A pendulum swings...
Dear Lori & Anthony,
I am continuing my reading and should be caught up with you in time for my next dispatch. In the meantime, I am considering your most recent letters.
As I’m sure you’re already aware, the contradictions you mention, Lori, are not just lexical (though I found your examples fascinating). They also appear in Young’s characters and settings. Look at the landscapes her mother and Miss Macintosh inhabited within Vera’s memories. Catherine Helena resides in an underwater grotto. There, she holds court from her bed, receiving both real and hallucinatory visitors. There’s an implied sumptuousness in her surroundings, a sense of enclosure and decay. Remember Dicken’s descriptions of Miss Havisham’s mansion and gardens? Both women inhabit a kind of madness wrought by isolation. There are parallels in their relationships with their daughters. Vera fled her mother, just as Estella eventually abandoned Miss Havisham.
In contrast, Vera’s memories of her time with Miss Macintosh are of tasks performed and games played. They were frequently outdoors. I love the image of these two, adult and child, in dresses playing ping pong at the surf’s edge. Or of them sitting together in candlelit rooms as a storm rages outside. Vera remembers working with tools to disassemble items and mend and rebuild them. Miss Macintosh is always active, just as Catherine Helena is always still. Miss Macintosh is angular and efficient, and Catherine is soft, even voluptuous.
In this novel, a pendulum swings back and forth between Miss Macintosh and Catherine Helena, the two Mr. Spitzers, Madge, and her dying rival Jackie. Who will be Vera’s opposite/other? Is it Lorena, who I haven’t encountered yet but who I know lurks in the future? One is always alive, the other dead or dying.
Anthony, you’re wise not to entirely trust what’s being presented to us on these pages. I don’t trust Vera, though I still can’t put my finger on exactly why. I’m re-reading Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. (Eco, once again!) It is a collection of essays about the relationship between the ideal author and the ideal reader. I picked it up again after reading Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. (Ron Charles called an earlier novel of Kushner’s, The Mars Room, “calculated,” and I believe the same can be said for Creation Lake, which had hair standing up on the back of my neck. Someone else is present in that novel but invisible, managing the narrative. I suppose it is Kushner.) Maybe Eco will provide instructions on reading Miss Macintosh, My Darling. I particularly want to revisit his chapter on time.
I’m very taken with Anthony’s Yeats quote, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” and all that it implies. Young has enmeshed the material and hallucinatory to such a degree we cannot separate the strands.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
I apologize if my letter is a bit fragmented and scattered. I am tossing an abundance of ideas into the wind, hoping some will land and take root. It seems fitting.
Creating my own path through the woods,
Tara