably finding herself in debt and dependent on publishers’ advances and the gradually waning support of editors and friends; her talent for prose would come to seem, in the later years of her productivity, fueled by desperation. Holding an unsparing mirror up to herself and others of her generation, Parrott dramatized the oscillating fortunes of a fitful life that reads like the script for a screwball comedy veering into something like crude farce and finally a sordid sort of tragedy.

Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands, and an abrupt, pseudohappy ending when the ex-wife decides, for purely pragmatic reasons, to marry a man she doesn’t love: “Yet I shall hope, through all my youth, through all my life, that in some far city I shall find my love again.”

At its most entertaining Ex-Wife is a Broadway play in novel form, with briskly clever dialogue tending toward the comic-aphoristic, as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era. The setting is an upscale Manhattan world of high-priced restaurants, hotels, and speakeasies in which young divorcées find themselves popular yet exploited by men. “They all want to sleep with us,” the novel’s narrator, Patricia, complains to her fellow ex-wife Lucia. “So soon as they get here for dinner they begin arranging to stay for breakfast.”

When the women are alone together their rapid-fire one-liners spring from the page: “An ex-wife is just a surplus woman, like those the sociologists used to worry about, during the war”; “Ex-wives…young and handsome ex-wives like us, illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.” Sagely Lucia points out that not every woman who has been divorced is an ex-wife—some have moved on and managed to establish new lives for themselves. But Patricia is not one of these and, to the reader’s exasperation, never grows beyond her humiliating need for men to define her: “You’re an ex-wife, Pat, because it is the most important thing to know about you…explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you.”

In its more didactic mode, Ex-Wife replicates the sort of articles published in women’s magazines on the subject of modern love and marriage through the decades. Patricia is lectured by the more experienced Lucia:

Fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have been unfaithful to [her husband Peter] once; because you wouldn’t have twenty opportunities for infidelity flung at you in a year; and, if he were unfaithful to you, he’d manage it discreetly, because he’d be socially ostracized if he didn’t. And he wouldn’t have told you to go your way, blithely; because there wouldn’t have been any way for you to go….

Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out. If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of Susan B. Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry….

The choices for women used to be: marriage, the convent, or the street. They’re just the same now. Marriage has the same name. Or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy (just like the convent). Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude toward sex, and a succession of meaningless affairs, promiscuity….

But I think chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no “consequence”—it just isn’t important.

Though it is tempting to see Parrott as a precursor of successful career women and feminists of the second half of the twentieth century, she has nothing good to say about feminism as a political movement and rarely passes up the opportunity to sneer at nonconforming women: “The abnormal ones, I suppose, had a rotten time of it, and so they yelled and pushed and tipped over the applecart for the rest of us in the end.” In an interview when Ex-Wife was published Parrott insisted, “I am not a feminist. In fact, I resent the feminists—they are the ones who started all this. I wonder if they realized what they were letting us all in for.” This predilection for blaming other women for the marital problems exacerbated by her own alcohol-fueled behavior suggests a curious sort of logic that prevails through her career; it was her conviction that the women of her grandmother’s generation had more “actual freedom” than those of her own.

In flashback scenes in Ex-Wife Parrott glides lightly over Patricia’s marriage to a young man named Peter, with whom she’d fallen in love while still in college: “We had loved each other for three years, and hated each other half the fourth.” Not much is made of the newlyweds having a baby who died, with no explanation, at the age of three months; of this baby Peter “did not talk…at all.” Yet naively Patricia imagines that having a second child might be good for their marriage: “I thought it might be rather nice…a small son something like Pete.” His brutal response to her announcement of her pregnancy is a surprise to her but not the reader:

Where in hell will we put it in a livingroom-bedroom-and-bath? We’ll never be alone again. It’ll take all your time. They have to be washed and rocked and fed incessantly….

Oh, God, they cry all the time, don’t they?

Yet more naively Patricia later confesses to Peter that she has been unfaithful to him with a mutual friend when both were drunk; this confession, which will destroy their marriage and set the course of her life onto its downward spiral, she undertakes as coyly as an ingenue in a romantic comedy: “Peter, I want to put on a wife-confesses-all show.”

It had been Patricia’s understanding, based on her husband’s admission that he’d been unfaithful to her once or twice, that as a modern young couple they were “very definitely committed to the honesty policy.” Analyzing the situation in retrospect, she acknowledges:

I know it all sounds absurd—as if I thought then the thing [confessing infidelity] should be played as a farce. I did not. There was anguish and regret and bewilderment. But they have faded. I only remember my surprise that all the theories about the right to experiment and the desirability of varied experience—theories that had seemed so entirely adequate in discussing the sexual adventures of acquaintances—were no help at all when the decision concerned Peter and me.

Initially Patricia mistakes her husband’s seeming placidity for acceptance of her infidelity and for forgiveness, but he has not accepted it, and he is not mature enough to forgive her. Soon he demands a divorce, for he has ceased loving her: “You look like hell nowadays; you aren’t even pretty any more.” In one of the most disturbing scenes in a novel primarily comprised of conversation, Peter begins to strangle Patricia, who has been taunting him: “He just picked me up and threw me through the glass door of the breakfast room. Then he went out.” Bleeding profusely, she bandages herself and makes her way to a doctor; while she is being treated (he discreetly makes no inquiries when she tells him that her husband is responsible for her injuries) she asks him to arrange for an abortion, which he does, with the sort of dispatch that suggests how common abortion was in the 1920s, at least in reasonably well-to-do circles in Manhattan.

Typically rueful, Patricia takes care to dress stylishly for the abortion: “I might be turning up a corpse before sunset, and that did not matter very much; but I would prefer to be a well-groomed one.” Since she is a fashion-conscious young woman with a modest career in advertising copywriting, she wears a “Jane Regny original” to the abortionist’s office:

Soft grey tweeds, a grey wolf collar and deep cuffs, a cream-coloured blouse. Its scarlet piping matches the close fitting hat, and the shining flat purse. Brilliant scarlet and blue scarf, grey mocha gloves…. A small, slim, scared, extremely smart young figure. “I may not be pure, but thank heaven I look immaculate.”

Describing an appointment with an abortionist in fashion terms is brilliantly ironic, but the scene passes too swiftly and bloodlessly to register as altogether convincing.

Despite these humiliations Patricia resists giving Peter a divorce for as long as she can. She fantasizes that he will change his mind and return to her, so she is always prepared: “Clothes were real. I bought many clothes so that, when Peter called up, I could say ‘come over instantly’ and I would be marvellously dressed.” When Peter does call, however, it’s to discuss their divorce. Patricia manages to seduce him, but their relations are not altered: to Peter she is a “slut” who “can’t help being what you are, I suppose.” Every scene in Ex-Wife involving the estranged husband ends with Patricia’s humiliation, both physical and emotional, yet she continues to pine for Peter, even after he has physically abused her.

Following the divorce, as her creator would do with the spoils of the success of Ex-Wife, Patricia spends money extravagantly as soon as she acquires it, mostly on clothes: “While I was married, I saved money and made plans for the next fifty years…. Afterward, I did not make plans for the month after next. It seemed such a waste of time.” The most lyrical chapter of Ex-Wife pays homage to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, much loved by Patricia and Lucia as the musical expression of romantic Manhattan:

“The tune matches New York,” Lucia said. “The New York we know. It has gaiety and colour and irrelevancy and futility and glamour as beautifully blended as the ingredients in crêpes suzette.”

I said, “It makes me think of skyscrapers and Harlem and liners sailing and newsboys calling extras.”

“It makes me think I’m twenty years old and on the way to owning the city,” Lucia said. “Start it over again, will you?”

As a divorcée, Patricia makes an effort to be “harder, inside”: “To try to take all this sort of thing as men are supposed to take it, for the adventure, for the moment’s gaiety…against feeling so alone.” Her life soon shifts out of her control, however: she begins to drink heavily and becomes involved with a succession of men, most of whom are charming but innocuous, though at least one, named Stepan, is a brute who treats her more cruelly than her husband did, and she eventually comes to love another, Noel, more than she’d loved Peter, but he is married to a woman he will never leave for her.

By the time Ex-Wife arrives at its abrupt ending, with Noel lost to Patricia and Patricia betrothed to another man, a sensation of exhaustion has set in for both her and the reader. The novel’s final line trails off in an aura of nostalgia: “New York lights blurred behind us…. That was a shining city.”

Marsha Gordon’s Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott is a thoroughly researched, sympathetic, but not uncritical portrait of a woman who achieved exceptional commercial success as a writer and who was, for a while, “the most famous divorcée in the United States.” As an expert on marital strife and its aftermath, Parrott was frequently interviewed in popular publications even as, in private, she was often struggling with “desperate,” “hopeless,” “suicidal” moods exacerbated by alcohol; and like many female writers prominent in their time, she was subsequently forgotten. (Notably, Parrott does not appear in Elaine Showalter’s magisterial A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, 2009.)

Biography is an art most powerful when it is not a mere summary of a life, however interesting it may have been, but an illumination of a life (and a career) that has been misunderstood, perhaps even by the subject, and undervalued. Gordon argues:

Like many of her female contemporaries, [Parrott] was categorized as a woman who wrote trivial and sentimental romances, although her tales were about much more: difficult divorces, phenomenally successful women’s careers, and single parenting; female piloting, adventuring, and traveling; risk-taking on the Underground Railroad, combat, and labor organizing; World War II veterans returning to civilian life and nefarious Nazi plots.

Parrott’s turbulent life, Gordon concedes, can hardly be told as an “inspirational feminist story”: she was a “wildly successful woman” who would have preferred to have had a conventionally happy marriage; a “romantic” who nonetheless burned through a succession of lovers and married—unwisely in each case—four men. In her uninhibited letters to the Herald Tribune reporter Hugh O’Connor, the unfaithful, unreliable, married man who seems to have been the love of her life but whom she never succeeded in marrying, Parrott confesses the most pitiful weaknesses, declaring herself a woman who merely appears modern, independent, and radical while craving the stability of a long-lasting relationship—marriage:

We hunt about among the wreckage of old codes for pieces to build an adequate shelter to last our lifetime…and the building material’s just not there…. Women like me, here and now, feel one way, believe another…and on neither side is happiness to be reckoned…

The ironic intelligence suffused through Ex-Wife does not seem to have prevailed in her own life.

