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3.44 AVERAGE
3.44 AVERAGE
This is sharp, terrifying, depraved, and laced with incredible moments of clarity. Other readers have called it funny, and while I don't think I'd go so far as to agree, I can see the shades of it. This chick Harriet is losing her mind and it's twisted and sad--what makes it interesting is the feeling you get that she's sometimes fighting it, sometimes inviting it.
In the intro Emily Prager says it well: "if every woman's fears and frailties can be hysterically articulated in one book, this is it."
I didn't love this book, but I appreciated its boldness and I will likely be haunted for awhile yet by its dark heart. (Not to mention the grimy rendering within of New York in the summer: "if you fancy cooked banana peel with pizza and eggshells, there was a feast in the gutter.")
In the intro Emily Prager says it well: "if every woman's fears and frailties can be hysterically articulated in one book, this is it."
I didn't love this book, but I appreciated its boldness and I will likely be haunted for awhile yet by its dark heart. (Not to mention the grimy rendering within of New York in the summer: "if you fancy cooked banana peel with pizza and eggshells, there was a feast in the gutter.")
The narrator's outrageous one-liners had me laughing throughout the book, but the last 40 pages or so take a weird, and interesting, turn that made me think of her in a completely different light.
dark
funny
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Watching a trainwreck of a woman. You can't decide if the guy she's with is villain or victim, since she is the "unreliable narrator," but you sympathize with her because her caustic wit is her only defense, it seems. Once she was ejected from Claude's apartment and installed in the room at the Chelsea Hotel, I lost sympathy. Like she'd found a collection of people having more predatory neediness then her, and she surrendered to them. Unless I missed how this saved her, restored her, or repaired her predicament. With some "trainwreck" stories, I find I want to slap them back to sensibility and self-esteem during the story and cheer when they overcome at the end. With this ending, I only felt a desire to leave her to her choice and go get a drink.
After discovering a group of remaindered NYRB paperbacks last week, I have been on a delightful, unexpected reading jag. "After Claude" is sharp, acerbic, and gallows-funny in its character study of a complicated woman who has become emotionally paralyzed and longs only to lie in bed all day watching television game shows and snacking. When her relationship with a French documentary film producer ends with a bang, she moves into full crisis mode. She has alienated everyone around her and her last three roommates have called the police to physically remove her from the premises. It is a great testament to the writing of this novel that the reader does not herself throw the book at the wall after twenty pages. It may be that Harriet's humour helps to keep her afloat (and to keep us reading), it may be that we want to root for her to find some measure of comfort. But there is also something powerful about watching a woman who refuses to follow the rules, but is still so completely hamstrung by cultural expectations that she cannot find a way to authentically function without a man. In an existential crisis, she slips further and further away from her own true identity, denying her jewishness, denying her past, even nearly losing her name, as she struggles against a society that has no place for her. As Emily Prager says in the introduction, "This predilection of bright women to twist themselves into bizzarre submissive postures from which only humor can release them is something die-hard feminists will never address. But Iris and I were in agreement: there is nothing that warms a smart girl's heart like the smile on the face of a sadist."
I filed this one under depression after spending a few hours with the darkly funny, pathetic, fanciful, deluded Harriet in this 1973 novel. After she has been moved to the Chelsea Hotel by the more-decent-than-I-would-have-been Claude, we encounter a setting smacking of primal scream therapy: "trapped groans filled my throat..." as her "guide" Roger chants "Let the demons out." But Harriet's demons are not to be corralled as she collapses yet again in wait for a man, any port in the storm to salve her paralyzed psyche and inertia. I thought of Edie Sedgewick or one of Jean Rhys' sad characters for whom the dark humor would be of no help.
And I am missing something so read this excellent, admiring review http://theamericanscholar.org/sex-and-the-single-woman/#.UfSQG9LVCh0
And I am missing something so read this excellent, admiring review http://theamericanscholar.org/sex-and-the-single-woman/#.UfSQG9LVCh0
Harriet is equal parts Holden Caulfield, Ignatius J. Reilly, and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She's caustic, neurotic, unstable, and occasionally insightful. The book is a fiercely short descent into her self-destruction and concludes with a knife's edge. A very worthy read.
It's been a loong time since a book made me laugh out loud (or "LOL" as the kids say), but this one did.