Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel: Dayswork — A Novel. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2023.
Martin Riker: The Guest Lecture — A Novel. New York: Black Cat, 2023.
Happy new year! Since I’d committed most of 2023 to translated fiction, we’re catching up with English-language novels released last year.
The pandemic fiction is finally pulling up, it seems. Don’t worry, but if you must, stay halfway-worried.
In Dayswork, a collaboration novel, married couple Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have made an interesting text that was also a nice quick read. It's narrated by a wife, who is researching on Herman Melville's biography, particularly his married life with Elizabeth Shaw, while also examining the lives of Melville's biographers. Everyone's stuck at home: the daughter is attending Zoom class, the husband teaches his fiction workshop. The heroine jots down post-it notes containing factoids as well as entries on what's going on during the stay-in.
These notes are what we read in the book: it's a collation of thoughts and events that brings together a picture of a mildly frustrated and put-upon wife in a stressful period.
One impressive thing this novel does is use a verbal phrase to quickly mediate the heroine browsing the web. These 21st century activities seem hard for fiction to present sometimes. But "I see that" feels right, in the screen-looking it indicates and its combination with understanding. "I see that Melville nearly missed his voyage on the Southampton, having waited so long to apply for his passport."
The Melvilles moved out to Berkshire where by most accounts Herman terrorized his family, but they also may have had a farm cat.
Debit: happiness
Credit: Kitten
Balance:
It is time to draw the moral balance sheet on one of the greatest, most influential of American writers.
Take two people, my husband said last night while chopping vegetables with gratuitous precision.
Person A abandons his family, moves to Tahiti to paint, behaves reprehensibly on the island, and produces celebrated and influential works of art.
Person B abandons his family, moves to Tahiti to paint, behaves reprehensibly, and turns out to be not very good at painting.
We tend to consider Person A less culpable, my husband said, even though he made the same choices as person B.
The artist is not the same as the art, though they can't be fully separated either. The rest of the novel becomes haunted by this precept of brilliant and lasting achievement making up for egregious shortcomings in life.
According to [the critic James] Wood, Moby-Dick "justifies Melville's life."
I place an asterisk next to the asterisk I placed in the margin of the page of the New Republic essay.
From my office window I can see my husband scooping seed into the bird feeders he made after his mother died and he couldn't write.
That clause by Wood launches a whole anxious theme. How does a brilliant artistic achievement justify behavior stemming from a lifetime's troubled emotions? Is this what the biographical project is reduced to, the balance sheet of a life?
And the narrator keeps noting niggling details from the husband, Chris. You only get the details from a handful of entries, but there's a buried pattern of resentment: the family had moved out to this place largely on the husband's initiative and livelihood — she had "lost" this battle.
She has her own life’s work going on, for sure, but her days' work — her daily existence in a family, entails furnishing the man's work environment. This point, one worth keeping in mind when considering the great authors of the 19th and even the 20th century who all had wives typing their manuscripts and keeping house, etc, takes on more residence with the story's pandemic and lockdown situation.
Too often, the man's work environment entails the woman's incessant torture. The worst example in the text perhaps comes from Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell. Hardwick is a respected critic to this day, and is one of the Melville biographers. In the 50s she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, considered a grandmaster. He had a troubled emotional life, and had numerous affairs which Hardwick endured stoically. A jilted lover sent Lowell a stack of bills, and Elizabeth paid them. Eventually, Lowell left both his wife and child to elope with an heiress in England. Hardwick sent emotional letters pleading with him to come back, for their daughter's sake, for the sake of American letters. He used her words in his next collection of poetry, without permission.
"Women, wronged in one way or another," she wrote in her essay "Seduction and Betrayal," "are given the overwhelming beauty of endurance, the capacity for high or lowly suffering, for violent feeling absorbed, finally tranquilized, for the radiance of humility, for silence, secrecy, impressive acceptance."
While combing through history, of the American literary renaissance, of mid-century American poetry and criticism, and then of the history of her marriage career, it appears that it's where the record shows a _gap_ that furnishes the most evidence of love. For instance: a book gifted by the husband with lines from a poem inscribed (by that scoundrel Lowell!)
He has, I've just learned, no recollection of giving me the book, much less inscribing it.
As I have no recollection of receiving it.
Perhaps someday we'll discover what I gave him that day.
A Saturday, I see.
