The Last Sane Woman, the debut novel from Hannah Regel, is interested in “women that can’t make things.” Its protagonist, Nicola Long, a shiftless artist living in London, is one such woman. In the dusty sanctuary of an archive devoted to female creators, she discovers a mirror of herself in a box of envelopes all addressed to a single recipient: “Susan, Susan, Susan, Susan.” Nicola and the letter-writer—Donna, we later discover—are both potters extracted from the same part of England. An archivist warns her that the collection contains sensitive material, because the author of the correspondence took her own life. Far from deterred, Nicola is propelled forward with a ghoulish curiosity. On the strength of a single letter, she feels an immediate affinity for the unknown correspondent, who, upon sighting a pretty set of stationary, dreams up a lifetime’s worth of use for it:
I want this to go on forever and then when we’re very, very old we can look back on it and read about all the men we’ve eaten and forgotten and you’ll thank me for having such a good idea!
Like writer, like reader. In Donna’s lack of direction, Nicola finds hers. She begins to haunt the archive and quits a series of uninspiring day jobs (toddler-chaser, art teacher for troubled teens) in order to devote more hours to the correspondence, which spans 1976 to 1988, making its author roughly her mother’s age. As the handwritten stories unfold, the lives of the two ceramicists come closer and closer. They flee from their problems, whether taking the form of men or employment. They bemoan their lack of popular recognition or consider it a mark of greatness. They compare themselves, unfavorably, to friends and artistic rivals. But is Nicola fashioning her life after the woman behind the ink strokes, or are the letters, fixed in their yellowing envelopes and bundles of string, somehow yielding to Nicola? The question, like so many that inspire the endless paging and reshelving of archival boxes, is answered only in continual repositing.
The novel is a dramatization of what Jacques Derrida termed “archive fever,” a sort of death drive that expresses itself in a compulsive need to document and record. There can be no archive without finitude and forgetting, and death merely increases its value. Perhaps Nicola is drawn to the Feminist Assembly, which collects the works of forgotten women, because she herself is in the process of being forgotten. When she stares at her own reflection, Nicola sees “the Dead Woman” inside of her. Archives are generally frigid spaces—lower temperatures protect against decay—but the prospect of Nicola’s trajectory ending like her double’s makes each turn of the page equally thrilling and bone-chilling.
Unlike the hushed, sterile atmosphere of a reading room, where the dead are no longer audible, the deceased potter still animates the pages of this novel. The third-person perspective shifts from Nicola to that of her spiritual twin and even to the inaccessible Susan, the otherwise silent letter opener, who notices the signs of despair in her friend’s words but chooses to interpret them as cheerful instead. These leaps fill in gaps in the papers while also introducing additional sorrows and quandaries. Regel’s facility with parallel storylines, laced through with excerpts from the correspondence—some lengthy, some aphoristic—is masterly. In her hands, that staid old form, the epistolary novel, is ripped from the 18th century shelf and given a gleeful blow to scatter the dust particles and accumulation of years. The correspondence may be one-sided, but the story of its rediscovery conscripts a chorus for its telling.
One symptom of archive fever is an intense fascination with crossed out words, eraser marks, smudges, and stains that offer clues to the mysterious life of the document. Regel’s unique angle on her material indulges us in this affliction. In one delectable passage, Susan reads Donna’s then-newly delivered letter as her young daughter rampages around the house. She pauses to wipe some custard off the child’s face and, in protest against her friend’s incessant navel-gazing, smears it on the letter. “Their evidence,” Regel writes, as the letter lands on Nicola’s floor, “now, a small stain face down on a stranger’s carpet, blotting her out anew.” Donna, Susan, Nicola, and you, the reader, are all united, across space and time, by a dollop of custard that resounds with meaning no scholarship could reveal.
The archive in The Last Sane Woman is not one justifying the wealth and power of nations. Rather it is a counterforce against history as told from above. Professional cliches are recounted with an eyeroll; a curator chatters “cerebrally about the archive as a ‘dynamic tool of the production between the realms of the living and the dead—’.” Yet the novel’s structure flattens time and expands upon the postmarked connection between Donna’s doomed struggle and that of her still-living confidant. Nicola hovers between the two realms and threatens to make others suffer from her own inner rot. When her obsession turns possessive, the reader is left wondering whether she is or isn’t the last sane woman in a world gone insane.
Though Donna’s life has been relegated to the lock and key of history, the book’s concerns are decidedly modern. Regel’s prose captures the unreality of the technology that pervades in today’s world and draws attention to the discontinuities that remain. Instead of touching her phone, Nicola taps “the flat of glass on her thigh to resume the podcast she liked.” Regel’s descriptions continually estrange us from the familiar products that will constitute tomorrow’s museum artifacts. Like Sheila Heti, Regel is interested in the ways that coupling and motherhood might stunt or warp a woman’s artistic development. The novel’s exploration of the generative potential of a shadowy doppelganger figure makes it an interesting companion to last year’s August Blue by Deborah Levy.
There is a haunting similarity between the potter’s letters, housed in a feminist archive struggling for survival, and a potter’s field, where unknown bodies are interred. Donna is one such a corpse; the refuse of her existence is stored in a box labeled with someone else’s name. Nicola’s archival antics, though well-intentioned, proclaim the perennial dominance of the living over the dead. Who does a letter belong to? the novel asks. Which is akin to asking who a friendship belongs to, or who the past belongs to. There are as many answers as there are unmarked graves.
Regel’s novel follows two poetry collections, When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed. The author retains a poet’s stealth and precision. A violent imagination enlivens the page. Not since Emily Dickinson has trepanning been so aspirationally portrayed: “Stopping just short of the dura mater, a drill bit, designed to cling onto what it had cut through like a corkscrew, would remove a small nub of the skull. The puncture it made in the skin would soon heal over like any other wound, but the skull, with its freshly made hole, was opened forever. No longer burdened by a forehead fused together, she might once again let the wonder in.” Poetry, Dickinson wrote in a letter, is when it feels like the top of your head was physically removed. Regel’s wordsmithing remains attuned to the surgical power of imagery.
Sympathetic readers will experience their own form of archive fever as they race through the chapters, quick to orient themselves into a new time period, and desperate to uncover something shocking that seems to have been waiting for them all along. In describing Nicola’s manner of reading correspondence, Regel slyly encourages a way of engaging with her own work, which seeks to reach out and touch everyday experience.
When reading a book, if she ever came across a sentiment or phrasing that she liked, she’d fold down the corner of the page so she could return to it…Sometimes, if something struck her as especially profound, she would press her forehead against the page it was written on so as to absorb it completely…She did this with the letters, too, when she thought Marcella wasn’t looking.
The dog-ears and underlines in this reader’s copy function as a miniature archive of my interpretation. If you want to understand why 500-year-old paper is often in better shape than paper from a few decades ago, don’t ask a novelist. But if you’re hoping for someone to articulate unspeakable things about friendship, creation, and the passage of time, you might do well to ask Hannah Regel. The author tells us what the archives cannot. They reanimate the life that is recorded on dead paper.
