In flash-forwards we learn that the younger sister, imagined as a “menace” before her birth, has turned out to be in fact a menace of a kind: she is an emotionally unstable, chronically depressed individual for whom Atwood’s narrator feels a helpless sort of sisterly responsibility. The depressed sister speaks obsessively of “leaving”: “I should just check out. I’m useless here. It’s too much effort,” which the narrator interprets as:
She doesn’t mean my house. She means her body. She means the planet Earth. I can see the same thing she’s seeing: it’s a cliff edge, it’s a bridge with a steep drop, it’s the end. That’s what she wants: The End. Like the end of a story.
Because Moral Disorder is rooted in domestic realism, and not in tragedy, or Gothic melodrama, the depressed younger sister never kills herself but survives, unremarkably, into adulthood: “She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along.”
As Moral Disorder moves forward in time, out of the relatively staid 1950s and into the “moral disorder” of the 1960s. Atwood’s unnamed narrator acquires the no-nonsense name of Nell as she acquires, apparently through the maneuvering of her lover’s wife Oona, a very nice man named Tig, and Tig’s two sons for whom she must care, as a responsible (if unmarried) stepmother. Belatedly Nell realizes:
She was being interviewed, in a way: Oona had her fingered for the position of second wife, or if not a second wife exactly, something second. Something secondary. Something controllable. A sort of concubine. She was to serve as Tig’s other company, so that Oona could get on with the life of her own she was so determined to lead.
Poor Nell, who doesn’t even cheat at solitaire! In the heady 1960s where “all games had changed at once and earlier structures had fallen apart and everyone had begun pretending that the very notion of rules was obsolete” Nell finds herself in approximately the position she’d been boxed into, at eleven: caretaker.
In the linked stories “Moral Disorder” and “White Horse” Atwood ventures into the rural Ontario that has been Alice Munro’s literary province, as into a canny, often very funny dissection of the sexual politics of the era. These are poignant stories crammed with richly nostalgic detail, rueful, wise, elegiac; years later, Nell drives past the farm where she’d lived so crowded and tumultuous a life, seeing how “[t]he farmhouse itself had lost its ramshackle appearance. It looked serene and welcoming, and somewhat suburban.”
The two linked stories that end the collection, “The Labrador Fiasco” and “The Boys at the Lab,” return us to Atwood’s unnamed narrator, now a middle-aged woman caring for her elderly parents. In the first of these, the father, weakened from a stroke, takes comfort in being read to by his daughter from an account of the ill-fated expedition into the wilds of Labrador undertaken by the doomed American explorers Hubbard and Wallace in 1903; in this somber story the narrator’s father suddenly peers at her with the remark: “You seem to have become very old all of a sudden.” “The Boys at the Lab” is essentially a portrait of the narrator’s mother that will evoke, to readers familiar with Atwood’s fiction, similar portraits of strong yet elusive maternal figures, including the ghostly mother of Surfacing. Now the mother is bedridden, near-blind and near-deaf:
Talking into her ear is like talking into the end of a long narrow tunnel that leads through the darkness to a place I can’t really imagine. What does she do in there all day? All day, and all night. What does she think about? Is she bored, is she sad, what’s really going on?
Like Atwood’s captive “murderess” Grace Marks who saves herself by emulating that prototype of all female storytellers Scheherazade, Atwood’s narrator understands that her function at her mother’s bedside is to tell stories; to make “legendary” what was once, decades ago at the summer wilderness camp, the stuff of ordinary life: “The stories she most wants to hear are about herself, herself when younger; herself when much younger.” When the mother’s memory at last fades, the narrator must evoke, out of her own imagination, an ending to the final story she has told her mother. What more eloquent and heartrending ending to this work of fiction published nearly thirty-five years after Surfacing, a final evocation of the wilderness site in northern Quebec to which Atwood’s father brought his family each summer: “Then they all climb up the hill, toward the Lab, and vanish among the trees.”
IN THE EMPEROR’S DREAM HOUSE: CLAIRE MESSUD
The Emperor’s Children
by Claire Messud
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, QUOTED IN THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN
1.