Ursula Parrott was born Katherine Ursula Towle on March 26, 1899, in Dorchester, Massachusetts; her father was a family physician described in the press of the day as “one of the last of Dorchester’s old family doctors,” though he also had, in his daughter’s words, “a small very highhat practice as a consultant and obstetrician.” As a girl Parrott received an excellent education at the prestigious Girls’ Latin School in Boston, where her potential was recognized though her grades and “work ethic” were not outstanding. At Radcliffe she majored in English, involving herself in a number of undergraduate activities (including a short-lived membership in the Suffrage and Socialist Club), and only just managed to graduate in 1920 with mediocre grades and a reputation for purchasing “ghostwritten” papers for her courses. Years later her son Marc would speculate whether his mother’s “showoff traits, some charming, some very dangerous, derived from the snubbing she took in Cambridge as a pushy lace-curtain Irish girl from Dorchester.”

After her graduation from Radcliffe, her conservative Catholic father put pressure on her to live at home and teach English in a Catholic convent school nearby. Instead of placating him, Parrott acquired a job as a cub reporter to please herself; instead of pursuing a graduate degree in English, in 1922 she married Lindesay Marc Parrott, whom she’d met at a Princeton prom and who was twenty-one to her twenty-three. Soon Lindesay began a career as a reporter at the Newark Evening News and became a member of a “booze-loving” brotherhood of reporters who lived in New York City and environs, “many of whom drifted between papers and crossed paths between pressrooms, speakeasies, and women”—the same romantically lively, rowdy, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous Manhattan netherworld evoked in Ex-Wife.

As in Ex-Wife, Parrott’s young, immature husband was strongly opposed to having children, while she looked forward to motherhood; very likely their marriage was seriously compromised when she kept her pregnancy a secret until it was too late for him to pressure her to have an abortion. As in Ex-Wife, Lindesay could not forgive Ursula’s being unfaithful to him though he’d been unfaithful to her. Naively assuming that she and her husband were equals, she unwittingly destroyed her marriage through her honesty: Gordon reports that Lindesay “deemed her one-night stand an irreparable moral failing. The wounds she inflicted, he told her, would ‘never mend’; he could not trust her or, for that matter, any other woman again.” This single act of unfaithfulness, or rather the impulse to confess it, catapulted the vulnerable young woman out of the security of marriage, making her both a divorcée and a single mother in an era in which to be either was considered scandalous, if not immoral.

Later she reflected wryly on the “ethics” of the so-called new morality in which, as in the old morality, women were held to a far more severe standard than men, and she recalled her reckless act of infidelity with a notorious heavy drinker and womanizer who had meant little to her, as she’d meant little to him, when she “needed to think of something funny. It was so funny in its devastating consequences.”

If it was funny, then only in retrospect. More immediately it was catastrophic for the young wife, who never fully recovered from the shock of losing her husband and was long haunted by

a memory…of [Lindesay] and me standing in that funny livingroom of the last apartment we had—the color of the walls, the way that the sunlight had faded an oblong on the green sofa, the pattern on the rug, and he and I so very young and bewildered, on the day he left. We had a banjo clock that belonged to his family…. It had an odd sort of tick. I can remember the sound of it. I’ll remember the sound of it ticking when I’m seventy if I live so long.

In melodramatic fiction and films of the era it was often a single reckless act (like a confession of unfaithfulness) that precipitated a sequence of unanticipated consequences; unfortunately for her, Parrott’s life followed this formula. Even before her divorce was finalized in 1928, she had begun an intense romantic relationship with O’Connor, who would dominate her emotional life for years, even when she was married to other men; not Lindesay, who in his fictional guise as Peter casts such a shadow over Ex-Wife, but O’Connor would emerge as “the most wonderful and most awful thing that ever happened to her.”

It was O’Connor who rescued Parrott from the emotional wreckage of her divorce and strongly encouraged her to write her first novel, in which he is enshrined, nearly idolized, as Noel. (“Noel, your hair is a colour destined to shine in my soul.”) Like numerous men in Parrott’s life, O’Connor was married not happily but (as he led Parrott to believe) permanently; in Ex-Wife, Noel’s wife is described as “disfigured” as a result of an automobile accident, and Patricia helps to ensure that their marriage prevails. In real life, the ex-wife had no such agency over her married lover. Though O’Connor seems to have assured Parrott that she was “‘the one woman’ whom he believed his ‘equal,’” he could not be convinced to divorce his wife and marry her, or even to be faithful to her.

It is a measure, however, of Parrott’s increasing desperation that she had several abortions at O’Connor’s request, though she had badly wanted to have a child with him; still more desperately, after the failure of her second marriage (to Charles Terry Greenwood, a Manhattan banker for whom she seemed to have felt little emotion), she offered O’Connor $6,000, the equivalent of his annual salary at The New York Times, if he would agree to be her husband for at least one year, piteously begging, “‘If I happen to get pregnant’ during this period, ‘let me go through with it.’” Gordon interprets this astonishing proposal as “proof positive” that Parrott was “radically rethinking male-female relationships in ways that defied tradition beyond recognition,” but the reader is likely to wonder if it isn’t a painful sign of her mental deterioration.

That O’Connor rejected the eccentric offer is not surprising, nor is it surprising that Parrott continued to barrage him with letters alternately cajoling and accusing: “Such an old Victorian plot this is, after all…. It makes me a little sick to recognize it. The woman ‘gives her all’ to a man without marriage, and he ‘spurns’ her, finally.” Another time Parrott suggests that she and O’Connor have a baby together: “If you would like to have a child…I am entirely willing. I should be very glad in fact, to have the child”—hastily adding that, if O’Connor wanted her to have an abortion, she would be willing to have an abortion. All to no avail: O’Connor did eventually divorce his wife but married a much younger woman in 1934.¹

Ex-Wife was a publishing sensation in 1929, receiving excellent reviews and selling over 100,000 copies on its first print run; it was on the best-seller lists with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and advertised alongside Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. When the anonymous author was outed in Walter Winchell’s syndicated gossip column On Broadway it was assumed, by Winchell and subsequently by others, that Parrott had written an “autobiographical” novel despite her protestations that this was not the case, at least not entirely—an identification that would persist through her life.

Much of Ex-Wife’s success had to do with its novelty as a racy sort of sociological document in the guise of a titillating tale of young divorcées behaving badly in Manhattan; even as divorce rates were rising alarmingly in the 1920s, the very category ex-wives scarcely existed. The first check Parrott received from her publisher, the new transatlantic firm Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, was for $16,000, the approximate equivalent of a quarter-million dollars in today’s currency.

Naturally, Hollywood was intrigued by Parrott, optioning Ex-Wife for $20,000 as a vehicle for Norma Shearer; retitled The Divorcee, it was a success at the box office even as the country was plunging into the Great Depression. Other films adapted from subsequent work by Parrott had such titles as Strangers May Kiss, There’s Always Tomorrow, and Next Time We Love (starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan); in 1931 she published what her biographer calls a “gangster novel,” Gentlemen’s Fate, which was made into a movie starring John Gilbert and was criticized, perhaps not surprisingly, for its lack of “vigorous credibility.”

A Hollywood “feeding frenzy” erupted over the rights to Parrott’s The Tumult and the Shouting. Even as she was involved in writing a screenplay for Gloria Swanson based on her as-yet-unpublished novel Love Goes Past, she reported to friends that in this “gaudy hell” she felt “like a dead woman, in a sort of daze.” Tersely, without elaborating, Gordon notes that in Hollywood, Parrott’s antisemitism “flared up in a town and industry run by Jews.”

Disillusioned with Hollywood, chastened by professional setbacks, Parrott fled back to the East Coast and to a second misbegotten marriage that ended in divorce within a year—a “brief absurdity,” she called it—with charges against the husband of “intolerable cruelty, drinking, and abusive language.” Two more husbands followed, each apparently a brief absurdity soon rectified by divorce, luridly heralded in tabloids and gossip columns in which Ursula Parrott had become a familiar, scandalous name.

By this time her frantic life was coming undone as a consequence of extravagant spending, heavy drinking, and increasing failures to meet publication deadlines. Her advances for stories were sometimes as high as $8,000; pressure was put on her to return them if she failed to deliver on time or editors rejected her work, which was beginning to happen with disconcerting frequency. Her son Marc recalled Parrott working “like a galley slave [with]…the chaos and tension of making those eternal deadlines.” Gordon remarks sympathetically, “Mass-market fiction writers have been defined by ‘speed, volume, and predictability, none of which aids in composing great literature.’” Amid a life of turmoil complicated by needless spending, in 1940 Parrott took flying lessons with the notion of helping “defend the United States during the war,” her biographer tells us without evident irony.

In the final phase of her career in the 1940s, Parrott wrote fiction for popular magazines about World War II from the perspective of a generation of women younger than she, whom she could imagine as more optimistic and less disillusioned than her own generation; her themes were marital strife, reconcilations and divorces, women’s careers curtailed or tempered by the demands of men. By then her longtime agent George Bye had cut ties with her and she was “drowning in debt”—in her biographer’s grim words, “completely worn out.” It is nearly miraculous that somehow she managed to set aside enough money to send Marc to Harvard: “Parrott took comfort in few things, but she delighted in her son’s academic achievement.”²

There followed then a series of increasingly unfunny episodes presumably linked to Parrott’s alcoholism. The most scandalous involved Michael Neely Bryan, a twenty-six-year-old army private with a fondness for marijuana seventeen years Parrott’s junior, whom she recklessly aided and abetted in escaping from a Miami prison stockade in December 1942; with Parrott at the wheel of a rental car, pursued by law enforcement, the fugitive lovers surrendered within twenty-four hours. The sensational adventure was recounted in tabloids and gossip columns. The “four-times-married, thrice-divorced author” Parrott and her paramour were charged with federal crimes; Bryan was sentenced to a year in prison for breaking confinement, while, to her great relief, Parrott was found not guilty of “subversive activities in undermining loyalty, discipline or morale of the armed forces.” But the damage to what remained of her reputation was irrevocable.

