THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE, by Anonymous (Fourth Estate, $24.99); WHAT I LOVED, by Siri Hustvedt (Hodder, $24.99); SPECIAL, by Bella Bathurst (Picador, $27.95); ISABEL AND ROCCO, Anna Stothard (Random House, $26.95).
If you know anything aboutThe Bride Stripped Bare, you’ll know that the author – who intended to publish anonymously – has been stripped bare herself, and outed as Australian novelist Nikki Gemmell.
Initially inspired by an anonymous 17th-century work that Gemmell came across in the library, this is a contemporary story of a woman’s liberation from the prison of bad bourgeois marital sex. In an afterword, Gemmell explains that she could never have written this “deeply private” book without that sheltering expectation of anonymity, so shatteringly confessional is it. But this is not a memoir, she insists. Rather, it’s a mixture of “fantasy and fact”, based on stories from her own life and solicited from friends. Think letters from readers’ wives, but actually written by one of the wives. And it’s dedicated, in the manner of an engraved bullet, “To my husband. To every husband.”
The novel is composed of bitsy little chapters headed with snippets of advice from Victorian conduct books. It’s also written in the present tense and the second person, a technique that at first you find annoying. You are on honeymoon in Marrakesh. Your husband is nice enough, although increasingly dull in bed; also, he may or may not be sleeping with your best friend. You rage, he denies. Back in London, you oscillate wildly between bouts of ennui and indignation, reminisce about penises you have known and the inadequacies of their owners, and consider writing an angry tell-all book something like this one.
Finally, nearly 200 pages into the book, the narrator puts her money where her mouth is, so to speak, and undertakes the seduction of an unemployed, well-hung and conveniently virginal actor. At last, that relentless “you” makes sense: it’s the insinuating whisper of the one-handed read. Dragged along by the increasingly explicit text, “you” strip the comely fellow bare every Tuesday and have your wicked way with him, teaching him in riveting detail what a woman really wants, here, there and, ooh yes, there. Now and then you enquire politely about his unfinished screenplay on the subject of bullfighting.
This section of the book is rewardingly juicy, although tamer than the advance hype suggested. Apart from bedding the would-be bullfighter, our heroine only otherwise does it with her husband and, inexplicably, a scruffy pair of good-time taxi-drivers. Although no doubt particularly exciting for readers who are themselves taxi-drivers, this is where the mattress begins to lose its bounce; the narrator puts an end to her Tuesday tumbles, reconciles warily with her husband, and promptly gets knocked up, before meeting an implausibly mysterious fate. Madame Bovary, more or less, c’est elle.
Gemmell writes that she wanted to give “a scrupulously honest account of a woman’s secret life”. To that pulp-fiction end, the book is sprinkled with shock-horror true-life revelations (not every woman likes giving blow-jobs – who knew?). But this is a manifesto on sexual freedom for women who’ve never heard of Erica Jong, Susie Bright, Nancy Friday or even Colette, writers who assume that the straightforward depiction of desire fulfilled can be revolutionary all by itself.
There’s a saucy novella buried somewhere inside this book (try pages 200-250), but it’s sadly thwarted, like an inquisitive Victorian bride fighting her way out from under a too-sensible flannel nightie.
Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved is a big, rewarding, grown-up novel. This book offers many old-fashioned pleasures in the course of its textured and intelligent account of 30 years in the life of two families and the city they live in.
The city is New York, and the families live in loft apartments in adjacent floors. Their destinies are linked when art historian Leo, the book’s narrator, buys a voluptuous painting by little-known artist Bill Weschler.
Leo and his wife Erica, a literature professor, befriend the artist and his poet wife, the oddly chilly Lucille. Soon, both couples have children, and settle into neighbourly domesticity. Until, that is, Bill leaves his wife for his model, a graduate student named Violet.
With all those academics and artists in the same room, the air is thick with discussions of Big Ideas: art, books, love, loss, desire, death and madness, for starters. And Hustvedt is an art critic in her own right: over the course of the book, Bill’s increasingly conceptual artworks are described with such indelible precision that you come to believe you have seen them yourself.
Into this urbane novel of urban manners, Hustvedt lobs not one, nor two, but three great tragedies. Their aftershocks reverberate through the rest of the book, and shed retrospective light on the peculiarly haunted timbre of Leo’s voice.
It would be unkind to reveal further details. This is a novel about looking very hard at things, while failing to see what was under your nose all along. It’s also an argument for the mysteriously redemptive alchemy of art. It is a very serious book – neither Hustvedt nor her narrator has much time for humour – but the gravitas of the prose and the momentum of the plotting exert a powerful pull on the reader. Violet, late in the book, spends her days reading obsessively: “I read and read and read until I can’t see the page any more.” I found myself doing the same.
Bella Bathurst gets the atmosphere just right in her first novel, Special, about cooped-up boarding school girls getting some compulsory fresh air in the Forest of Dean. Bathurst serves up a raw, angsty chronicle of misery and mutual torture, as the week-long retreat accelerates from dull to devastating. It’s hard to believe the girls are, as they keep reminding themselves resentfully, barely teenagers. Perhaps 13 really is the new 21.
After a scene-setting road accident and some ominous talk of quicksand hereabouts, Bathurst safely delivers her embattled group to a splendidly imagined venue. The Manor, a former lunatic asylum, evokes both the burgeoning sexuality of young women and the long and futile history of attempts to contain it. It’s “part hostel, part barracks, part derelict” and, in a gleefully nasty touch, the interior of the grim redbrick institution is painted a “gynecological pink”. Ick.
The title comes from Johnny Rotten – “Don’t touch me. I’m special” – and the novel features five untouchable girls, each special in her own way. There’s a desperate anorexic, a blowsy risk-taker, a lumpy misfit, a cruel beauty and a steely outsider. Nominally in charge: two teachers, one sadistic, one sad, who bring their own well of loneliness to the proceedings. Naturally, the girls immediately plot their escape, scoping out the nearest town and its attractions: shops, pubs, boys, men.
Bad things happen. Alternately neglected and harassed by the adults who might protect them, the girls betray each other and themselves. The coldly expedient horse-trading and vicious barbs render the novel increasingly bleak and claustrophobic, as events build relentlessly towards what is supposed to be a shattering climax. I found the stagy denouement curiously disappointing; Bathurst’s mordant take on the depressingly ordinary disasters of adolescence was gripping enough.
A similar surfeit of melodrama afflicts Isabel and Rocco, Anna Stothard’s debut novel about a teenaged brother and sister inexplicably abandoned by their antique-dealer parents. -Stothard is even closer to the action than Bathurst; she wrote this novel while still in high school. Fay Weldon called it “urgent, wondrous and alarmingly erotic”. I’d rate it a beautiful failure, an intense but flawed exercise in recording the hypersensitivity and heightened awareness of early adolescence.
Preternaturally observant Isabel and her older, wordlier brother (that would be Rocco) play strange games in their shared attic bedroom while the house literally falls apart around them. In passing, Isabel loses her virginity, and then a hectic and disturbing chain of events delivers the ill-omened siblings to romantic exile in Paris.
At the heart of the novel is Isabel’s (and according to the author, her own) urgent desire to chronicle all the momentous “first times” in life that are soon obliterated by the ennui of adulthood and its dull routines. Alas, Stothard’s moments of luminous insight are undermined by the frankly silly plot and the often throbbingly repetitive prose. She is a talented writer; may her editors serve her better next time.
Jolisa Gracewood is a New Zealander living in New York City. She writes a blog at www.publicaddress.net.