Forgotten

Recently our Book Club read “Stoner”, a wonderful 1965 novel by John Williams which had gone out of print until its success in France led to its reissue in the United States. It reminded me that one of the books on my 'Hope to Get To' list had a similar history. I had read an article in the New Yorker about Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower, whose works had been out of print for many years until, in 2012, the Australian publishing house Text reissued them and persuaded her to publish her last novel, which she had withdrawn just before it was to be released in 1971. The article declared The Watch Tower to be her greatest novel, so I decided it was time to read another forgotten work.

Although the story is set in the Australia of the 1940's, I kept being reminded of novels from earlier times. Laura and Clare Vaizey are not orphans like Jane Eyre, but they might as well be. Their heartless mother yanks Laura out of her academic high school so that she can support the family, then abandons the girls completely to return to England. Laura sacrifices her own dreams and attempts to save her sister's future by marrying Felix Shaw, her boss at the factory where she works. Harrower describes him as “a swarthy nuggety man of forty-four who looked closer to fifty”. All I could think of was poor Dorothea stuck with boring, insensitive Casaubon in "Middlemarch".

But Felix turns out to be much worse than the pompous Casaubon; in fact, he proudly compares himself to Bluebeard. What follows is a harrowing psychological tale, as Clare attempts to escape the toxic household that Felix has created around Laura and herself. If you've ever wondered why a woman stays in an abusive marriage, this novel provides a vivid case study.

Harrower's language is precise and controlled, sometimes witty, always honest. The story was terrifying, but I couldn't look away.

Artistic Vision

The woman upstairs is mad. Not like Mr. Rochester's wife in “Jane Eyre”. No, Nora Eldridge, Claire Messud's narrator in The Woman Upstairs, is mad in a very different way. “How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that”. That's how Nora opens her story, at the age of “forty f***ing two”, as she looks back on the last five years. As a third grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts she had grown accustomed to her life as a single woman, a loyal friend, a caring daughter to her aging father. Her mother had warned her before she died not to be dependent on a man, and she had perhaps taken that advice too much to heart, abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist for the security of a teaching job.

And then she falls in love. But not the way you'd expect. It begins with the arrival of a new student in her class, Reza Shahid, son of an Italian mother and a Lebanese father. Nora is taken with his charm and his exoticism, and she is soon drawn to his parents as well. The family seems to possess much that Nora admires and lacks – they are confident, successful, cosmopolitan, larger than life. Soon she is sharing studio space with Reza's mother, herself an aspiring artist, and listening entranced as Reza's father, a visiting professor at Harvard, discusses his theories on ethics and history. She basks in the glow of their attention, and if there are subtle hints that they may not be as devoted to her as she is to them, Nora misses those clues for a long time.  Maybe at some point in our lives we've all been seduced by someone who seems possess what we wish we had.

But we know from page one that Nora is angry, and Messud skillfully crafts her evolution from blind adoration to doubt to disillusionment. And her anger, when it comes, is not resigned resentment but a fire-breathing, expletive-laced rage that leaves me with the hope that Nora's days as an artist and a fully realized woman are just beginning.

Art and Life

The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers is the story of a psychological journey. The main portion of the novel is an extended session between psychologist David McBride and his suicidal patient Elizabeth Cruikshank. David, the narrator of the story, feels especially able to deal with the “suicidally disposed” because of an incident in his own childhood in which his beloved older brother was killed before his eyes in a traffic accident when he was five years old. He has a sort of survivor's guilt that makes him sensitive to those who choose to end their lives. But his early attempts to reach his uncommunicative patient are unsuccessful. Finally, her brief reference to Caravaggio draws him to view the painting The Supper at Emmaus in London and when he describes his reaction to her, Elizabeth opens up and begins to expose her other self.

Elizabeth's story of what led her to suicide forms the main portion of the book, and I don't want to give away too much of it. But her first words concerning her tragedy - “I was faithless” - are profoundly important. It's not just that she was unfaithful, but that she lacked the faith to embrace the love she was offered. As David gently questions her, he also begins to realize that his own life mirrors Elizabeth's. The trauma in his past has caused him to close himself off, to remain in a marriage with the self absorbed wife. When Elizabeth asks him “"Why do you do this? Is it love or damage?" he answers, "Possibly both."

Vickers invokes the image of the Caravaggio paintings frequently as the story progresses. If you've read St. Luke lately you'll remember that it tells the story of two of Jesus's followers traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the crucifixion, mourning the death of their leader. They are joined by a mysterious stranger, and when he breaks bread with them at supper he reveals himself as the risen Christ and then disappears. David and Elizabeth are also travelers, and each helps the other to the revelation of the “other side” of themselves.

The title for Vickers's novel comes,from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland ("Who is the third who walks always beside you? . . . Who is that on the other side of you?"). Although some may find the language somewhat stilted at times, I thought it was beautifully poetic in capturing the human emotions of loss, regret and redemption.