Parrott’s last novel, Even in a Hundred Years—described by Gordon as an “introspective tale about generations, tradition, loss, and hope…. A far cry from the hedonistic, destructive freneticism of Ex-Wife”—was published in 1944; her last story, ironically titled “Let’s Just Marry,” appeared in 1947. Seriously in debt in the years following and hounded by the IRS for unpaid taxes, Parrott tried to write her way out of disaster as she had in the past, but without success. She borrowed money from her new agent that she had no intention of repaying; she wrote bad checks and “was the subject of unwanted press for ‘smuggling herself out’” of hotels without paying her bills; in a particularly embarrassing incident she was arrested on a charge of grand larceny for stealing silver items from the home of wealthy friends. She became destitute and homeless. A final time she wrote to O’Connor saying she was penniless and faint with hunger and asking if he could send her five dollars. (Gordon doesn’t confirm whether O’Connor replied.) In September 1957 Parrott died in the charity ward of a New York hospital. Not a single obituary appeared.

This piling on of pratfalls and pathos in the concluding chapters of Becoming the Ex-Wife fatally diminishes its already minor, vulnerable subject. The reader winces for Ursula Parrott, humiliated by pleading letters to a man who seems to have exploited her naive adoration of him, as well as by the vicissitudes of a life ravaged by alcoholism. Holding the biographer’s magnifying glass up to an individual so unstable and self-destructive undermines the claim for the subject’s significance; it is difficult to believe that a woman who so frequently behaved as foolishly as Parrott could have possibly written much of consequence after her initial success with Ex-Wife.

It might be called the Brobdingnagian effect: a predilection in even the most sympathetic biographies (including most recently Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work and Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography) to dwell upon minutiae of the most petty sort and by sheer corrosion wear away the dignity of the subject, undermining what should be the fundamental effort of the biographer—to enhance, to illuminate. One thinks of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians: forced to see too much, at too-close quarters, appalled by the grotesque physicality of his giant hosts, suffused with disgust, and desperate to escape.

The post None-Too-Gay Divorcées appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure…. I will not have earned death.

—Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once, her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Most vividly and memorably in her later works of fiction—the teasingly elliptical ghost story “I Used to Live Here Once” and the lush, lyric Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a postmodern prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that is her greatest literary achievement—she evokes the lost Eden of her youth. Like many another writer exiled from her birthplace, Rhys dwelled most productively in the (imagined, reappropriated) past, when, as the child of relatively well-to-do parents, she lived in a large timber-framed corner house in Dominica’s capital, Roseau. Her adult life, however, was spent in cheap Parisian hotels, rented rooms or flats, or dwellings in English villages so cramped, “charmless,” and “wretched” that visitors were scandalized.

“Jean Rhys” was a pen name urged upon the young writer in 1924 by the influential literary figure Ford Madox Ford, her lover and benefactor. She was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in 1890, one of four surviving children of a white Creole mother, whose ancestors had once owned slaves in Dominica and who looked down upon her black island relatives, and a Welshman, a former ship’s doctor who had emigrated in order to work as a medical officer. In the late nineteenth century Dominica was inhabited by fewer than 30,000 people, of whom fewer than one hundred were “white”—then as now, in some quarters, an accursed minority associated with a slaveholding past. Separated from the black islanders, to whom she was attracted (though, like the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea, a white Creole girl like Rhys might be taunted by darker-skinned Dominicans as a “white cockroach”), she was also isolated from British-born visitors to the “cruel, caste-conscious little world of Roseau.” A black girl whom she befriended abruptly and inexplicably disappeared from her life, possibly as a consequence of having attracted the attention of a male member of Rhys’s family. “Mixed race,” Seymour writes, “was not uncommon in families like hers.”

The practice of obeah (voodoo) was widespread among the native Dominicans; Rhys’s nursemaid Meta terrorized her with tales of vampires and zombies who, she recalled, “could get through a locked door and you heard them walking up to your bed.” The sinister subterranean power of obeah suffuses the early life of Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, whose anxieties surely mirror Rhys’s own: “Meta had shown me a world of fear and distrust, and I am still in that world.” She once casually remarked that Dominicans traveled to Haiti to study obeah “just as English students went to Oxford and Cambridge.”

According to Seymour, Rhys resembled neither her father, whose favorite she was and who encouraged her education, nor her mother, who whipped her routinely until she was twelve and who “missed no opportunity to crush and humiliate a daughter of whom she was perhaps a little jealous.” Almost from birth, she felt like an outsider:

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.

Though Rhys never wrote in depth about the inexplicably hostile, hateful mother who made her girlhood so miserable, it seems likely—indeed inevitable—that her lifelong sense of alienation and chronic depression sprang from her mother’s rejection. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a sense of self-worth after such an early wounding; for an artist, life is combative enough without the added disadvantage of a mother who not only withholds love but deals out corporal punishment. In any case, as Seymour notes, Rhys’s self-identification as an outsider was “the role which would come to fit both the writer and her work as closely as a handstitched glove.”

That she often inhabited a role—that an “unforgiving solipsism was indeed central to Jean Rhys’s work”—is persuasively suggested by Seymour throughout the biography. It might be argued that all artists are obliged to construct personae through which to observe the world, as a photographer requires a camera lens; a female artist of the early twentieth century would have felt particularly obliged to take up a protective role with which to shield her vulnerability. Rhys’s social affect was one of extreme femininity; decades later she recalled herself at the age of seventeen, praying, “Oh, God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Let me be, let me be. Oh, God.”

To Rhys, as to most others of her era, femininity was synonymous with a doll-like prettiness, docility, passivity, though there was a steely will beneath her public mask (often a carefully applied cosmetic mask involving elaborate eye makeup), which would erupt spectacularly when she was older and no longer dependent on attracting the attentions of men. But as a young woman, she seems to have resembled the drifting, seemingly will-less Marya Zelli of her first novel, Quartet (1928), whose life consists almost entirely of time spent in Parisian cafés alone or in the company of men who pay for her drinks:

Marya was a blond girl, not very tall, slender-waisted. Her face was short, high cheek-boned, full-lipped; her long eyes slanted upwards towards the temples and were gentle and oddly remote in expression.

Marya presents herself as a blank slate to men, sexually alluring but not threatening, “the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess.”

As a girl, Rhys seems to have conformed, at least outwardly, to the sort of gender-determined behavior appropriate to her class, even as, from an early age, she was an obsessive reader. Despite a curious interregnum in her twenties, when she lived in England, supported herself as a chorus girl, and claimed not to have read a book for years, a love of books was perhaps the most abiding of her loves. She seems to have read virtually everything available to her, beginning with such classics for children as Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels. Her Irish grandmother sent her boxes of books, one of the happy memories of her childhood.

Despite Rhys’s mother’s disinclination to educate her, her father insisted upon sending his daughter to a Catholic convent school in Roseau where, taught by “intelligent and worldly nuns,” the sensitive girl flourished. Still, it was with relief that Rhys left Dominica at the age of sixteen to attend the distinguished and academically demanding Perse High School for Girls in Cambridge, on the ship bound for Southampton, rather coolly thinking, “Already all my childhood, the West Indies, my father and mother had been left behind. I was forgetting them. They were the past.”

As a girl in Dominica, Rhys had, unsurprisingly, attracted the attentions of older men. One of these, Seymour notes, was the “sinister Mr. Howard” (“Captain Cardew” in one of Rhys’s short stories), a friend of her parents’. She recorded in an exercise book at the time: “Fourteen, he says, fourteen is old enough to have a lover… His hand of an old man on my breast felt cold and dead.” Thrown into his company, Rhys had to endure his lurid fantasies of making her his slave, “ready,” Seymour writes, “to be carried off to a distant island where she would obey his every whim: she would be whipped, bound with ropes of flowers, summoned to wait, naked, upon his fully clothed guests.”

Sinister Mr. Howard prefigured a number of older, well-to-do, predatory men who were attracted to the diminutive Rhys, particularly during her hardscrabble years as a chorus girl (under the stage name Ella Gray); an undertone of sadomasochist fantasy suffuses virtually all of her works of fiction, as in the more self-consciously erotic fantasies of her younger contemporary Anaïs Nin. Repeatedly, naive young women are exploited by men who, though physically unattractive, even repellent, exert a perverse sort of charisma, like the manipulative Hugh Heidler of Quartet, modeled on Ford:

He had oddly shaped eyelids, three cornered eyelids over pale, clever eyes. Not at all an amiable looking person. But nevertheless not without understanding, for every time that her glass was empty he refilled it. She began to feel miraculously reassured, happy and secure.

Marya is easily seduced:

He wasn’t a good lover, of course. He didn’t really like women. She had known that as soon as he touched her. His hands were inexpert, clumsy at caresses; his mouth was hard when he kissed…. He despised love. He thought of it grossly, to amuse himself, and then with ferocious contempt.

Eventually her submission is complete:

He whispered: “Open your eyes, savage. Open your eyes, savage.”

She opened her eyes and said: “I love you, I love you, I love you. Oh, please be nice to me. I love you.”

She was quivering and abject in his arms, like some unfortunate dog abasing itself before its master.

In 1919 Rhys, somewhat impulsively and against the advice of her older lover/protector at the time, married a twenty-eight-year-old Dutchman named Jean Lenglet, who happened to be already married. Dazzled by Lenglet’s handsome face and seductive manner and the illusion he gave that he was wealthy, Rhys seems to have been a victim of a skilled con man, French spy (in England), and habitual embezzler and thief who was soon incarcerated in a French prison. Nonetheless, Rhys remained deeply in love with Lenglet for years; they did not divorce until 1932. She had two children with him: William, who died at the age of three weeks in 1920 of pneumonia while his parents were out “drinking champagne with a friend,” and Maryvonne, born in 1922, who survived to figure intermittently in her mother’s chaotic life.

It was during Lenglet’s incarceration that Rhys met Ford—“Silenus in tweeds,” according to the artist Paul Nash—a notorious but kindhearted womanizer who would become the most valuable of her older-male protectors, introducing her to the expatriate coterie in Paris, which included, famously, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce; and to the work of Joseph Conrad, Guy de Maupassant, and Colette. Eventually, Ford tired of his unstable young mistress’s emotional outbursts and broke with her by leaving Paris for New York City.

