Private Life by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley, like all great writers, can look out at the world from one small private life and reveal a universe to the reader. In her recent 2010 novel, Private Life, she takes her readers on a slow and painfully meticulous journey from 1883 to 1942 as seen through the eyes of a clever but rather plain girl, Margaret, the third child in a family of five. Within the first few pages of the novel, we are informed that Margaret’s two older brothers are dead by the time Margaret is eight, and that her father, a doctor, commits suicide six months after the death of his oldest son. Margaret’s mother, Lavinia, says simply that his suicide had to do with melancholic propensities. Lavinia moves with her three remaining children, all daughters, back to her father’s farm, the practical thing to do, and tells Margaret, “because she was the oldest, that death was the most essential part of life, and that they must make the best of it. Margaret always remembered that.”

It is the subtitle of this excellent novel that gives away the theme: Private Life: Marriage can sometimes be the loneliest place. In a novel whose pace is slow enough to resemble a lived-life, Smiley tells us that Margaret’s younger sisters, Beatrice and Elizabeth, are successfully married off while Margaret, an old maid at twenty-three, is left behind. Margaret is not particularly troubled by her unmarried status, nor is she particularly keen on finding a man, although she is surprised that her feelings are hurt when she overhears her new brother-in-law describe her as forbidding. He continues:

But she never looks at a fellow, and if she makes a mistake and lets him catch her eye, she glares like fury. I don’t know anyone who can stand up to that sort of thing, at least in the beginning.  

And then you don’t know what she means half the time. I ask myself once a day, is she making a joke. The fellows can’t take that. It makes them feel thick…A fellow doesn’t want to feel as though a girl is running rings around him, at least not till her marries her.

And then when Margaret is twenty-seven, a brilliant scientist who has for mysterious reasons lost his university position and returned to the small town in Missouri where his mother still lives, takes an interest in her, and rather out of the blue proposes marriage. An astronomer who wonders about the universe but seems rather oblivious to the world around him, Andrew whisks Margaret off to an island off the coast of California where he has access to a small telescope, and there she begins her life as a married woman. Her mother’s parting words as she leaves Missouri, “You’ve always been a good girl, and now you’ve had a piece of luck, marrying at twenty-seven, but a wife only has to do as she’s told for the first year.”

Perhaps Margaret should have listened more carefully to this advice, and also to the veiled implications. It turns out that Andrew is an odd man, socially inept and naïve, “day after day, year after year, he thought only of the universe, which he could not see.”

While Andrew obsesses over his view of the universe and stews in resentment as an alternative view, that of Einstein, comes to prominence, Margaret becomes his audience, his assistant, his typist, eventually his driver. After a miscarriage and then the death within weeks of an infant son, Andrew gives up on both sex and the idea of children and devotes himself with renewed passion to describing his view of the universe. Of course, he expects Margaret to assist him in the writing of his masterpiece and his battle with the fools who fail to understand his brilliance. Andrew’s reaction to the short life and death of their infant son, Alexander, confirms for Margaret in a new way his utter self-absorption. And as she continues to type his manuscript and ferry him around to speaking engagements, she also begins to be aware of the reaction of others to her husband’s work. And then reading a newspaper article in responding to Andrew’s theories, she comes to a new, not quite startling realization.

As she read Mr. Malisoff’s words, she knew what had motivated him to write—Andrew’s blustering, grandiose claims, his circular reasoning. She knew that as well as if God himself had whispered in her ear. Just then, she saw Andrew as the world saw him, and she did it all at once, as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap—who he was that solid and permanent for her—he was a fool.

Much like Kate Chopin’s lead character in The Awakening and so many other women who are faced with the prison of an unhappy marriage, Margaret has now to live with her comprehension. Smiley’s brilliance is in describing in considerable detail the day-to-day struggle of living with a man who is “Opinionated and energetic, loud and forbidding.” Margaret does not walk into the sea, nor does she suddenly throw off the shackles of a loveless marriage, but she does in small ways begin to assert her inner self. And she realizes more and more that she is in an arranged marriage, as certainly as if their had been a bride-price and signing of documents between man and man. 

And of course there was no help for it, except recalling bits of conversations she had overheard from time to time about marriage. That’s what knitting groups and sewing groups were for wasn’t it? Commiserating about marriage. But through the years no one had said what she now thought, which was that marriage was relentless and terrifying, and no wonder that when her father died her mother had risen from her bed and gone to work.

There is no happy ending to this book, no dramatic escape into a new world. And yet Margaret does persevere. Coming to understand how she came to be married to this strange obsessed man, how his mother and her mother conspired together to do what they thought best for their offspring, constitutes a kind of freedom. And as she did in A Thousand Acres and so many books since then, Smiley shows us not only the ways in which marriage has been (and still is) a prison for many women, but how strength and endurance can win small victories and point to a new horizon. I find myself uplifted and enlightened by the quiet life of Margaret and rejoicing in her small joys, and stunned once again by the brilliance of Jane Smiley.

The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore

Coming of age stories almost always interest me, no matter the country or the period of time. The Life of Objects, by Susanna Moore, is an extraordinary coming of age novel about an Irish girl, Beatrice, who wants nothing more than to escape her cruel and restrictive mother and her Irish village. She is seventeen when her story starts, but in most ways a very young seventeen due to her mother’s tight, cold rein on her life. A Protestant girl in a mostly Catholic town and not allowed to associate with any Catholics, her single outlet (both emotionally and intellectually) is the Church of Ireland cleric, Mr. Knox, who keeps a small school and who has a passion for birds. There being no lending library in Ballycarra, it is through the books loaned her by Mr. Knox that she learns of the larger world.

