One of George Eliot’s early publications was a piece of criticism called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.”  That wonderful titular phrase sprang to my mind when I was rereading Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor.  In trying to encapsulate the book in a phrase, I came up with “Weird Novels by Lady Novelists.” And then I realized that Angel is in fact the story of a writer of Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, and my little brain-worm came full circle.

Weird Novels by Lady Novelists is, for me, a category. Yes, I just made up this category, but go with it.  Other books I’d include in this category are: The Brontës Went To Woolworth’s by Rachel Ferguson, The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. What these and Angel have in common in that they are truly unique from other novels. Each presents a set of characters that are bizarre, living in the actual world (none of these are fantasy novels in any way), made unfamiliar and fascinating by their odd-ball existence in it.

Elizabeth Taylor was the author of a string of novels and short story collections published in the mid-20^th century. She’s not quite so obscure as some of the other writers NYRB revives—the wonderful imprint Virago Modern Classics has kept Taylor in print the last 25 years or so, though her books have seldom been easy to lay hold of in the USA.

While Taylor could never be accused (like, say, Anita Brookner) of writing more or less the same novel over and over again, Angel is, in Taylor’s body of work, a stand-out in its oddity. The eponymous protagonist—she’s too perverse and unlikeable to be styled a heroine—is a grotesque. Angelica is a monster of egotism, who in no way resembles her humble parents (her mother runs a down-at-heels cornershop, her aunt is a lady’s maid), seeming instead of have sprung from the depths of her own fevered will. (Hmmm. She’s actually quite a bit like Ayn Rand, minus the fascistic politics.)

Self-absorbed, devoid of empathy, disdainful of everyone around her in the sad little provincial town, Angel quits school rather than face the pupils she’s alienated, and hits upon the idea of writing a novel when she grows too bored of feigning a vague illness as an excuse to stay in her room. She writes a rags-to-riches story of a brash young woman of great talent and beauty bounding into the heights of aristocratic society—a kind of portrait-of-the-artist-in-apotheosis. Knowing nothing about books or publishing, she sends her completed manuscript to the Oxford University Press because she finds the address in one of the few books in her room. They don’t take it of course, but the next London publisher she tries at random snaps up her odd romance, and publishes it, despite Angel’s resistance to making a single editorial change—even to correct the fact that champagne isn’t opened with a corkscrew.
The publisher summons her to London and is astonished by her—she admits blithely to having read very little because she has no books and is busy writing, and when pressed, to quite liking Shakespeare except when he is trying to be funny. Later he describes her to his wife: “They are never happy, these sports which ordinary, humble people throw off: they belong nowhere and are insatiable.” Angel Deverell is indeed insatiable for her own strange sort of success: she knows exactly what she wants out of her new-earned fortune, and proceeds to get it.

All of this happens fairly early in the book, which then goes on to tell the story of the rest of Angel’s life, as a driven artist who sacrifices everything human in her life—and all the humans around her—to her art. Angel understands and cares nothing about the real people she lives among—she is emotionally blind to the feelings of her mother, who when brought to live in suburban luxury is only intimidated by the servants and longs for the social life of her former shop-keeping days, and of her husband, a good-looking wastrel of a mediocre painter, who, unlike Angel, sees all too clearly through his own pretensions to artistry, and once set up with all the accoutrements of a fine studio by his wealthy wife, gives up painting altogether.

That her art is laughably, humorlessly, bad is Taylor’s wonderful joke in this novel. In examining the Passion of the Artist through a purveyor of trash, Taylor turns the exploration of the relationship of the artist to her imagination, her drive, her self-opinion, her ego, on its ear. Angel’s dismal traits occur frequently in the private lives of successful artists too, who, in their single-focus approach to how they use their time and that of others, lay waste to family and friends—but where the art product is great, the destruction is seen as somehow inevitable—maybe tragic, but worth it.

Taylor is a writer who is dryly droll, sharply observant, and able to show her characters in the most squirm-inducing light while still quietly honoring their humanity. NYRB’s reprinting of Angel and another of her novels, A Game of Hide and Seek, is an opportunity for readers to re-engage with one of the greats of 20^th century fiction.