By this time, encouraged in her writing by Ford, Rhys was completing Quartet, in which thinly disguised characters based on Ford, his common-law wife, Stella, and Rhys’s reprobate husband, Lenglet, figure prominently. The slender novel is suffused with the air of youthful melancholy and cynicism that characterizes Hemingway’s far more acclaimed first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), set in much the same milieu:

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.

Marya takes as consolation the pitying remarks of a Parisian sculptor: “You’re a victim. There’s no endurance in your face. Victims are necessary so that the strong may exercise their will and become more strong.” Significantly, Quartet ends with Marya’s ex-convict husband murdering her for having been unfaithful to him.

In addition to Quartet, Rhys published three similar, slender novels during this early phase of her career, each of them from the perspective of what Seymour calls “the Rhys woman”: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In exhaustive detail Seymour traces the ways in which Rhys transformed fairly ordinary autobiographical material into fiction, writing of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie:

Rhys’s genius—still not fully flowered in her fortieth year, but growing at an astonishing rate—lay in her unfailing ability to create, within fewer than 150 pages, a world that is both uniquely alien and recognisably mundane.

In Rhys’s artful variations on the theme of acute female sensitivity conjoined with a fatal passivity, as in the purposeful smallness of her fictional worlds, she is a precursor of sorts to Anita Brookner, though more willing to explore the sleazier depths of female experience than Brookner was; she is more naturally akin to Colette or Nin, who also wrote of ménages à trois in which a sensitive young ingenue is seduced by an older, manipulative couple.

After this highly promising start to her career, Rhys did not publish another novel for nearly thirty years. World War II and its aftermath were not hospitable to her particular sort of talent, though she continued to write short fiction, which was eventually gathered in Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976) and posthumously reprinted in her Collected Short Stories (1987). Rhys was twice widowed after her divorce from Lenglet, by men who seem to have been devoted to her (Leslie Tilden Smith, Max Hamer) despite her violent oscillations of mood, her heavy drinking, and her propensity to brawl with them publicly; it does not escape Seymour’s notice that one night in February 1942 she caused a fracas by shouting “Heil Hitler” while she and Tilden Smith were drinking at a country pub in the east of England.

When she was drinking, which was frequently, Rhys was likely to get into physical altercations with astonished neighbors; once she “rashly called the constable ‘a dirty Jew.’ After hitting and even biting him, she accused the bewildered officer of belonging to the Gestapo.” On another occasion she was so ill-behaved that she was incarcerated briefly in a prison hospital on a charge of disturbing the peace, and later Hamer was more seriously incarcerated on a charge of fraud. Ostracized as a public nuisance, the frail Rhys was finally banished by the Bromley Court from Beckenham, the London borough where Hamer had bought a house—surely a unique distinction for someone subsequently honored with both the W.H. Smith Literary Award and the Heinemann Award. As her devoted editor Diana Athill wryly observed, “Disaster seems to be so much her element.”

Despite the vicissitudes of her later life, about which we come to know a dispiriting amount in the concluding chapters of I Used to Live Here Once, in March 1966 Rhys finally finished her fifth and most accomplished novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which she had begun planning before World War II. Published in 1967 to disappointingly obtuse reviews, her deftly executed “prequel” to the Gothic-Romantic melodrama Jane Eyre gathered acclaim by degrees, winning awards, assuming a place as a major English work of fiction of the twentieth century, and becoming a staple of university courses in contemporary English literature, Caribbean literature, postcolonial literature, and gender and women’s studies.

Rhys had said, Seymour writes, that she’d long wanted to “redress the injury done by Charlotte Brontë to the white Creole class of which Rhys herself was a member”—reclaiming the madwoman Bertha, Rochester’s despised wife, whose rival is the governess Jane Eyre. Rhys brilliantly reimagines Bertha as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress of nineteenth-century Dominica, before the abolition of slavery, who is seduced by the English fortune hunter Rochester, unwisely marries him, and is brought to the punishingly cold climate of England, where she deteriorates into the “madwoman” Bertha locked in the attic in Rochester’s manor house. In Wide Sargasso Sea the quintessential “Rhys woman”—the intensely female “victim”—is given a historic and political significance through her identity as a white Creole woman appropriated, misused, and betrayed by a figure of the English aristocracy; in a sense, Rhys’s very narcissism becomes a virtue, transcending the particularities of her own identity and suggesting the “victimhood” of colonials by imperialist Britain.

Despite her alcoholism, her chronic ill health, and the general chaos of her life, Rhys not only lived to the age of eighty-eight but was working until shortly before her death in May 1979; her last book, Smile Please: An Unpublished Autobiography, was published that same month, with an excellent introduction by Athill that focuses on her as a highly disciplined prose stylist for whom revision was obsessive and necessary, rather more than as a figure of somewhat lurid celebrity. As Rhys said, “A novel has to have a shape, and life doesn’t have any.” Athill observes:

When [Rhys] wrote a novel it was because she had no choice, and she did it—or “it happened to her”—for herself, not for others… A novel, once it had possessed her, would dictate its own shape and atmosphere, and she could rely on her infallible instinct to tell her what her people would say and do.

Smile Please includes fragmentary prose passages akin to a personal journal in which Rhys admonishes herself to write write write all night even as she castigates herself for the many failures of her personal life. A relentless interlocutor (the internalized voice of her mother?) pursues her until she admits defeat: “I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me.”

Rhys was strongly opposed to a biography, fearing (with justification) that much in her life that was sordid, petty, and shameful would be brought to light, including unfounded claims that Ford was the father of one of her children. In her later years, after the success of Wide Sargasso Sea brought her a belated and not always pleasurable literary celebrity, including requests to attend public events that she could not always decline, the reclusive writer found herself surrounded by editors, journalists, self-appointed caretakers, hangers-on, and sycophants (predominantly the young American writer David Plante, who befriended the elderly Rhys, only to write about her with misogynist contempt in his memoir Difficult Women). It was a shifting pack, some of whom (Athill, Francis Wyndham) genuinely cared for her as a person as well as a writer, while others appear to have been prurient witnesses to her physical decline. Seymour summarizes Rhys’s exasperation with these people: “And why must they regard every careless word she uttered—after the couple of stiff drinks required for the ordeal of being interrogated—as gospel truth?”

Following Rhys’s death, Athill and Wyndham gave permission to a number of writers to quote from her letters and manuscripts, and approved a short biography, aptly titled The Blue Hour (2009), by Lilian Pizzichini, as well as this surely definitive study by Seymour, the author of acclaimed biographies of subjects as diverse as Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Ottoline Morrell, and, most recently, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, the wife and daughter of Lord Byron. The biographer’s voice in I Used to Live Here Once is a steadying principle throughout the turbulent, disjointed life of Jean Rhys, corrective when necessary, at times rueful, bemused, but never intrusive or judgmental: “Writing from pitiless self-knowledge, Jean Rhys addresses the watchful and lonely outsider who lurks within us all.”

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That last could be said of Oates. Not counting a clutch of letters and two poems, the Carvalho essay is her seventy-eighth byline in our pages. Her first review, “The Cruelest Sport,” was published thirty years ago last Sunday. In addition to contributing an average of two and a half reviews per year since 1992, she has published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, and several collections of poetry, while teaching creative writing at Princeton and, presently, at Rutgers (New Brunswick), where she is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Oates also found time to e-mail with me last week, and we discussed her writing process, the fascination of being edited, her history with the Review, and her presence on Twitter.

Daniel Drake: Why do you write? What brings you to writing?

Joyce Carol Oates: Writing is very natural to me, I suppose. I love working with language and (usually) imagining mediated voices in narratives of some complexity and originality, which can yield surprises in the writing and the opportunity to explore a kind of vivid alternate reality.

I am not so interested in my own voice, the voice of the reviewer/essayist, precisely because it is my “own” voice, thus not likely to surprise me or take me to unexpected places. Yet, there is a kind of pleasure in speaking directly and without a mask (a timely metaphor!)—this is my “teaching” voice, as well.

I wonder if I am alone or in some way represent other longtime reviewers for The New York Review in saying that there is definitely an “NYRB voice” or tone that would not be appropriate for another publication, like The New York Times Book Review, with a more general, less academic audience. Longtime writers for The New Yorker surely calibrate their prose for that magazine’s particular font, as one does for the NYR’s, without thinking or intending to do so.

Do I sound bizarrely literal? I don’t mean to be; it’s simply the case that book reviewing is a purely site-specific activity. One does not write book reviews with no specific publication in mind, as one might write fiction or poetry; except in rare instances, a book review has been assigned or suggested by an editor. Virtually all my reviews for the NYR were inspired by editors; they were not self-generated.

For a very long time—more than thirty years?—I was either writing an essay for the NYR or immersed in the reading that preceded it (usually involving the reading of previous books by the writer under review); visitors were bemused that there was an NYR pile of books in a certain nook of the house, and that I was always in some stage of writing something for Barbara Epstein or, after Barbara’s death, for Bob Silvers. If I’d just finished a review, many of a length that elsewhere would have been called a “review-essay,” I would already have received a new book or box of books from Bob to consider for the next one, with the handwritten note, “See what you can make of it.”

How stunning it was in March 2017 to learn that Bob had died! Though I had known that he was unwell, and he was eighty-seven, I was certainly unprepared for his abrupt passing. I remember vividly how I learned of it: returning to civilization from a long day hiking and taking photographs in Death Valley with my husband, Charlie Gross, I checked my cell phone, which had been inoperable while we were in the desert, to learn, as e-mails began to flood in, that “Robert Silvers, Editor of The New York Review” had died…. We were standing in a restaurant, not yet seated, as I stared at my phone and Charlie said, “Is something wrong?”

The last work of mine that Bob had accepted for publication wasn’t, oddly, a review but a poem, a bleak, droll, political-commentary sort of poem speaking to the degradation and malaise of the Trump era, titled, all too aptly, “Exsanguination.” It appeared after Bob’s death—so very sadly.

This is your fourth decade writing for the Review. Are there any articles in your archive that you are particularly fond of, or find yourself thinking about?

My first review for the NYR, at Barbara’s request, was really a review-essay about boxing, in which I discussed several books, including a biography of Muhammad Ali. This was an exciting occasion for me, for it was the first time that I’d reviewed any books about boxing for any publication.

