Retreating From a Ruptured Marriage. Review by Maria Russo

Retreating From a Ruptured Marriage. A review by Maria Russo 

THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN

By Siri Hustvedt

Illustrated. 182 pp. A Frances Coady Book/Picador/Henry Holt & Company. Paper, $14.

    One little word — “pause” — sets off the chain of events in which Mia Fredricksen, the 55-year-old poet and professor who narrates Siri Hust­vedt’s fifth novel, retreats for the summer to the “backwater” Minnesota town where she grew up. Her husband, a neuroscientist named Boris Izcovich, has asked for a “pause” in their marriage so he can take up with a younger colleague, “a woman with whom he had no past.” After a short, agonizing stay in a psychiatric ward, Mia decamps from her Brooklyn apartment to tiny Bonden, seeing no choice but to wait out the “cruel crack of hope” in her husband’s request. There she finds herself immersed, somewhat accidentally, in an all-female world that includes her mother’s five lively geriatric friends, the seven adolescent members of a poetry workshop and the young mother next door, whose husband travels often for work. Over the course of the summer, Mia confronts, with the help of phone sessions with her (female) therapist, her own history as a willing second-class citizen, “a scribbler of the stolen interval” who “hadn’t fought for myself.” Along the way, she re-examines everything she’s believed about the differences between men and women and the possibility of married love.

     Hustvedt’s novels tend to be as somber as they are intellectually invigorating. Her gripping, hypnotic tale of love and death in the New York art world, “What I loved,” devastates with its dark emotion, conveying a haunting sense of life’s pull toward mystery. In “The Sorrows of an American,” a psychoanalyst’s quest to understand his dead father’s Scandinavian melancholy becomes a stark meditation on how the past shapes the present. In this novel, Hustvedt tries for something different, with mixed results.

     At under 200 pages, “The Summer Without Men” is sprightly and frisky, even as it contends with life-and-death subjects. Mia breaks into all-cap outbursts. (“The problem was that any number of Borises were in my head.”) She samples poetry and shares her own verse (including one unfortunate hybrid of Emily Dickinson and Donald Rumsfeld: “Loss. / A known absence. / If you did not know it, / it would be nothing, / which it is, of course”). There’s an instant-message exchange and many e-mails, including a missive from the laconic Boris, hilariously annotated by Mia. And in keeping with the novel’s upbeat atmosphere, this time the intellectual menu includes not just Hustvedt’s usual forays into philosophy, literary theory, neurology and psychiatry, but also an investigation into romantic comedy, both the classic Hollywood version — “love as verbal war” — and Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” which Mia is asked to introduce at her mother’s book group. Like Anne and Captain Went­worth, Mia decides, she and Boris could come together a second time.

     Among the novel’s pleasures are its analysis of gender (“It is not that there is no difference between men and women,” Mia concludes, “it is how much difference that difference makes”) and the character of Mia herself, who comes across as honest, witty and empathetic (and is rendered charmingly in line drawings by the multitalented Hustvedt herself). What feels lacking, unfortunately, is the story itself, Mia’s respite from her marital woes via an all-female summer in Bonden. The Five Swans, as Mia calls her mother’s friends, present a familiar array, staunch ladies bravely facing the bitterness of old age. They blend into one another, with the exception of Abigail, who reveals to Mia her “private amusements,” small blankets she has made that feature happy scenes done in needlework, with naughtiness in the background or under flaps: naked breasts, masturbation, a town being destroyed by a vacuuming woman. But this symbolism is all too clear, and the set-up — a seemingly proper, repressed older woman who has hidden her subversive creativity — feels heavy-handed.

     Likewise, Mia’s interactions with the teenage girls have a tug of the predictable. And the girls’ decision to clear their schedules for her poetry workshop strains credulity. Mia’s students’ main purpose in the book, it seems, is to befriend and then hurt one another, demonstrating an overly familiar set-up — “mean girls” ostracizing the “different” one.

     Perhaps the problem is that Hust­vedt herself might not find a summer without men particularly stimulating. She cheats on her concept by giving Mia an e-mail stalker who signs himself “Mr. Nobody” and proves more on her intellectual wavelength than the gals in Bonden. (His notes “hopped from Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’ to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath.”) As the novel is drawing to a close, Mia wonders “if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody.” Well, maybe. But I found myself questioning Mia’s own constant references to male stalwarts (Freud, Kierkegaard, Dr. Johnson, but no Simone de Beauvoir, no Margaret Fuller), wishing she’d thrown in some brilliant, undervalued women.

     Hustvedt’s argument for sticking with a ruptured marriage is so simple it’s almost overshadowed by the novel’s other themes. “Our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten so tangled up,” Mia writes, “that it was hard to see where one person’s ended and the other’s began.” Of course, that’s also the reason many people, including Boris, choose to rupture a relationship in the first place. And so it’s to Hustvedt’s credit that she doesn’t overplay the romantic hand, conceding that a happy ending is all in how you look at it. “A comedy,” Mia concludes, “depends on stopping the story at exactly the right ­moment.”

Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-the-summer-without-men-by-siri-hustvedt.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print

 

THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN

By Siri Hustvedt

Illustrated. 182 pp. A Frances Coady Book/Picador/Henry Holt & Company. Paper, $14.

    One little word — “pause” — sets off the chain of events in which Mia Fredricksen, the 55-year-old poet and professor who narrates Siri Hust­vedt’s fifth novel, retreats for the summer to the “backwater” Minnesota town where she grew up. Her husband, a neuroscientist named Boris Izcovich, has asked for a “pause” in their marriage so he can take up with a younger colleague, “a woman with whom he had no past.” After a short, agonizing stay in a psychiatric ward, Mia decamps from her Brooklyn apartment to tiny Bonden, seeing no choice but to wait out the “cruel crack of hope” in her husband’s request. There she finds herself immersed, somewhat accidentally, in an all-female world that includes her mother’s five lively geriatric friends, the seven adolescent members of a poetry workshop and the young mother next door, whose husband travels often for work. Over the course of the summer, Mia confronts, with the help of phone sessions with her (female) therapist, her own history as a willing second-class citizen, “a scribbler of the stolen interval” who “hadn’t fought for myself.” Along the way, she re-examines everything she’s believed about the differences between men and women and the possibility of married love.

     Hustvedt’s novels tend to be as somber as they are intellectually invigorating. Her gripping, hypnotic tale of love and death in the New York art world, “What I loved,” devastates with its dark emotion, conveying a haunting sense of life’s pull toward mystery. In “The Sorrows of an American,” a psychoanalyst’s quest to understand his dead father’s Scandinavian melancholy becomes a stark meditation on how the past shapes the present. In this novel, Hustvedt tries for something different, with mixed results.

     At under 200 pages, “The Summer Without Men” is sprightly and frisky, even as it contends with life-and-death subjects. Mia breaks into all-cap outbursts. (“The problem was that any number of Borises were in my head.”) She samples poetry and shares her own verse (including one unfortunate hybrid of Emily Dickinson and Donald Rumsfeld: “Loss. / A known absence. / If you did not know it, / it would be nothing, / which it is, of course”). There’s an instant-message exchange and many e-mails, including a missive from the laconic Boris, hilariously annotated by Mia. And in keeping with the novel’s upbeat atmosphere, this time the intellectual menu includes not just Hustvedt’s usual forays into philosophy, literary theory, neurology and psychiatry, but also an investigation into romantic comedy, both the classic Hollywood version — “love as verbal war” — and Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” which Mia is asked to introduce at her mother’s book group. Like Anne and Captain Went­worth, Mia decides, she and Boris could come together a second time.

     Among the novel’s pleasures are its analysis of gender (“It is not that there is no difference between men and women,” Mia concludes, “it is how much difference that difference makes”) and the character of Mia herself, who comes across as honest, witty and empathetic (and is rendered charmingly in line drawings by the multitalented Hustvedt herself). What feels lacking, unfortunately, is the story itself, Mia’s respite from her marital woes via an all-female summer in Bonden. The Five Swans, as Mia calls her mother’s friends, present a familiar array, staunch ladies bravely facing the bitterness of old age. They blend into one another, with the exception of Abigail, who reveals to Mia her “private amusements,” small blankets she has made that feature happy scenes done in needlework, with naughtiness in the background or under flaps: naked breasts, masturbation, a town being destroyed by a vacuuming woman. But this symbolism is all too clear, and the set-up — a seemingly proper, repressed older woman who has hidden her subversive creativity — feels heavy-handed.

     Likewise, Mia’s interactions with the teenage girls have a tug of the predictable. And the girls’ decision to clear their schedules for her poetry workshop strains credulity. Mia’s students’ main purpose in the book, it seems, is to befriend and then hurt one another, demonstrating an overly familiar set-up — “mean girls” ostracizing the “different” one.

     Perhaps the problem is that Hust­vedt herself might not find a summer without men particularly stimulating. She cheats on her concept by giving Mia an e-mail stalker who signs himself “Mr. Nobody” and proves more on her intellectual wavelength than the gals in Bonden. (His notes “hopped from Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’ to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath.”) As the novel is drawing to a close, Mia wonders “if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody.” Well, maybe. But I found myself questioning Mia’s own constant references to male stalwarts (Freud, Kierkegaard, Dr. Johnson, but no Simone de Beauvoir, no Margaret Fuller), wishing she’d thrown in some brilliant, undervalued women.

     Hustvedt’s argument for sticking with a ruptured marriage is so simple it’s almost overshadowed by the novel’s other themes. “Our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten so tangled up,” Mia writes, “that it was hard to see where one person’s ended and the other’s began.” Of course, that’s also the reason many people, including Boris, choose to rupture a relationship in the first place. And so it’s to Hustvedt’s credit that she doesn’t overplay the romantic hand, conceding that a happy ending is all in how you look at it. “A comedy,” Mia concludes, “depends on stopping the story at exactly the right ­moment.”

Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-the-summer-without-men-by-siri-hustvedt.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print