Nietzsche tells us: “Poets behave shamelessly toward their experiences: they exploit them.” But is this so, invariably? In prose fiction, as in poetry? It has become a commonplace assumption that even writers of ambition are inspired primarily by their own lives and by the experiences of their generations, fed by the influence of the great, self-absorbed and-obsessed Modernists (Joyce, Proust, Lawrence) and by mid-twentieth-century American “confessional” poets (Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Plath); as if the autobiographical pulse is ubiquitous, beating visibly, or invisibly, fueling the very act of creation. Who needs a muse, where there is a mirror? What need for any effort of the imagination, in the creation of poetry or prose in the mode of Robert Lowell: “Yet why not say what happened?”
Yet there is an equally powerful instinct to resist autobiography/confession, to forge purely imagined, or assimilated, literary subjects; for some writers, even those for whom the stylistic experimentations of Modernism are extremely attractive, the very act of “identification” must involve distance, difference. “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” as George Eliot once remarked. That art should be guided by, or even suggest, a moral compass seems, in the post-Modernist era, quaintly remote, quixotic; yet there are numerous, notable writers for whom the nineteenth-century ideal of “enlarging sympathy” is predominant. Among contemporary writers whose inspiration seems, at times magically, to be the very antithesis of self, Claire Messud has demonstrated a remarkable imaginative capacity.
Born in 1966 in the United States, educated at Yale and Cambridge, Messud has set her several novels in such widely disparate places as the remote, punishing islands of Bali and Skye (When the World Was Steady, 1994); in a meticulously realized south of France and in Algeria under French colonization (The Last Life, 1999); in Ukraine, wartime (World War II) Europe, and Toronto (“A Simple Tale,” in The Hunters, 2001). Messud’s debut novel When the World Was Steady is a tenderly ironic double portrait of two hapless middle-aged English sisters who travel to very different islands: Emmy, abruptly divorced by her Australian husband, leaves her affluent residence in Sydney to make a pilgrimage of sorts to the exotic island of Bali, for no reason other than a wish to escape the place of her humiliation; Virginia, the younger and more naive sister, a spinster caretaker of an aging, difficult mother, agrees to accompany her mother on a misguided sentimental journey to the mother’s birthplace in a remote area of the Scottish island of Skye. Each of the Simpson sisters has adventures on her island, of a kind that might be called romantic, or mystical; each leaves her island a changed woman, but not very changed. Emmy leaves Bali and almost immediately reverts to her former, superficial self, in a flurry of planning her daughter’s wedding: “This was her way of being, she recognized, and her way of not suffering too much, which was why she had come home to the mantles—however tattered—that she knew how to wear.” Virginia, the more thoughtful of the sisters, as she is the lonelier and more poignant, seems to have lost even her wan, anemic Christian faith when she returns from her island adventure:
Virginia had concurred, falsely, that God might Himself be in the wrong, or at least, might be cruel. But for herself, she attributed fault to human inadequacy and she continued to try to be
lieve that He Himself could not disappoint…But out in the world, in the London that looked ruthlessly and exactly the same since her return from Skye…she could discern only emptiness and terror, a morass of humanity’s failure masked only by its transparent illusions of meaning.
As if the “good women” so attentively observed by Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner were taken out of their routine, domestic lives, given a shake and made to experience a metaphysical chill, before being brought back safely home again.
Messud’s most ambitious novel is the very long, very detailed and coolly impassioned The Last Life, a sustained feat of ventriloquism narrated by an expatriated young Frenchwoman named Sagasse La Basse, living now in New York City (“with my burden of Original Sin” and studying at Columbia University, who looks back upon her turbulent early adolescence in a resort town on the Mediterranean, amid a family of French Algerian emigrants. Sagasse’s mother is an American in exile who is never allowed to imagine that she really belongs in France, or in the stultifyingly close-knit and self-regarding bourgeois La Basse family; Sagasse’s paternal grandfather is a well-to-do hotelier with French Nationalist leanings, whose single, impulsive act of violence, discharging a firearm at teenaged trespassers on his property, precipitates the disintegration of the family, including the suicide of Sagasse’s father. The novel is recounted in a tone of obsessive memoir, in which each recalled detail is equivalent to all others as in an inviolable incantation, an expression of a doomed yet prideful lineage:
we knew ourselves to be bound to our faith, cement-bound, blood-bound, in a proximity shared by only a few hundred thousand, those who were, like us, exiles of French Algeria…The logic of my upbringing was indisputable: we were Catholics, we were French, we were Algerian. Ours, as a personal heritage, a gift indeed, most particularly for us, the Europeans of North Africa, was the doctrine of Original Sin.