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Lily Tuck is a masterful, insightful, readable writer, who, in her latest, goes over some very familiar ground in a winning way. Of her four novels I’ve only read The News From Paraguay; I’m looking forward to getting my hands on her others.

I Married You For Happiness took hold of me at once, and held me throughout with the comfortable sense that I was in the hands of a novelist who knows what she’s doing . At the same time, it felt like somethings I’d read before—it cleaves to the stereotypical subject of so much American literary fiction in telling a slim story about marriage and adultery among the well-educated and well-heeled. There’s nothing surprising in this narrative of the life of a couple—Nina is a painter; Philip is a professor of mathematics; they’re parents and travelers and occasional adulterers; their 40-plus-year marriage ends in his sudden death. What’s compelling here is not the bare bones of Tuck’s story, but how she gives it to us. Tuck is concerned with the nature of memory, with the running story one tells oneself about oneself. One of her epigrams from Pascal reads: “We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future … [T]he fact is that the present usually hurts.” With this story, Tuck explores the way a woman recounts to herself the story of her own marriage, at the same time that, through the course of the single night in which the novel takes place, she assimilates the death of her husband beside the bed where lies his cooling corpse.

Nina free associates—did Philip really love her? Would rereading Plato be of comfort now? Should she plunge into a study of philosophy? Or Zen? These thoughts plunge Nina into the past, where she revisits—retells—the story of her Paris courtship, their honeymoon in Mexico. Tuck deftly weaves into Nina’s ruminations themes derived from Philip’s own college teaching syllabus: what is infinity, what is probability, what are amiable numbers, perfect numbers? Philip’s relationship to mathematics and logic provides a mirror of the marriage, points of entry that Tuck uses as she tacks back and forth through the couples’ decades together. She gives us Lily imagining how Philip would present her infidelity, had he known of it, as a classroom exercise: “if we know for certain that my wife is not having an affair, the probability of the event would be 0; but, should we discover that she is having an affair, the probability would be 1. The numerical measure of probability can range from 0 to 1—from impossibility to certainty. Thus, the probability of my wife being unfaithful would be 1 over 2 because there are only the two possibilities: that she is having an affair or that she is not having an affair.”

Lily Tuck

In a different kind of imaginative leap, Nina populates her first long evening of mourning with elaborate fantasies about the unanswered questions between her and Philip: there was, before they ever met, a young woman, Iris, whom Philip drove home from a party and whom he killed by accident in a wreck. Nina wonders if Iris was Philip’s sweetheart, speculates that she may have been pregnant and about to tell him when he crashes the car, silencing her forever. She leans over her husband’s body, full of wonder, wishing for him to come back, at least in part in order to fill her in, to present answers. She thinks also of Lorna, the astrophysicist, who came to dinner at her house, ate her cake, and whose relationship with Philip is an open question. And there’s Louise, Nina and Philip’s daughter, who enters the novel only in her mother’s flashback thoughts of her childhood colic and adult anger, and in her resolution to postpone the inevitable phone call until morning, even as she invents the course of the young woman’s last hours of not knowing her father has died.

I Married You For Happiness has a compact elegance at less than 200 pages, and with sections that are sometimes just a paragraph, or a few paragraphs, in length, sometimes reads with the stark brilliance of a poem. With lightness, touching down here, and here, and here, Tuck mimics the gingerly internal process of Nina’s night. She is constantly shuttling into the past, she is constantly startled to find that her husband, who lay down for a short nap before dinner, is dead. Each time she makes the discovery, it’s a little different, and her ideas shoot off in another direction. “What’s it like to be dead? Is it how it was before he was born, before he was alive?… She cannot imagine a life without Philip. Nor does she want to.”

Her vigil, and the novel, ends with the dawn. It’s both the first morning of Philip’s being dead, and a morning in Paris when they, new lovers, drink coffee in a café. She thinks of how she will word her call to her daughter, and of how she cannot think properly. In the novel’s fine final paragraphs, Nina has a dream (or is it a vision?) that completes her transformations through time, from youth to late middle age, from married to widowed, and from helplessness to a competence that brings her back to the light of day.