Overall, it’s probably the longer reviews, reviews that are also essays, that have meant the most to me. These include lengthy pieces on H. P. Lovecraft, the “literature of serial killers” (a review that also dealt with serial-killer trading cards!), books on JonBenét Ramsey, omnibus gatherings of short story collections; overviews of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Joan Didion, Shirley Jackson, Richard Flanagan, Emily Dickinson, Annie Proulx, Flannery O’Connor.

Do you enjoy being edited?

It was always a pleasure to be edited closely by Barbara, who invariably marked a galley in the margin with “explain” or “expand” or “examples?” Bob did not edit in quite this way, toward expansion, being rather more interested in the actual prose—infelicities of speech or grammar, uses and misuses of punctuation. Being edited by a sharp-eyed editor is always a fascinating experience, perhaps not unlike entering an imaging machine and seeing MRI photos of one’s brain.

What are you working on right now?

I am immersed in a short novel about J. Marion Sims, the famous/infamous “father of modern gynecology,” who experimented on enslaved Black women and children in the 1840s in Montgomery, Alabama, allowing him to discover a way to repair fistulas in afflicted girls and women following difficult childbirths. My character both is and isn’t the historic Sims—his name is Syms. Sims’s most exploited subject, Anarcha Westcott, appears in my narrative as Arelia. Though the novel is based for the most part on actual events, the tone is rather more a hallucinatory sort of realism than strict realism. The title is, appropriately, Butcher.

We see from Sims’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, published posthumously in 1884, how an individual of more than average intelligence and vision—seen by himself and others of his acquaintance as a “good” Christian husband and father—could, at the same time, function as an absolute racist, as indifferent to his subjects’ suffering as presumably Descartes would have been to the suffering of animals, since Descartes believed that animals were just machines, without sensation. Yet Sims was widely honored in his own time, and a controversial and quite ugly statue of him was only just recently removed from Central Park.

You once incisively described the hordes of people on Twitter as “rushing around the landscape of news.” You’re a keen user of the platform yourself. How do you decide what to tweet?

Though I follow some accounts on Twitter avidly, and have learned much from its grassroots journalism aspect, in which far-flung individuals report and comment on what is happening in parts of the country often ignored by mainstream media, I am not so very interested in Twitter overall. It’s a purposefully fleeting, ephemeral medium, not unlike casual conversation; its most brilliant witticisms are quickly forgotten. It is, however, a curious simulacrum of a world, perhaps a fantasy world, where, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “the soul selects its own society”—and shuts its door against the rest by muting, blocking, or just remaining in blissful ignorance. Thousands of tweets, however, don’t add up to a single review in The New York Review of Books.

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Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if brutally reductive title for this unsparing depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Lisbon, executed by the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy. Originally published in 1966, it is the first work by Carvalho to appear in English, in what seems an excellent translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Deftly and cunningly written, narrated by an observer who glides in and out of the text with the patrician disdain of a Nabokov character, Empty Wardrobes is gradually revealed to be a double portrait: at its core are two middle-aged Portuguese women—two “empty wardrobes”—ironically linked by their relationship to a preening cad who treats both of them badly and walks away blithely untouched by either.

Though in her impassioned introduction Kate Zambreno describes Empty Wardrobes as “a hilarious and devastating novel of a traditional Catholic widow’s consciousness,” there is not much that is even mildly amusing in Carvalho’s steely, unadorned prose; certainly there is little Catholic consciousness in the incurious Dora Rosário and virtually nothing of the familiar domestic impedimenta of Catholicism. Dora doesn’t observe the sacraments, even confession and communion; we never see her attending mass; if she is concerned with the condition of her soul, we are not made aware of it; her “religion” is the observation of unvarying routine performed with “eyes…as dull as an empty house or unnaturally bright when she became excited.”

Zambreno also describes the novel, for all its domestic interiority and apparent indifference to history, as a “deeply political” work of fiction reflecting “the ambient cruelty of patriarchy, an oppression even more severe in the God, Fatherland, and Family authoritarianism of the Salazar regime [1932–1968] in Portugal.” Indeed, a stifling sort of ether wafts from the cramped interiors of Empty Wardrobes: Dora is first the manager of an antiques shop with few customers, then a saleswoman in a cheap furniture store selling “basic pinewood furniture, mattresses, sofas.” Yet it’s difficult to see how her congenital dullness can be attributed to the reign of a patriarchal dictator, for surely an adult so lacking in autonomy is a special case; her daughter, who is determined to live a very different sort of life, tells her, “You married a man who was poor and lazy…. I’m going to marry a rich, energetic man who loves me.”

Maddeningly naive, passive, and unquestioning in her continued devotion to the deceased husband who left her penniless and with a child to raise, Dora is, at thirty-six, already “ageless and hopeless,” in her daughter’s words. She is dissected by Manuela, the cold-eyed and unsentimental narrator, as if she were a laboratory specimen:

She was always a woman of few words. She never said more than was strictly necessary—the bare indispensable minimum…. She would sit quite still then, her face a blank, like someone poised on the edge of an ellipsis or standing hesitantly at the sea’s edge in winter, and at such moments, all the light would go out of her eyes as if absorbed by a piece of blotting paper; for all I know, she may still be like that, because I never saw her again.

And later:

She had neat, regular features, but had never done anything to help nature. Never. She seemed, rather, to be unconsciously intent on hampering it. You could describe her face as lackluster: matte skin, pale lips, dull, straight brown hair tied back…. She took so little trouble over how she dressed that even her body went unnoticed.

Not sympathy but a detached sort of cruelty characterizes Manuela’s interest in Dora, which invariably turns upon Dora’s flaws and her defeated prospects; canny, icily detached, and near-omniscient, Manuela’s perspective seems identical with the author’s, for we never see Dora behaving in a way that refutes Manuela’s judgment.

Indeed, the narrative “I” in Empty Wardrobes is paradoxical: as a voyeur in Dora’s life Manuela is both nowhere and everywhere, only briefly in Dora’s presence and the rest of the time imagining scenes that (presumably) take place beyond her scrutiny. Disarmingly Manuela says of herself:

I’m not part of this story—if you can call it that—I’m a mere bit-part player of the kind that has not even a generic name, and never will have, not even in any subsequent stories, because we simply lack all dramatic vocation.

She calls herself, not apologetically but with a kind of pride, a “sterile woman”—a woman who hasn’t wanted children.

In a more conventional novel, certainly in one exploring feminist bonds of sisterhood within a stultifying patriarchal culture, as in the fiction of Elena Ferrante, we would likely see Manuela, abandoned by her longtime lover for a younger woman, joining forces with Dora; and each woman, victimized by men, would become stronger as a consequence. But Carvalho is not interested in feminist romance, any more than she is interested in traditional romance: rivals within the patriarchy, women have no instinctive sisterly feelings for one another and remain hostile and estranged. Manuela thinks, with characteristic disdain, “I thought that perhaps what [Dora] needed was a good shake or, better still, an X-ray, so we could see if she did actually have more inside her than just lungs and a digestive system.”

In her premature but life-defining widowhood, Dora is a Portuguese equivalent of those pathetic persons “outcast from life’s feast,” in James Joyce’s poignant phrase. She is emotionally and sexually bereft; her “threadbare coat, with runs in her stockings, [and] untidy hair” unsex her as mercilessly as her need for money deprives her widowhood of romantic nostalgia. Dora reminds us of those lonely, left-behind Dubliners inhabiting the penumbra of Joyce’s richly peopled Irish world, involuntarily celibate casualties of a repressive Roman Catholicism that provided no meaningful occupation for unmarried women apart from the convent.

We may also think of Brian Moore’s most “painful case”: the luckless heroine of Judith Hearne, for whom virginity has become a kind of curse and episodes of drunken forgetfulness her only solace. With a kindred subtlety and sympathy Colm Tóibín has written of more contemporary Irish outcasts from life’s feast, notably the widowed Nora of Nora Webster in her similarly claustrophobic, tight-knit, and conscribed small-town Irish world; and there are the achingly lonely unmarried Englishwomen in the novels of Anita Brookner, wraithlike figures scarcely distinguishable from one another in their yearning for a love that might provide them with some measure of self-definition in a man’s world.

Such figures of female pathos are virtually the only inhabitants of Carvalho’s Lisbon, as sparely presented as a landscape by de Chirico, but they lack the inner lyricism of Tóibín’s and Brookner’s women. They certainly lack the ferocious resentments and strategies of self-determination found in the female characters of Carvalho’s contemporary Doris Lessing. Apart from Dora there are two other widows—empty wardrobes—as well as Manuela; these are women whom life has also left behind, without men and without meaningful employment or interests. “When single women reach a certain age, they’re so…frightening. They wither away, don’t they?” Dora’s daughter, Lisa, asks tactlessly. Dora’s mother-in-law, Ana, at least has money, which gives her empty life a measure of freedom. Dora’s Aunt Júlia, another widow—“a small, serene, pleasant woman, slightly stooped…. A hieroglyph that was more like a meaningless doodle”—takes refuge in hallucinatory memories and silly dreams of flying saucers, which Dora professes to envy: “At least she believes in something.” (Aunt Júlia is characterized as an elderly, senile woman, so it’s something of a shock when we learn that she is only in her late forties!) And Lisa, advantaged by a heedless youth and beauty, impetuously marries the very man, more than twenty years her senior, who has ruined what remained of her mother’s atrophied life.

Few scenes in Empty Wardrobes are dramatized, as if Manuela, recalling the banality of her subject, can scarcely be troubled to evoke them. She resorts instead to desultory summaries: “And so it was. [Dora] got the job, bought the books, and she did learn, earning enough money over the subsequent years to send her daughter to a school for rich kids.” Mired in a mourning for her husband that seems a consequence more of an inadequacy of imagination than of genuine feeling for him, Dora is incapable of initiating change in her life: things are done for her, and to her. A kindly friend arranges for her to have the undemanding but (improbably) well-paying job in the antiques store, which spares her the ignominy of having to beg for favors and money from her late husband’s friends. In this position she drifts like a sleepwalker, in an unvarying routine; no time seems to pass in her stultified life except for her daughter growing out of childhood and into an independent adolescence.

