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For Your Reading List

(3) "Vacant Possession." 

Hilary Mantel's work is informed by rage. It's rage about gender inequality. Her first novel--"A Place of Greater Safety"--was dismissed by male critics. One complained that there was "too much discussion of wallpaper." (Mantel mentioned wallpaper exactly once in 750 pages.)

Mantel suffered for years from endometriosis, which was dismissed and/or misdiagnosed by several male doctors. Asked what era she would most like to write in, she says, "Now is as good a time as any for female writers." (Which is *not* to say that it's a great time for female writers.) One of her early novels, "Eight Months on Ghazzah Street," concerned the brutal treatment of women Mantel witnessed when she actually lived on Ghazzah Street.

There's a sense of rage, also, in Mantel's thoughts on the treatment of (female) writer Anita Brookner: "Brookner is the sort of artist described as minor by people who read her books only once. A decade ago it was fashionable for critics to stamp their feet at her and insist she do something different. Her characters should get out more, cheer up or take some Prozac, go shopping, get a makeover."

Mantel, of course, has a different assessment of Brookner: "Grow up. The singular quality of each novel, as well as the integrity of the project, is established. Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night."

I think of those lines when I think of "Vacant Possession." It's not cozy. It's not warm. It doesn't offer visions of redemption. It is a hard, perfect bead. Or a well-oiled machine. Characters come in and out, and they have improbable (delightful) connections, and they do crazy things to one another. No one learns. No one grows. The humor is exhilarating and bleak. There's very little in the way of justice; little, if anything, can be predicted. The chaos often seems like a direct copy of actual life. You read it and think, "Here's a mind unlike any others I know of."

(2) "My Year of Rest and Relaxation." A woman fights to have the chance to sleep, uninterrupted, for several months. Bizarre challenges fly at her. For example, if you take heavy drugs to induce sleep, you may find yourself out shopping or partying *in your chemically-manufactured slumber* ...In a moment of weird triumph, our narrator realizes she must pay someone to be her captor. He will lock her in from the outside. He will stop by once and a while to be sure she has pizza or yogurt (for those brief moments when she wakes up).

Months later, having extinguished her drug supply, the narrator emerges into the world. She discovers she really is like a newborn. The light hurts her; it takes her a week to walk around one block on the upper east side. She finds wonder in previously quotidian things: a grackle in Carl Schurz Park, a honeybee.

She tapes footage of 9/11 to remind herself to be awake. There's an image of a woman jumping from the seventy-eighth floor: "One heel has flown up above her body; the other shoe seems squeezed on, like it's too small. She is beautiful; she is fully alive; she is diving into the unknown."

The book is audacious and reminiscent of "Our Town": "Does anyone really experience life as she lives it?" Moshfegh seems to have access to "the special knowledge of poets and saints": She makes living seem extraordinary, once again.

(1) "Tips for Conversation" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/smarter-living/tips-better-conversations.html

I find this story utterly bizarre. It actually warns against asking someone about his/her job, because this question could be intrusive. Who thinks that way?

At the same time, in baffling, self-contradictory, Lewis Carroll-ish fashion, it suggests that this *is* a common and acceptable (American) question, and says we shouldn't use it in Europe, because it's so bland that we will be scoffed at. We should instead ask: HOW DO YOU KEEP YOURSELF BUSY? (As if some Belgian would fail to register that I was a struggling American--would fail to give me the benefit of the doubt.)

Where did the NYTimes find the space alien who wrote this article? And is there not an editor on the staff? (I do find helpful the advice to "shut up and listen"--something I sometimes struggle with.)

More later! 

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