There is a curious, largely unexamined rift between the highly sophisticated inner language of Sagasse and Sagasse’s outer life, in which she behaves like a spoiled, somewhat dyspeptic fifteen-year-old, a moody child of privilege with (somehow) the power of an artist to re-create La Basse family histories in France and in Algeria, at second hand; as if the precocious young narrator of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse were gifted with the political/cultural insight of a Camus, or the young Thomas Mann of Buddenbrooks. So deeply immersed is Sagasse in her subject, so persuasive in her interior voice, the La Basse clan, somewhat petty, self-destructive and exasperating individuals, emerges as figures of significance, and sympathy. Sagasse’s lengthy homage to her past is an homage to the mystique of French Algeria, where Sagasse herself never lived; and to the imperial France that colonized Algeria, only to fall fatally in love with its creation. Both Augustine and Camus are quoted liberally in The Last Life, but it is Augustine whose melancholy fatalism, disguised as religious piety, speaks to the La Basse sensibility: “From the evidence of this life itself, a life so full of so many and such various evils that it can hardly be called living, we must conclude that the whole human race is being punished.”
How necessary, then, that the exiled Sagasse reinvent herself as an American, which is to say as anonymous:
And in time, America becomes a kind of home, without the crippling, warming embrace of history…In a gesture of perversity, I studied history, as an undergraduate, the wild idealism of the Founding Fathers, the piling, stone upon recent stone, of a culture notable for its interest not in the past but in the future: a different, an American, way of thinking.
At the novel’s end, in an eloquent coda, the solitary Sagasse hints at a future involving a fellow graduate student at the university, whom, so far, she has only observed from a distance:
Not long in America, he has washed up here like Phlebas the Phoenician, but alive, from the wars of his homeland—and of mine—a home that exists only in the imaginary. His name is Hamed. How to tell him, who might have been my cousin, the stories I know? How to avoid it?
The oddly paired novellas of Messud’s The Hunters would seem to proffer variants on themes of alienation and urban dislocation: “A Simple Tale” is the radically compressed life-story of an aging Ukrainian woman, a kind of European immigrant Everywoman, who has worked for an eccentric Canadian woman named Mrs. Ellington for nearly fifty years, in the vein of Flaubert’s self-effacing homage to “ordinary” life, “A Simple Heart” “The Hunters,” set in a grubby district of London, is narrated by an eccentric individual of no evident sex, age, or ethnic background (“This was…a time in which I had no life. Or rather, in which I had no life that could be seen”), given to arch Nabokovian observations and fantastical speculations about his, or her, neighbors, in the vein of that most riddlesome of Henry James’s late voyeuristic novels The Sacred Fount.
What links these seemingly antithetical works of fiction is the singular author who would seem to exhibit, perhaps more convincingly than James Joyce himself did, those ideal attributes of the artist set forth in Stephen Dedalus’s credo in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak…The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
2.
Curiously titled, The Emperor’s Children suggests a gloss on the cliché of the emperor’s “new clothes”: shared delusion, communal madness, nullity. One of the characters in the novel has a work-in-progress titled The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes, described in the hyperventilated terms of contemporary publishing jargon:
Marina Thwaite’s groundbreaking debut book demystifies [parental neuroses], unraveling them through the threads of our clothing, and more particularly of our children’s clothes. In this brilliant analysis of who we are and the way it determines how our kids dress, Marina Thwaite reveals the forms and patterns that both are and lie beneath the fabric of our society. In so doing, she bares children, their parents, and our culture at large to an unprecedented and frank scrutiny, and in her truth-telling shows us incontrovertibly that the emperor’s children have no clothes.