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I read the opening pages of Ralph Sassone’s first novel, The Intimates, in a state of resistance. Oh no, I thought, please tell me I’m not reading a novel about an obsessive teenage girl who has a relationship with her high school guidance counselor. But this initial take was a kind of mistaken identity—which is oddly appropriate for what turned out to be a story about two friends coming of age through a series of incidents of mistaken identity and misapprehension.

The teen protagonists of The Intimates are Maize and Robbie—each the product of a failed suburban marriage, each living as best they can beneath the narcissistic burdens placed on them by parents without peers to absorb their own hurts and bewilderments. Sassone is good at portraying what it’s like to live in that kind of family crucible—being the not-really-adult child of a wounded parent who wants more from their child than any kid can give. In alternating chapters, Sassone shows us, in well-chosen, sometimes surprising vignettes, how Maize and Robbie make their way through those heavy, and sometimes hilarious, months before they escape to college campuses.

Maize’s “interview” with a young alumnus of the party-centric safety school she doesn’t want to attend is an admirable set-piece, interweaving an actual case of mistaken identity—her interviewer assumes she’s a classmate who has a broken leg that has kept her from her own appointment—with a brief, devastating portrait of the alum who uses these interview with prospective freshmen to indulge his own arrested yearnings. As her mother’s exhortations to present herself as ambitious (“Don’t be yourself,” she says) echo back at her, Maize allows herself to be seduced, and comes away from the sordid encounter with some inkling of how the rules will be different in life beyond high school and home.

Ralph Sassone

Robbie has a related encounter when he heads to Italy during a college break to meet the father who left years ago, and who now lives in Rome with his trophy girlfriend. Filled with resentment, Robbie stalks the girlfriend, catching her out in what he takes to be a betrayal of his father, which he documents with photographs before the visit. Of course he’s mistaken, a discovery which gives him some needed insight into his own frustrations and feelings of inadequacy.

Maize and Robbie are high school friends who reunite in college and then, in their early twenties, share a tiny Manhattan apartment while working dreadful entry-level jobs. Sassone is equally skillful in portraying the yawning dread of the terrible first job, reporting to an imperious, emotionally eviscerating boss. The portrait of Maize’s employer is vivid and real:

He was as crudely fascinating as a horror movie you were appalled to find entertaining yet couldn’t stop watching anyway. And he had a split personality. If Maize didn’t know André, she’d never have guessed that the short, caustic, potty-mouthed man who criticized her work and brayed at other brokers and routinely denied them access to his listings was the same supple charmer who seduced sellers into giving him their property to handle and wheedled buyers into ponying up far more than they thought a place was worth. It was astonishing how deftly André could switch from one persona to another, between sips of the espresso he sent Maize out to get for him three times a day, and it was more impressive when he had multiple phone calls on hold and he pivoted from Mean Vulgar André to Smooth Cajoling Andre at the push of a button, into his headset, like a psychic channeling different voices during a séance.

Sassone is also good at showing the devastating emotional craters of first love, with its intense, irrational desire and long, immobile dry spells; and at the bumpy, often baffling relations between the generations, as Maize and Robbie interact with their mothers. The later sections revolve around a visit Maize and Robbie—along with Robbie’s boyfriend Daniel, the object of his romantic confusions—make to his mother’s house, to help her prepare for a move to a smaller place. The inventorying and packing stir up all kinds of emotions among the young people, and when Maize finally connects with Robbie’s mother and confides in her about her own stalled life, it’s a relief to feel that at last an adult is able to penetrate a young character’s bubble and offer something like wisdom.

In many ways The Intimates reminded me of another recent novel, Peter Cameron’s charming Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You, which also details the fallibility of a young man from a privileged background as he vacillates between childishness and adulthood. Sassone as yet lacks Cameron’s ability to make his characters resonate—even as they were real and recognizable, neither Maize nor Robbie felt remarkable. The novel’s incidents are invariably well-drawn and lively, its protagonists always sympathetic, yet as a whole The Intimates struggles to rise above its own self-conscious writerliness. Whether you’re engrossed or faintly disappointed by Sassone’s novel may come down to how many novels of this kind you’ve read before, and the expanse of your own progress into maturity.