After a decade of widowhood Dora’s sole expression of autonomy is to have her hair styled and to purchase some new clothes, provoking a male acquaintance to inquire, “What the hell has happened to her?” As in Tóibín’s Nora Webster, a still-youthful widow seems to be about to reenter the world after a prolonged emotional stasis, surprising everyone who knows her; but Carvalho has another, more humiliating fate in mind for Dora.

Empty Wardrobes is a short novel that seems longer than it is, for it moves with glacial slowness, as if in the grip of inertia. Years pass in Dora’s life in the space of a paragraph, yet she remains unchanged, a cipher. New clothes, a new hairstyle, will not infuse life into so shallow an individual. Cynically Manuela observes:

In the olden days, some women would shut themselves away in their houses for good when their husbands died. Some didn’t even let the sun in, perhaps because they would find its cheerful face too shocking. Dora Rosário went to work…but when she returned home at the end of the day, it was as if she had never left.

Dora’s deceased husband, Duarte, whom she had absurdly idolized, had prided himself on his very lack of ambition:

I’m not the kind of man who wants to rise in the world at the expense of others, or indeed of myself. That smacks too much of wheeling and dealing…. Nor am I going to stand up in the marketplace listing my many qualities and putting a price on them. I just let myself drift, that’s all I can do and all I want to do.

Here at least is the very antithesis of machismo, one thinks, until it becomes clear that swaggering male vanity can take many forms.

There is no spiritual or religious quality to Duarte’s indifference to the marketplace; he isn’t an ascetic who has repudiated a materialistic life, only the coddled son of a well-to-do mother who has indulged and enabled his narcissism. Dora understands this but lacks the courage to object: “Had she said anything…it would have spoiled everything”—that is, the folie à deux of a marriage in which the husband is placed on a pedestal for the wife to admire regardless of his flaws. Though it’s stated repeatedly that Dora loves Duarte very much, we see little evidence of any physical or emotional attraction between them; Duarte seems as lackluster and sexless as Dora, an underimagined character in an underimagined narrative. When he becomes ill he is dispatched within a paragraph, leaving Dora stunned:

When Duarte died, and Dora realized that he was lost forever, it was as if the earth around her shook, and only the tiny scrap of earth beneath her feet remained still. Her world, already sparsely and rather poorly populated, was suddenly deserted.

Dora wants her grief to remain “uncontaminated,” but with only a small pension from Duarte’s employer to support herself and her daughter, “thus began her calvary, her daily round”—searching newspaper ads for jobs, begging for small sums of money from everyone she knows, who soon come to resent her even as they pity her.

This collision of the widow’s private grief with the public fact of her diminished financial state, as a catalyst for Dora’s quasi awakening, comes as a welcome development in the novel. It is bluntly completed by her mother-in-law’s decision to apply a “fixation abscess” to her: “You need such an abscess, and I’m the cruel doctor who’s going to create it and make you suffer.” In the novel’s most dramatic scene, Ana tells Dora that Duarte had been thinking of leaving her before he became ill, to live with another woman:

A work colleague of his, I think, although I can’t remember her name anymore. He’d made up his mind. For once in his life, he was going to take the initiative, a real novelty…. I didn’t try to dissuade him. I thought perhaps that other woman might make something of him. But then he fell ill…. She was a small, nervous woman, like a very intelligent mouse.

Following this revelation, which comes a decade after her husband’s death, Dora is catapulted into an altered consciousness that inspires Carvalho to her most precise and poetic language, suggesting the novel’s latent possibilities, largely unexplored:

She wanted to sleep, to escape herself, to escape the new life she would now be obliged to live, but the paths into sleep were more difficult, more complicated than ever. Cul-de-sacs, long rivers with no tributaries and no sea, no sources either, rocky mountains that she would have to scale in order to see over to the other side, to another landscape.

Is Dora really courageous enough to venture into this foreign landscape? Can she transform the deep hurt of her husband’s infidelity into a repudiation of him, and of her prescribed role as his widow? Carvalho leads the reader to expect liberation when, in an ironic reversal, Dora’s trust in a male acquaintance, Ernesto, by chance the longtime lover of Manuela, leads to a near-fatal car crash that leaves Ernesto, the driver, untouched but Dora physically disfigured, with a scar that runs “diagonally from her forehead to halfway down her cheek.” Her humiliation is complete.

Empty Wardrobes is a bleak, embittered novel holding little possibility of happiness except through delusion; not even a sisterhood of outcasts is possible for the women scorned by men. Manuela observes with chilling detachment as Dora falters in her attempt to establish a rapport with her:

[Dora] couldn’t find quite what it was she meant, and I didn’t help her in the search…. It was raining, and she was a gray woman, slightly bent, lost in a plundered city deserted after the plague. I noticed that she walked uncertainly, hesitantly, teetering slightly, as if she were a little drunk or had not quite woken up from a long nap.

Shrewd and coolly distanced from life as she imagines herself, Manuela is nonetheless “absolutely flabbergasted” and “lost for words” when Ernesto informs her bluntly that he is leaving her to marry the seventeen-year-old Lisa.

As Manuela has observed earlier, “The calm waters of an apparently stagnant river can, at a certain point, form a torrent but then, later, continue serenely on their way.” So, too, the trancelike stasis of Empty Wardrobes is interrupted by a flurry of drama—a belated revelation of an infidelity, a devastating car crash—and the finality of despair, which will then subside into the banal and everyday. At the novel’s end one waits in vain for Manuela to at least embrace the scarred Dora in recognition of their common loss; but Manuela, too wounded to give solace to another, stands stiffly apart as Dora leaves her apartment. Pride dooms Manuela to solitude as rain continues to fall, “passively, from an old and ailing sky, bleary-eyed and weary with life. Now that I lived alone, it was a day like so many others. Another number to be subtracted from my account.”

Since relatively little Portuguese fiction is translated and published in the US, Empty Wardrobes is of particular interest to American readers. One might wish for more nuanced characters and a more capacious representation of Portuguese life, which is surely more varied and engaging than suggested here, but there is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho’s vision and the originality and severity of her voice, as scathing and pitiless in her depiction of “empty” women as in her depiction of oafish swaggering machismo.

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There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.

—We Keep the Dead Close

Mystery, like unrequited love, is best experienced in anticipation. Before myriad possibilities are collapsed to a single blunt conclusion, before the riches of the imagination are reduced to the merely factual and a cast of captivating suspects is reduced to a single guilty perpetrator, the romance of mystery lies in its very irresolution. Whether the genre is true crime or mystery-detective fiction, whether its mode is the straightforward police procedural or the elaborate puzzles of the locked-room mystery, it begins with death made specific: a dead body. (Nearly always the body of a “beautiful” young woman or girl, as if in homage to Poe’s dictum that “the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”) As in a chess game, the opening gambit precipitates all that follows, though the author, knowing the solution of the mystery before she sets out, will structure the text in such a way that it moves inexorably toward its conclusion even as it must digress, misinterpret, and mislead, to provide the heft required of a book instead of, for instance, an article or a column of newsprint. It might be said that the art of mystery is the art of obfuscation.

In fiction, the investigation must involve a cast of suspects of whom one is the guilty party, but not obviously so: if the murderer is too easily detected, the reader will feel cheated; if the murderer is a minor character or a stranger inadequately integrated into the narrative, the reader will feel doubly cheated. Something of the same structure is required in works of true crime except, in these cases, there remains the very real possibility that the murderer will turn out to be a total stranger, not a suspect, identified through an impersonal means of detection like forensic DNA testing, and all that precedes this identification—the close scrutiny of suspects and persons of interest; attention paid to background, circumstances, speculation; indeed, most of the investigation and its chronicling—will turn out to have been irrelevant. “It was random? It was senseless? It could have been anyone?”—such a revelation defeats the purpose of the heroic effort of detection, like a postmodernist mockery of narrative itself that refuses to provide the meaning that justifies the story’s existence.

We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper is a brilliantly idiosyncratic variant of generic true crime, rather more a memoir than a conventional work of reportage, so structured that the revelation of the murderer is not the conclusion or even the most important feature of the book. Instead, the journey to nonrevelation—“the absence of mystery, of narrative echo, of symmetry or rhyme or sense”—becomes the memoirist’s subject.

The product of ten years’ research and speculation by Cooper, a former New Yorker staff member and a senior fellow at Brandeis’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting, We Keep the Dead Close resembles a Möbius strip in which the more information the author accumulates, the less certain she is of its worth, for the history she is writing has “blurred into a vehicle for telling my own [story].” As she tries to “disentangle myth from fact, and to study the iterations of these myths for what they revealed about the storytellers,” it is the “limitations of my imagination” with which Cooper is finally confronted. Appropriately for an investigation into the brutal murder of a student of archaeology and anthropology, We Keep the Dead Close questions traditional procedures of interpreting the past:

Some days, I don’t even know what to tell you about Jane. I know even less about whether telling a responsible story of the past is possible, having learned all too well how the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller.

In January 1969, on the day of what would have been the first of her three Ph.D. general exams, twenty-three-year-old Jane Britton, a Harvard anthropology graduate student and daughter of a Radcliffe administrator, was found in her off-campus walk-up apartment at 6 University Road, Cambridge, savagely bludgeoned to death, her body partly covered with fur blankets and sprinkled with what appeared to be “red ochre”—in the eyes of some observers a re-creation of a burial ritual. Semen stains on underwear belonging to Britton were never identified since, long before forensic DNA testing of such evidence became routine, the underwear was lost by police. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from the apartment; no one reported hearing screams. Though owned by Harvard, the building had “a history of violent crime” that included two previous attacks on young women, one of them fatal. Nonetheless, Britton was said to have rarely locked the door to her apartment as if, in Cooper’s words, “she seemed to live with a sense of invulnerability.”