(How skillful, and how funny, Claire Messud is in her new role as satirist! An entire chapter of The Emperor’s Children, titled “Vows by Lisa Solomon, Special to The New York Times,” is virtually indistinguishable from the “real thing.”) The speaker here is a self-styled “revolutionary” named Ludovic Seeley with a “pale, oval, Nabokovian [and] predatory face” and the young woman to whom he is speaking is Marina Thwaite, daughter of the prominent public intellectual Murray Thwaite, who has been working halfheartedly for years on a pseudo-cultural exposé of children’s fashions. All that the oddly named Ludovic Seeley does, or says, is seductive, or manipulative, for Seeley is both a stock figure of women’s romance (“His face, so distinctive, struck her as that of a nineteenth-century portrait, a Sargent perhaps, an embodiment of sardonic wisdom and society, of aristocratic refinement”) and a figure of sinister foreboding, exuding the fascination of a “reptile, a beautiful but dangerous one” Seeley speaks openly of his admiration for Napoleon, and his wish to “unmask” and “debunk” individuals of prominence, like Marina’s father Murray Thwaite, the novel’s “emperor”: “the country’s liberal conscience.”
The classic European novel which The Emperor’s Children most resembles is Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), the author’s third novel and by some, including Flaubert himself, considered his masterpiece. In the guise of naturalism, L’Éducation sentimentale is a lengthy, relentless satire fueled by Flaubertian contempt for the hypocrisy, venality, and vanity of Parisian men and women during the general period 1840 to 1851, an era, in Flaubert’s vision, of money-grubbing madness. The “sentimental education” of Flaubert’s zestfully misanthropic novel is that of an idealistic young man from the provinces who has come to Paris
to study law: the romantic-minded Frédéric Moreau, naive, credulous in the way of a male Emma Bovary, doomed to perpetual disappointment by life and revealed, in time, in a typical Flaubertian flourish, to be as empty-headed as everyone else. The “young man from the provinces” of The Emperor’s Children is an awkward American cousin of Flaubert’s Frédéric, one Frederick “Bootie” Tubbs, overweight, slovenly, with intellectual/writerly pretensions, who has dropped out of college at Oswego and has plummeted, as his anxious mother notes, from being a brainy “phenomenon” (valedictorian of his Watertown High School class) to being a “freak” a resident of dreary Watertown, New York, who somehow has the conviction that he is, or is meant to be, a genius. Unemployed, unemployable, supported by his doting mother, “Bootie” feeds upon the fantasy of living “like a philosopher, the way Emerson said that Plato had, alone and invisible, known to the world only through his work…He had to get to New York, for this: to his as yet unalerted teacher and mentor. To Murray Thwaite.”
As these excerpts suggest, The Emperor’s Children is a work of satiric comedy, a considerable departure for Claire Messud whose prose style has exuded a certain gravitas in the past. Ambitious, multi-layered, set predominantly in Manhattan in the months leading up to, and following, 9/11, The Emperor’s Children is Messud’s first American-set novel, as it is her first work of fiction to rapidly shift perspective from chapter to chapter, leaping about, with authorial freedom, among a number of interlocked characters. Such omnipotence suggests the airy glibness of a comedy of manners, or satire; Messud eschews here the dramatic intensity of a single perspective, like that of Sagasse La Basse, in the service of an “unmasking” and “debunking” project of her own. Yet The Emperor’s Children is never so bleakly misanthropic as L’Éducation sentimentale, nor even so corrosive as the urban satires of Messud’s contemporaries Martin Amis and Zadie Smith; its prevailing tone of crisp bemused irony suggests the less savage comedies of manners of Alison Lurie, Diane Johnson, and Iris Murdoch. Even as she unmasks them, Messud can’t resist evoking sympathy for her mostly foolish, self-deluded characters; and can’t deny even the fatuous Bootie the possibility of regeneration and redemption in the chaotic aftermath of 9/11.
In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews Page 23