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There is a particular pleasure to reading a short novel or novella that is distinct from that of reading a longer book. Having spent most of the summer immersed in long novels that stretch, I turned with some anticipation to Michael Knight’s The Typist. The book itself is small—smaller than most hardcovers, an early signal that promises a story that can be taken in quickly, absorbed with some of the same immediacy of a film or a short tale.

Among the good things The Typist offers is an unfamiliar setting—Tokyo immediately after World War II, during the U.S. occupation led by General Douglas MacArthur—and a fresh perspective and narrative voice, that of a soldier who has spent the war not in combat but in office work. (They also serve who only sit and type.) The typist of the title is this young man from Mobile, Alabama, who confides his story in a simple, earnest tone that establishes him at the outset as naïve, rather earnest, but equipped with sensitivity, attention, and intelligence.

Van is part of a large corps of administrative functionaries in MacArthur’s occupying government. MacArthur himself, whom Van refers to throughout by the soldiers’ nickname of “Bunny,” is a character here, seen close up both at the office and at home. MacArthur has a young son, Arthur, who is isolated socially; the general hires Van as a weekly playmate. Van spends his days typing, his weekends babysitting the general’s boy, his off hours dodging letters from the girl he impulsively married and left back in the States. That life back in America is something he seems eager to postpone indefinitely, posing as it does the challenge of a decision he can’t yet wrap his mind around. Meanwhile, his roommate, Clifford, draws him into the sophisticated and seedy world of Tokyo nightlife, among the prostitutes and black marketeers of a ruined city. Unlike Van, who steers clear of physical temptations, Clifford falls for Namiki, a pan-pan girl he meets in a dancehall, and, wanting the money to live with her, gets involved with dangerous local politics and illicit trade.

Michael Knight

We see MacArthur’s administration of postwar Japan through Van’s perspective as one of a hive of office workers—the general lives on a grand scale at the apex of his huge organization, with his haughty wife and lonely son; the reader thus sees MacArthur as a man trying to please his family even while administering a vast army and a defeated nation. As a companion to the general’s son, Van attends the war crimes trial of Tojo. Later, escorting the boy to the screening of an American movie, Van finds himself sharing a clandestine limousine ride with both young Arthur MacArthur and Clifford’s Japanese girlfriend, a collision of previously separate spheres that loses him his cushy babysitting duty. When Clifford’s obsession with Namiki ends in violence, Van’s efforts to maintain distance between himself and these personal and political turmoils collapses. The quiet power of The Typist lies in Knight’s understated depiction of the impacts of these collisions.

Knight produces a number of stunning set-pieces, in which what must have been considerable research is elevated through imagination and skillful prose into marvelously effective scenes that submerge historical detail in effective drama: the testimony of Tojo; the crowded screening of a Gene Kelly movie to a mixed American and Japanese audience; and the novel’s climax, an elaborately staged demonstration football game played by ex-college players, organized by MacArthur and carried out before a stadium crowd of American GIs and Japanese guests. The occasion, intended to demonstrate good will and cultural exchange, recreates and amplifies the inherent incomprehension between the two groups. Van attends with Namiki’s friend Fumiko, and the occasion, though meant to be festive, brings them instead to a crisis of mourning.

The apparent simplicity of Van’s narrative belies the increasing emotional magnitude of the story he tells. As the tale unfolds, it gradually builds in resonance, and the small elements of narrative and character put in place at the outset erupt in the final pages with seismic effect. By the time Van returns to the United States, his desk-bound military experience feels as authentic, and convulsive, as that of any frontline warrior, and as transformational—for him and for the reader.