Cambridge police investigated the murder but did not, inexplicably, secure the crime scene (“There was no caution tape, no barriers. You could just push in the front door and climb the stairs right to Jane’s hallway”), inevitably botching the investigation. Though numerous “persons of interest” associated with the Harvard anthropology department were interviewed, as well as others involved with the victim, no arrests were made. The inquiry eventually stalled and became a cold case, kept alive in the memories of people who’d known Britton and also in lurid legends of the kind Cooper would hear, as a Harvard junior in 2009, of a beautiful young graduate student in archaeology who was murdered sometime in the late 1960s by the professor with whom she was having an affair:

Police found her [body] the next day and questioned the professor. The school forced the Crimson to change its article about the murder. They couldn’t have it point to one of their own…. Suddenly, everything was hushed up. The press stopped writing, the family never investigated, and the police never arrested anyone.

Truncated as this sensational account is, and essentially inaccurate, nonetheless the implication that Harvard exerted its influence to stall the investigation will turn out to be true.

As an undergraduate Cooper immediately became enthralled with the story of Jane Britton, long before knowing her name, “filed in my head, as a fable”; after graduating in 2010 she felt herself drawn back to the unsolved case: “It seems obvious in retrospect that Jane was still waiting there for me.” This startling statement, the implied intimacy between subject and researcher presented as if it were not one-way but somehow reciprocal, suggests how strongly and how immediately Cooper identified with the victim of (presumed) male violence, whose favorite quote (from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan) turned out to be uncannily prescient: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” (Cooper remarks in passing that she has pinned this quote to her own wall.) The connection soon becomes obsessive, fated:

For female graduate students, [Jane’s story] had become a kind of cautionary tale about the systematic imbalances they faced…. I wasn’t innocent, either: Jane had become something to keep me company. A way to structure my life. Something to give it meaning.

And an admission of particular poignancy, as out of place in a generic true-crime book as it is heartrending here: “I had found a companion in my loneliness in [Jane Britton].” In a novel, such a statement would be a signal to the reader that a powerful, perhaps lethal delusion has overcome the narrator. In a memoir, the statement suggests an awakening from delusion, since the recollection is past tense: had found.

Throughout We Keep the Dead Close there is a dramatically sustained tension between the subject (“unsolved murder, Jane Britton”) and its (secret) meaning in the life of the young female investigative reporter:

The distance between my world and Jane’s had already become hallucinatorily thin in spots, but the #MeToo movement felt like 1969 had come crashing fully and completely into the present day [2018]. What had, for years, felt like a secret confined to the halls of archaeology was suddenly what everyone was talking about: whisper networks, the need for rumor to tell stories with no other outlet, the corrupting influence of power, the silencing, the erasure.

“The silencing, the erasure”—these are burials of a kind to which the female sex is particularly vulnerable. That Britton was not only murdered but her murder both given sensational initial coverage (“Pretty Graduate Student Found Slain in Apartment” was one headline) and subsequently erased (the Cambridge police department and the district attorney soon generated “administrative roadblocks” as if to sabotage the investigation) charges Cooper with a mission to address more than simply an individual death but a gender-determined “cultural amnesia” involving male-generated violence against women and girls. She quotes from a lecture she attended at the Harvard Club: “There are many kinds of memory…but the ghosts of alternative histories always surface.”

What fascinates the investigative reporter even as it appalls and infuriates her is the unexamined interpretations given to Britton’s death by those who’d known her, or claimed to have known her, and who were originally questioned by Cambridge police and, years later, interviewed by Cooper. We are made to see how reflexively people may blame a victim for her own murder: some make much of the facts, if they are even facts, that Britton was sexually adventurous, with a predilection for having affairs with academic colleagues, and that she was guilty of consorting with questionable persons—“‘hangers-on and acid heads who you would not call young wholesome Harvard and Radcliffe types.’ There was talk of a secret abortion, and affairs with at least one professor.” One theory held that Britton had threatened to expose the professor with whom she was (allegedly) having an affair, another that she had “maybe threatened to undermine [the professor’s] claim about Tepe Yahya,” an Iranian archaeological dig in which both had participated the previous summer.

Britton’s brother, a Christian minister, is startlingly accusatory in speaking of her, suggesting that she was “sexually active” at the age of eleven. Far from expressing sympathy for his murdered sister, Boyd Britton speaks critically of “affairs that Jane had had with people in the Anthropology department. Several of her section men.” He adds as an afterthought that Jane could be “dreary and pretentious and a bitch.” Cooper notes, “I had no idea what to do with a brother who was talking about his dead sister like that.”

Accused of “negligence” in violation of the Cambridge building code, Harvard seems to have interfered with the investigation because the murder in one of its properties “cast an unwelcome light on Harvard’s real estate policies…at a time when Harvard was in the middle of a $48.7-million fundraising drive.” Britton’s father was a vice-president at Radcliffe who presumably might have insisted on a serious investigation of his daughter’s murder, yet it seems “he never pursued it”; a reporter who’d covered the case in 1969 tells Cooper that neither Harvard’s administration nor the police seemed interested in finding Britton’s murderer: “They just wanted it to die down, bury her, and move along with life as usual at Harvard.”

Like a skilled mystery novelist, Cooper presents her cast of suspects in so beguiling a way that as each is examined, it seems likely to the reader that he is the killer. Initially, the leading contender is the enigmatic, darkly charismatic anthropology professor and archaeologist Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, with whom Britton was believed to have had an affair, in his early thirties at the time of her death but already tenured at Harvard partly on the basis of his work on Tepe Yahya. Among the kinder things said of him is that he is a “bully,” a “plagiarist,” a “toad,” and “Machiavellian.” As Cooper presents him, Lamberg-Karlovsky was a swaggering academic con man with a flair for self-promotion who might have stepped out of the pages of a Saul Bellow novel:

Over the years, as his academic reputation arguably faded, his personal life grew wilder and more legendary. As if to encourage this, Karl stalked the halls of the Peabody Museum in a cape—at least according to graduate student lore. To these students, he seemed to play up to a caricature of the villainous professor…. The whispers that followed Karl seemed, perversely, to give him more power. The story, while never proven, was never dispelled, and it lurked in the background of his interactions: This man might have killed somebody.

Though Lamberg-Karlovsky was known to be a suspect in the Britton murder case, with, at best, a shady personal reputation in the anthropology department, Harvard provided legal counsel for him and eventually promoted him to direct the distinguished Peabody Museum; his value to the university, it’s suggested, was primarily monetary—Lamberg-Karlovsky was a skilled fundraiser whose success was believed to be reason enough “for Harvard to overlook any flaws.”¹ By the time Cooper interviews him he is seventy-four years old, still a prominent presence in the department, an “imposing” figure with an “aristocratic” aura; it is he who provides the title for Cooper’s book, remarking, in a classroom lecture that she attends, “The dead are kept close to you.”

Another “flawed” individual associated with the anthropology department, Lee Parsons, whose relations with Britton involved bullying, stalking, and threatening behavior, and who was known to be a habitual drinker with a predilection for sudden outbursts of temper, was “lawyered up to the gills” by Harvard: “This would mean that Lee was someone worth protecting even if he was a misfit of the department.” The implication is that the university preferred to take a chance on harboring a murderer among the faculty rather than drawing adverse publicity that might interfere with fundraising.

There is a sociological term—“structural violence”—to describe the effect on individuals of oppression of various kinds within institutions, which is likely to be indirect, thus invisible, in contrast to the way the violence of “street crime” is visible: the exclusion of many individuals from full citizenship, for example, thus full protection under the law. This sort of violence can be exercised in secret, and certainly in silence, within long-established institutions like government bureaucracies and private universities; its effects can be devastating for countless individuals, and yet its origins may remain elusive.

For instance, 87 percent of the students who withdrew from the Harvard anthropology Ph.D. program over three decades were women—a fact that Cooper discovers in tandem with her investigation into the Britton murder, along with the fact that 70 percent of five hundred women at Harvard reported having experienced sexual harassment on archaeological field sites. Cooper notes, “It was only because I was talking to all these women in the department, studying this amorphous pattern of unhappiness, that I was beginning to realize how corrosive institutional habits could be.”

From the frustrating case of Jane Britton it’s a logical leap for Cooper to consider more generally the reluctance of Harvard, surely a microcosm of the (patriarchal) academic world, to integrate women into its faculty and student body,² as well as its failure to confront rampant sexism (including outright sexual harassment and abuse) among its male faculty toward vulnerable women faculty and students. The closing of ranks to protect their own is a familiar feature of this “culture of silence”—“the great enabling,” as it’s called by one of its victims, Terry Karl, a former assistant professor of government who was forced to leave in the aftermath of bringing charges against a tenured professor in her department. (Though known to be a “repeater,” this professor was later promoted to director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and, in 2006, as if in rebuke to the accusations made against him, named a Harvard vice-provost.) A formal sexual harassment case initiated by a woman against a tenured male professor “pits a person against an institution that is predisposed to defend the accused.” The university’s complicity through inaction allows the victimization to continue; the signal is sent that “speaking up does nothing but harm the speaker.”

We Keep the Dead Close shares an impassioned advocacy for victims of injustice at Harvard with William Wright’s Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (2006), a revelation of the systematic persecution of undergraduate men suspected to be homosexuals, involving clandestine trials, expulsions, blacklists intended to destroy lives, and subsequent suicides among the expelled.³ In each case, a “culture of silence” protected the oppressors while the victims were ostracized and forced out of Harvard. Cooper quotes a former anthropology associate professor, Kimberly Theidon, who’d sued Harvard in 2014 for failing to give her tenure because of her gender and her “outspoken advocacy” for victims of sexual assault:

On college campuses nation- wide, senior professors—frequently male—wield tremendous power over their students and junior colleagues…. These gatekeepers operate with virtual impunity, administering silences, humiliation, and career-ending decisions. The black box of tenure, lacking transparency, is precisely how silencing and impunity work to the disadvantage of those who would speak up and unsettle the status quo.

In the tradition of classic true crime, Cooper provides an exhaustively detailed account of the police investigation into the Britton murder, which was allowed to lapse for years and was then resuscitated in the summer of 2018, when the results of a forensic DNA test were at last made public. While much that Cooper uncovers in her private pursuit of the case is fascinating in itself, not least her interviews with Lamberg-Karlovsky and other “persons of interest” for whom the case of Jane Britton was never allowed to go cold, it is the revelation of the murderer that is most unexpected: no fellow archaeologist but a local “stalker” unconnected with the Harvard anthropology department, indeed unconnected with Britton herself. “Just some random killer” who had raped and killed at least one other young woman in Cambridge, who had been incarcerated, and paroled, and reincarcerated, and who had died in prison in 2001, years before his DNA would be linked to DNA found at the crime scene.

