Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

I decided too much time had passed: “Everything okay? I’m thinking of you. Mia.”

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The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural fm dominated almost entirely by women. In fact, reading fiction is often regarded as a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don’t. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does.” The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at that time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B.’s, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.

On Saturday at five in the afternoon, the Rolling Meadows Book Club met in the library over small sandwiches and even smaller glasses of wine to discuss the novelist Jane Austen, author of Persuasion, ironic observer, precise dissector of human feeling, stylist from heaven, and an author who did away with perverted monks but retained her own version of virtue rewarded. Both loved and detested, she has kept her critics hopping. “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen,” said America’s literary darling Mark Twain. “Even if it contains no other book.” Carlyle called her books “dismal trash.” But today, too, she is accused of “narrowness” and “claustrophobia” and dismissed as a writer for women. Life in the provinces, unworthy of remark? Women’s travails, of no import? It’s okay when it’s Flaubert, of course. Pity the idiots.

You may recall that I had been asked to introduce the proceedings. With some editing here and there and taming of my prose from the incendiary to the palatable, as well as additional rigmarole about the Great Jane teetering between two literary eras and inventing a new road for the novel, the above paragraph gives you an idea of what I said, so we won’t bother to rehearse it here.

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The DISCUSSANTS: The three remaining Swans, my mother, armed with well-marked copy of book in question; Abigail, looking more doubled over than ever and exceedingly frail, dressed in elaborately embroidered blouse depicting dragons; and the mild, good-natured Peg, with her bright side showing, as well as three ladies new to me: Betty Petersen, with a sharp chin and sharper gaze, had made extra money for the family as the author of humorous texts for a greeting card company; Rosemary Snesrud, former — grade English teacher, and Dorothy Glad, widow of Pastor Glad, who had once presided at the small Moravian Church on Apple Street.

The SETTING: two sofas upholstered in an alarming green-and-violet print of aggressive foliage facing each other, two stuffed chairs, far less excited in appearance, also parked across from each other, all of which circled long oval coffee table with one unstable leg, which caused it to lurch every now and again when especially perturbed. Three windows on far wall with view of courtyard and gazebo. Bookshelves with volumes, most of which were lying wearily on their sides or leaning with a desultory air against a divider, but too few of these to qualify for the noun library. General hush in building interrupted only by squeaking walkers in nearby hallway and the occasional cough.

The CONTROVERSY: Should the young Anne Elliot have been persuaded by her vain, silly, profligate father, her vain and cold sister, Elizabeth, and her well-meaning, kind, but very possibly misguided older friend, Lady Russell, to break with Captain Wentworth, with whom she was madly in love because he had only prospects, no fortune? As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance. You may think I would disapprove of this, I, who had endured the ongoing trials of literary theory, who had taken the linguistic turn, witnessed the death of the author and somehow survived fin de l’homme, who had lived the life hermeneutical, peered into aporias, puzzled over différance, and worried about sein as opposed to Sein, not to speak of that convoluted Frenchman’s little a versus his big one, and a host of additional intellectual knots and wrinkles I have had to untie and smooth out in the course of my life, but you would be wrong. A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. Back to the controversy at hand:

Peg looks on the bright side. Because Anne gets Wentworth in the end, all is well.

Abigail strongly disagrees: “Wasted years! Who has time to waste years?” Adamant statement followed by table limping to one side. Glass slides. Grabbed by Rosemary Snesrud. Does not fall.

Uncomfortable silence pertaining to waste, my own silence among the other silences, a wondering silence about wasted years, about the not done, the not written.

Dorothy Glad injects extraliterary not-at-all-glad possibility: “He might have drowned at sea! Then she would never have found love.”

I suggest sticking to the text itself, as it was written without that particular shipwreck.

My mother holds up imaginary scale and weighs familial duty against passion. Imagine the pain of alienating one’s family. That has to be considered, too. There was no easy solution for Anne. For the motherless Anne, breaking with Lady Russell was tantamount to breaking with her mother.

Rosemary S. defends my mother. According to the Snesrud philosophy, life’s decisions are “sticky.”

Betty Petersen brings in unsavory Elliot cousin destined to inherit family baronetcy: “She might have hitched herself to that snake in the grass, if her friend, what’s-her-name, hadn’t given her the dope on him. Lady Russell was completely snowed.”

Abigail, irritation mounting, insists that stepping on one’s desires is deforming. She makes strong pronouncement accompanied by feeble bang on the table’s surface: “It mutilates the soul!” Table nods in agreement, but Peg clicks her tongue. Talk of mutilation threatens brightness of all kinds.

My mother gazes soberly at her friend Abigail, understanding that it is not Anne’s soul that has been mutilated. The crooked Abigail is trembling. I notice how skeletal her arms are under her dragon blouse. I suffer irrational worry that the strength of her emotion will shake her fragile bones to the breaking point, and I deflect the conversation to men and women and the question of constancy, one close to my heart. What do the discussants think of Anne’s argument about women and men in her conversation with Captain Harville?