All that happened to Van in Tokyo follows him back to the United States, as he pays a visit to Clifford’s family and tries to find his place in the post-war world. When he retraces his steps to his wife’s home, he’s uncertain what he’ll find there, or what he wants to find. Knight makes the suspense here, as throughout, real and thrilling, and brings the enormity of Van’s war experiences to bear meaningfully on the domestic scenes to which he returns, bringing this elegant, restrained novel to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

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Aryn Kyle’s fictive world is populated mostly by befuddled, unhappy children, failed by the adults around them, and young people whose lives have drifted off course. None of the protagonists in Boys and Girls Like You and Me, an accomplished, highly readable collection, seems to be older than 29. With acerbic humor and sharp observation, Kyle’s stories bring us into the complex inner worlds of these young people as they struggle to cope with circumstances that they either can’t or won’t control.

In “Nine,” a little girl named Tess exists in a world that frightens her: the trees outside whisper the names of the dead, and even gravity itself is undependable, causing Tess to cling to the carpet lest she fall off the earth. Tess’s worries connect to the loss of her mother, who walked out two years ago and never came back. Kyle is adept at showing us a child’s experience of a broken marriage while also reflecting, through the girl’s perspective, on the very different coping strategy of her abandoned father.

Aryn Kyle

In “Company of Strangers,” a girl’s worries about meeting a horrible premature death give her brother fodder for tormenting her. Lilly grows up into a disconnected young woman, whose reunion with her brother at their father’s deathbed forces her to confront the aimlessness of her own life. Put in charge for a few hours of her niece and nephew, Lilly takes the children to a pirate-themed restaurant—and then home with a waiter for a one-night stand. As Lilly narrates the incident, the reader simultaneously grasps the inappropriateness of everything she does and empathizes with her matter-of-fact acceptance of her perverse choices. Lilly knows she’s a fuckup and expects her brother and his wife know it, too.

Later, when the kids have inevitably disappeared, Lilly thinks:

Around me, the city stretched into state, into country, into a whole world of strangers. The sphere of the earth was crowded with people who would never know me, would never look for me, would never try to find me if I disappeared. I wrapped my arms around my knees. A person is missing only if another person misses them.

None of Kyle’s characters is numb or shut-down, though many of them can’t express the gross differences between their outer and inner lives. Confusion and dismay abounds. For the awkward twelve-year-old boy in “Captain’s Club,” tapped almost at random to accompany a classmate he barely knows on a foreign cruise with his feckless father and the father’s mistress, vivid feelings come with a sense that they must be concealed: “In the end, Tommy didn’t cry. But he wanted to and that was bad enough.” Once the trip is underway, the father’s girlfriend, Tree, is revealed to be, like Tommy, unappreciated and seemingly there at random—though she knows she’s supposed to be old enough to take care of herself. Tree and Tommy bond over the ship’s programmed entertainment, from daytime tours of Greek ruins to nighttime musical acts, while the father and son each disappear into separate distractions. By the time Tree tells Tommy that she quit her job on impulse to take this trip with a man she’d just met—“I can’t stop,” she said, “I can’t stop ruining my life”—her anguish gives us a glimpse into the private terrors that lie within every character in the story.

The stories in Boys and Girls are darkly funny, with dialogue that is quippy and to the point; it’s the rare story collection that inspires a reader to go through it in one sitting. A few of the stories begin to feel formulaic, straining to achieve certain storytelling goals—opening with bold, compelling statements (“The first man I slept with kept his eyes closed the whole time,” or “That was the year I thought I’d never be happy again”), that lead to some quirky doings in which the main character is treated shabbily by those who ought to be looking out for her, makes bad decisions, and brings about a stomach-churning climax followed by a few paragraphs that help the reader see what it all means (“But when, at last, Tommy began to cry, it was not because of fear or loneliness or disappoint, but because there was so much beauty, too much beauty for his small body to hold…”). For all Kyle’s considerable narrative skills, this overfamiliarity keeps some of the stories from clearing a reader’s barriers of disbelief.

Despite this, Kyle’s fictive world offers considerable pleasures. Days after reading them, these stories, in their admirable brevity, complexity, and completeness, have a way of hanging on in the mind.