Like many others who had constructed narratives to explain Britton’s death, Cooper is astonished, dismayed. Hers is the stunning epistemological revelation that no theory generated out of her own intrepid research and analysis had approached: the spare, blunt fact that the murder was a random one, in no way related to the unique person Jane Britton:

Michael Sumpter is not who I would have wanted cast in this role. He is a caricature of a villain, the star of a different myth: the faceless, nameless, shadowy Black figure who abducts white women and has his way with them. A brute. A savage. A beast. This ancient trope is racist and tired…. And it masks the truth: A woman is much more likely to be killed by a loved one than by a stranger…. But my reluctance to embrace this ending changes nothing.

As Cooper presents it, the cruelty with which Britton is treated by the rapist-stalker who enters her life so briefly, even as he ends it, is mirrored, to a degree, by the cruelty with which the young man she’d loved, a fellow archaeologist, broke off their romance with a letter of stunning and inexplicable indifference, which Cooper includes, as if to spare neither herself nor the reader: “Was there anything more horrifyingly indifferent than ‘Health + luck, Jim’?”

At the “white-hot center of the knowable,” after literally a decade of having been obsessed by the death and life of a young woman she’d never known, Cooper finds it as difficult to let go of Britton as she finds it difficult to give up the “reporting mode where everything feels more intense”—the perfect fusion of obsession and rectitude. In the throes of her “immersive insanity” Cooper reconstructs the (probable) death scene, with its terrifying feature of sheer chance; she visits Britton’s grave in Needham Cemetery on what would have been her seventy-third birthday, hoping that she might “encounter someone doing the same pilgrimage…or some flowers left behind anonymously for Jane,” but is made to realize the “very different and very believable alternative that nobody had come here in decades.” Like an inconsolable lover she writes a letter to leave at the gravesite: “Dear Jane, I hope I’m telling the story you want me to tell.”

It’s fitting that Cooper’s beautifully composed elegy for Jane Britton ends with Britton’s own words, from a 1968 journal Cooper discovered, that seem to have been written for Cooper herself, and not for the callow young man who’d so wounded her:

You know more about what makes me tick than anyone else, oddly enough…. Be my chronicler, so the tale of the Brit is told throughout the land, or at least that one person remembers me the way I am instead of the way they see me.

The post Chronicle of a Death Ignored appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In dead of night ask
for God’s sake what
did you miss. You know
goddamned well you
have missed what
they hid from you.

The lost, the loney.
You knew them too late.
Dying too soon.
The young uncle you’d loved most.
Killed himself to free
his spirit, trapped like a genie
in a Coke bottle.

Never knew why. How
was a secret too whispered
in the cornstalks.

Oh that was terrible! Just—
terrible…Something
like that, in a family—
you never forget.

It’s the quiet
after gunshots you remember.

Misshapen ears of corn,
wizened faces. By November
you could see them
seeing you along the rows
of stalks.

You ran from the faces,
hid your eyes. Gut-kick,
spine-cold, sick
with fear of what
had no name.

The post Loney appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

[I] took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by…. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed….

Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.

Self-medicating—“hibernating”—is the narrator’s stratagem for getting through her life benumbed to feeling: “This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.”

Since the deaths of her parents, to whom she seems to have been very little attached, the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation has slipped into a state resembling an open-eyed coma. Memories of her childhood and her parents’ dully disastrous marriage torment her; she hopes to avoid memories of their last unhappy days. (Though estranged in life, the father and mother die within a short span of time.) She avoids friends and acquaintances, and barely manages to tolerate her closest friend. She’d wanted a prescription from a doctor just for “downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything,” but eventually the massive ingestion of drugs dulls more than hatred:

I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system—a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?

In flat, deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill, Moshfegh portrays the vacuous interior life (she has virtually no exterior life) of a narcissistic personality simultaneously self-loathing and self-displaying. So much critical concentration upon the self is a way of adoring oneself, for the subject is never anything other than the self: “Since adolescence, I’d vacillated between wanting to look like the spoiled WASP that I was and the bum that I felt I was and should have been if I’d had any courage.” Acquiring a glamorous job in a pretentious gallery after graduating from college is easy for her, given her looks, clothing, and style: “I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have “turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model.” Being “pretty” assures her a modicum of social success, but she perceives it also as a trap that allows her to succeed in a world that “valued looks above all else,” which she professes to despise.

As in a fairy tale given a distinctly contemporary Manhattan gloss, the spoiled WASP protagonist decides to withdraw: “I was born into privilege,” she says at one point. “I am not going to squander that.” Allowed the luxury of a withdrawal not available to the lugubrious Eileen, who must live in a filthy hovel with an alcoholic father she has come to hate and work at a job she loathes, the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation systematically prepares for her hibernation by prepaying taxes and bills; her finances are overseen by her deceased father’s financial adviser, who sends her quarterly statements she never reads. Her life is focused on taking drugs to induce sleep, sleeping for as long as she can, waking reluctantly for brief intervals, and returning to sleep as soon as possible. Her fondest memories of childhood are of sharing a bed with her drug addict, alcoholic mother, who crushed Valium into her milk when she was a baby. It is sleep that feels “productive,” for she is convinced that “when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn…. My past life would be but a dream.” Indeed it’s something of a challenge for a novelist to make the achievement of sleep into a goal worthy of hundreds of pages of prose, but Moshfegh succeeds, to a degree:

The speed of time varied, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep…. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust…and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy doses of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation.

Readers with a particular interest in designer drugs will thrill to the eroticism of Moshfegh’s litanies:

My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up…. I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien…. And maybe one more Ativan.

The narrator tells herself that what she is doing is not suicide but rather the opposite of suicide: “My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.” The major side effects from the drugs appear to be merely comical: not cardiac or liver failure as one might expect, not brain damage, not even severe constipation, but rather sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating, sleepshopping, sleepsmoking, sleeptexting, sleeptelephoning, and sleepordering Chinese food. In passing the narrator alludes breezily to weight loss, imbalance, and atrophied muscles, but only in passing, and the point is made that she never loses her looks. When she takes her blood pressure in a drugstore she notes indifferently that it is 80/50—“That seemed appropriate.”

When, from time to time, despite ingesting enough medication to kill an elephant, the narrator still can’t sleep, she compulsively watches movies she has seen before, which help to narcotize her mind: “The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg.” Even movies for which she feels contempt are cherished: “The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work.”

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is laced with blackly comic interludes. Though passive to the point of virtual catatonia, the narrator can’t avoid interacting with a very few other people who include a “lover” named Trevor of such astounding sexist oafishness he might have stepped out of one of the more fatuous episodes of Sex and the City: “I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism.” Even funnier than Trevor is a radiantly nutty therapist named Tuttle who prescribes drugs extravagantly, promiscuously, and unquestioningly, prattling away in a unique psychobabble:

Dr. Tuttle had warned me of “extended nightmares” and “clock-true mind trips,” “paralysis of the imagination,” “perceived space-time anomalies,” “dreams that feel like forays across the multiverse,” and “trips to ulterior dimensions.”… And she had said that a small percentage of people taking the kind of medications she prescribed for me reported having hallucinations during their waking hours. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter.”

In flashbacks the narrator recalls her indifferent mother, who “got away with so much because she was beautiful,” a caricature of a narcissist who expresses surprised disapproval when her husband, dying of cancer, requests to be brought home to die, and whose “only intellectual exercise…was doing crossword puzzles.” (“She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk.”) More stereotypical are satiric portraits of art gallery proprietors, patrons, and artists: “The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, ‘punk, but with money.’” The gallery’s star artist is Ping Xi, whose early hugely successful work is “splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate.” (Critics rave: “Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?” When a homeless person takes up residence in the gallery, patrons assume that she is part of the exhibit.

As the year of rest and relaxation progresses, slowly and haltingly, it begins to seem likely that the somnophile is in fact deeply aggrieved, mired in the kind of pathological grief to which Freud gave the romantic label “melancholia,” to distinguish it from the less extreme, more commonly experienced “mourning.” Her drug-taking is a means of escaping from “the tragedy of my past”; she cannot express mourning, it seems, perhaps because she had not loved her parents, and so she is trapped in melancholia—a paralysis of the spirit. Yet My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream.

Both Moshfegh’s novels, like the majority of the deftly narrated, deadpan short stories collected in Homesick for Another World (2017), showcase characters who are defiantly unlikable—ungenerous, unfriendly, critical of others, lacking intellectual or cultural interests. They are “outspoken”—if female, the very opposite of “feminine.” Cripplingly self-conscious, embittered and spiteful, the antiheroine of Eileen acknowledges that she “hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time.”

Like the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Eileen shares a bed with her mother even as her mother is dying, and wakes in the morning beside her corpse: “She died when I was just nineteen, thin as a rail by then, something my mother had praised me for.” To immunize herself from the “misery and shame” that surround her, she has learned to face the world with a “death mask” appropriated from reproductions of actual death masks. Eileen’s angry stoicism masks her self-pity, though the reader is likely to sense that the energy galvanizing the novel has been, indeed, an infinite pity for the misfit self abandoned by an unfeeling mother.

As the somnophile had predicted, My Year of Rest and Relaxation concludes on a hopeful note. After nearly a year she begins to free herself from her enchantment with sleep. She takes the last of her pills; she ventures outside. She begins to rediscover the world. She shakes off her past identity: “I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun.” And lest we should miss the point: “That was it. I was free.”

More engaging than Eileen, more varied in tone, and much funnier, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a recycling of the materials of Eileen that tracks a disagreeable, self-absorbed young woman in her twenties through a cathartic experience that leaves her ostensibly altered and prepared for a new, freer life. Where Eileen ends abruptly and not very convincingly, after an awkward melodramatic interlude, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends with the spectacle of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, for which the author has subtly prepared us. In fact, it seems likely that the narrator’s college roommate—about whom she has felt a prevailing exasperated boredom—has died in the attack. Unambiguously now, the somnophile has been awakened. “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now…. I could move on.”

The post Sleeping Beauty appeared first on The New York Review of Books.