Dayswork examines New England literary history like Susan Howe, with an inventory of knowledge that gives suggestions about who is doing this work and what they're experience, like the late novels of David Markson. But this book is more accessible and mainstream friendly than either of those artists.
I enjoyed both the low-key, ironic story and the slick form of Dayswork.
Much less successful for me, though still well written, was the second novel by Martin Riker, which also came out this year. The Guest Lecture follows one stressful night's sleep in the consciousness of Abigail. Abigail is a feminist academic who studies the rhetoric of economics, in particular that of John Maynard Keynes. Much of her current angst comes from having been denied tenure, leaving her career in an ambiguous lurch. She's been invited to give a "guest lecture" at a small campus about the utopianism of one of Keynes's essays from the late 20s.
To prepare her guest lecture, Abby uses the loci method, assigning parts of the speech to different rooms of her house. The novel is taken up with an imaginary tour of the structure while reviewing the content of her talk. Joining her is the figure of Keynes himself, who mostly gives pointers. We get lot of the content of her studies through her rehearsal, about how Keynes rejected both revolution and reactionary positions: everything's getting better, in a very pragmatic way of course.
In fact the economic problem is so far from being solved that most of Keyenes's predictions seem, from the perspective of today — ridiculous? Naive? Or, or, we might be misunderstanding the lesson of "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" — and this is what I wish to speak about today. About optimism and pragmatism, about reality and storytelling, about being "right" versus being "useful," and what all these things have to do with how we think and take in our own day and age.
Abby's horrified by her life situation as well as the state of the world, because Trump is president, and therefore optimism is dead. She sends a lot of dark thoughts in the direction of her husband Ed. "Ed had no idea how dark things got that day. He doesn't know what's going on with me half the time. If half the time he knew half of the things i was thinking, he'd decide I was crazy or else give me a medal for holding it together at all."
Just looking at the premise here: why Keynes? And why Keynes, a liberal anti-Marxist who specialized in monetary policy, as the basis for a utopian conception of economics, an economics of potential? If as a scholar I mounted a vision of utopian speculative criticism based on the classical liberalism of Lionel Trilling, I wouldn't hold my breath for tenure.
There’s one concrete policy idea that may come out of this blend: universal basic income. Oh, boy...
There's no mention of the classics of Marxist economics, not even to reject it, even though it's clearly the more fertile field for intellectual feminism. For being a feminist, Abby does not want to think about the relationship between feminism and the capitalist state. Is women's emancipation staked with the struggle to abolish private property, or is it a question of reconciling women to capitalism as it exists? Can male domination be disentangled from these social relations so easily? There are many feminisms, and the one Abby's employing has no thought to spare for the masses of working women.
But fine, aside from my own biases and pedantic questions, in the work itself, I couldn't figure out what Abby's relationship to Keynesianism is, or for that matter, the other cultural items in her imaginative memory house, or the memories of her parents and women who played a shaping role in her life. Honestly, it seems like Keynes is only here because Martin Riker became interested in him, and whipped up a fictive structure to present his findings.
I think we're too close to Abby's inner meaning with her first-person narrative. She's overwhelmed emotionally, but it comes off as self-pity. There's no room for ironic reflection that made Dayswork work for me. Abigail does not have the tools to understand her problems, she doesn't seem to know what Keynes, feminism, modern art, economics, rhetoric, and utopianism mean for her, and she seems angrily disinterested in knowing. At the forefront of her mind is how much she misses President Obama.
I could just spend more time with petty-bourgeois New Yorkers who listen to Beyoncé as “praxis” if I were interested in that kind of drivel!
If your host sounds too mean, I fear the novel itself has a mean-spirited joke in store for ending (and how I hoped I would come around by the ending!). During the climax of the novel and Abby's dream, she says explicitly that "Keynes led me down the wrong path." She means it literally and perhaps figuratively, suggesting that her intellectual project is a failure. Perhaps Abby should have done what people in our real world do, which is to go with The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Engels.
I mentioned Susan Howe and David Markson above as avant-garde writers that definitely inspired Dayswork. The Guest Lecture, in a similar but more dismaying way, is a domesticated experimental piece, stitching in non-fiction discourse into its text, but without a bigger tapestry of ideas to keep all these things held together. It makes no demands and expects none from the reader. It’s like an ersatz, “easy piano” version of the real thing, and reminiscent of literary authors like Orwell and Huxley who condescended to dabble in science fiction.