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The Carne family are arty and bohemian, but solidly upper class—the narrator Deirdre is a budding journalist, her sister Katrine a beginning actress, and their mother has obviously been left most comfortably off by her deceased husband. Along with the youngest daughter, Sheil, a little girl still with her governess, all the Carnes are at constant play with their imaginations. Fantasy narrative is the central organizing principle of the Carnes’ homelife—these women are fangrrrls before fangrrrls were invented. At table, they spin—or rather, act out—new installments of their collaborative running serial, with a dramatis personae made up of toys and dolls they’ve owned and regard as real people, characters from books, and, most intriguingly, celebrities from the stage and public life whose careers they follow and whom they speak about as if they were intimates. In producing an ongoing play in which they all willfully suppress the line between reality and fantasy, the family are essentially practicing fan-fiction 50 years before that genre really got started.

The family governesses—they have quite a bit of governess turn-over in the eccentric and intimidating Carne family—are at first amused, then bemused, then alarmed and censorious, when they realize that the actors, writers, and government officials who are spoken of with such familiarity by all the Carnes, as if they were always in and out of the house, are in fact strangers to the family. At least, until Deirdre attends a charity bazaar where she meets the wife of Justice Toddington, an elderly high court judge who is the family’s chief imaginary pet (they collect pictures of him cut from the newspapers and like to imagine him in elaborate pajamas, yawning “like tiny jam tarts”). The Carnes and Toddingtons become friends, a friendship which is first threatened, and then gloriously reinvented, when the elderly couple get their first glimpse into the parallel made-up world in which they play a part.

It’s not just this situation that appeals to me so deeply in Ferguson’s 1931 novel, which I’ve read 5 or 6 times since I first got a hold of it in a Virago Modern Classics reprint 15 years ago. The weird story is carried along by the witty, peppery, penetrating and sometimes downright ruthless narrative voice of Deirdre Carne, who is a sharp observer of her London world, and stern parser of its unbreachable class boundaries. She’s particularly unsympathetic to the interloping governesses (though no one in the family ever questions that the little sister needs a governess—being looked after solely by her mother and sisters is not an option in their time and class). But she’s also unbending when a successful music hall star who has long been a (real life) family friend and mentor to her sister’s acting career turns into Katrine’s real life suitor—because it’s one thing to adore Freddie Pipson who, though a Cockney and a professional comedian, is one of nature’s gentlemen, and quite another to marry into his family. That, she advises Katrine, is, no matter how much she might love and respect him, is impossible.

I have to admit that I was so enchanted and persuaded by Dierdre’s voice that it wasn’t until I discussed the novel with an English friend and then reread it again, that I noticed what a complete and often nasty snob Dierdre is. I was too instantly bonded with her to be critical, because of pronouncements likes this, from page 1 of the novel:

A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, ‘Do you like reading?’ which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread—absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever. And then Katrine blinked at the woman and said, ‘Yes, a little.’

This is the sort of novel that can inspire that kind of total involvement and sympathy.

So what does all this have to do with the Brontës? Apart from the parallels between the three imaginative Carne sisters and the three Brontë sisters, there’s the governess connection, and this is where the book surprises, because you’d expect the Carnes, with their effulgent fantasy life, to have a little more sympathy for these vulnerable women who come to join their household. But the Carnes’ exuberant ways are no match for the expectations of Miss Martin, the new governess. It takes a visitation from the ghosts of the Brontës —or are they really ghosts?—to make a decisive change for both the out-of-depth governess, and the Carnes as well.

This unusual novel is a portrait of a family seen from the inside (as Miss Martin reflects, “Families were very awful things: showed one face to each other and another to the stranger within their gates.”), and of a certain London social milieu in the time of the Bright Young Things. But most of all for me, it’s a foray into the overwhelming role fantasy and narrative can take in the lives of intelligent women that felt at once so familiar to me, and so astonishing to find going on in fiction. Rachel Ferguson’s novel presents as no other book has, a vivid and specific portrayal of the role of collaborative fantasy in inner—and outer—life.

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