Mr. Knox liked to say that novels help to show us that the world is a place of strangeness, ruled by chance, which makes it difficult to maintain our certainties. I had no certainties other than my desire to leave Ballycarra.

And leave she does through a series of happenstances she could not have foreseen. She says of her mother:  “her disappointments had rendered her bitter and unkind. My father and I were in constant dread of her. I lived in a chaos of desire and disappointment.” Her mother takes her out of school at fifteen, thinking that Mr. Knox is filling her head with ideas that would do her no good in the world of haberdashery, and installs her in the small shop owned by the family. She is not allowed to read in the shop, “lest it appear that I gave myself airs,” and so, using materials stolen from the shop, she teaches herself to crochet, and then to make lace. Eventually, her father not only secretly provides her with thread, but begins to display pieces of lace she has made in the shop; the fine lacework is seen by a wealthy woman, who gives her two books of lace patterns, and this in turn leads to an encounter with a foreign woman, Countess Hartenfels, and finally an invitation to escort the Countess to Berlin where Beatrice will live as a lace-maker in the house of a wealthy family, the Metzenburgs. 

What I have not yet mentioned is that this move, so thrilling for the young Beatrice, occurs in 1938, just as Germany has launched its aggressive campaign across Europe. Felix Metzenberg, besides being a wealthy collector of art, has been a politically influential force in Germany who served in the Great War, and whose memory of that time makes him extremely skeptical of the Nazi party and its campaign. Having refused a foreign ambassadorship position in the new regime, he is looked at with suspicion, and soon decides to leave Berlin and take his treasures to a country home where he will be less scrutinized. Although he offers to pay Beatrice’s passage back to Ireland, and warns her that he may not be able to protect her in the uncertain future, she elects to remain with the family.

I’ve told this much of the story, which the reader gets in the first thirty pages or so, simply to set up the dangers and moral dilemmas that face the family as the war continues and enlarges. While the Metzenburgs oppose the tactics and ambitions of Hitler and the Nazi party from the beginning, they obviously have to do so with great care. All during the war, they harbor Jews and others who are perceived as enemies of the regime, and return to a kind of feudalism with regards to the villagers who come to depend on them for produce, employment, and various forms of protection from the authorities. 

What I found particularly fascinating about this book was the view of it from inside Germany and through the eyes of a family whose sympathies lie with the allied forces of Europe and who rejoice at the bombing of Berlin even when the bombs are being dropped on them. 

Not only the rich and powerful in Germany, but even many of the poor villagers still close their eyes to the rumors of the murder of Jewish prisoners, and at least pretend that “the humiliation and misery inflicted on the country were in part the fault of the Jews, who had forgotten their place…” Felix argues against such views, both with the villagers and his rich friends. 

Felix said that he once believed that humanism had been founded on the shared need to know. It had grown more and more apparent to him, however, that the opposite was true—we were united by our shared need not to know. ‘By the time that we understand what is happening,’ he said, ‘we are already complicit.'

In spite of the fact that I was born in 1941, the year America finally entered the war, I continue to be astounded by my own ignorance of the immensity of loss, the unbearable hardship of so many from so many countries. My view of Pearl Harbor was that of a few Japanese planes somehow reaching Hawaii to sink a few ships, not of the nearly four hundred planes that flew in three waves to sink eighteen ships and leave three thousand dead. And although I have read about the firebombing of Dresden, I had no idea that in March of 1945 a thousand B-17 bombers destroyed the center of Berlin. 

Perhaps reading novels is a lazy way of learning history, but I am so grateful to novelists like Moore who do such meticulous research and then so skillfully put into real flesh and blood stories about the suffering and bravery of millions of Europeans, Russians, and yes, Germans. 

As the tide begins to turn and Germany begins to lose the war on many fronts, the lives of the Metzenburgs and the villagers become even more difficult, and unfortunately, even with the surrender of Germany and the advancing armies of Russia and America, the lives of Germans who had resisted the Nazi’s and at least covertly aided the allies do not magically become better. Whether it is German soldiers looting and ravaging the land as they retreat, or the victorious Russians doing about the same as they occupy, the lives of rural farmers and thousands upon thousands of refugees fleeing first one way, and then the other continue to spiral out of control. This is a searingly sad story, but told through the compassionate eyes of Beatrice, there is something beautiful and profound about it. I leave you with her words:

During the war, we had scavenged at night and slept in the day. Children had not gone to school. Animals had not foaled. Thre’d been no appointments to keep or to cancel, no market days, weddings, or funerals, and no cars, buses, trains, or horses to get us there, had there been someplace to go. There’d been no telephones, electricity, petrol. No medicine. No money and no food. 

We had survived, but we were different people.

Swimming to Elba by Silvia Avallone

Try to imagine a steel mill that takes up 2,500 acres of land, three miles of factory fence behind which are acres of decaying buildings and smokestacks, most of them ruined or partly ruined—a place that once employed 20,000 people, but in 2001 is reduced to a skeleton of its former self, with only one of its four giant towers still belching toxic clouds of bluish fluorescences, named simply A-Fo 4; A-Fo 1,2, and 3 now mostly just piles of rusting metal.

 …the posthumous carcasses of the three blast furnaces that hadn’t yet been dismantled, and, down there at the far end, the coke oven where men shoveled coal by hand, by arm, as if it were still the nineteenth century. 

There was no sky. There was an aviary: the purple flames of the furnaces; the swinging arms of the cranes; the tons of metal slung from the hooks beneath the hoisting tackle. The endless rows of sheds, workshops, bunkers. A self-sufficient obsession. The smokestacks, both active and extinct. Overhead, the constant crackling of flames: purple, red, black. The arms of hammerhead cranes  swinging around, yellow, green, tons of metal whirling like birds, yellow clouds of carbon smoke, black at the mouths of the smokestacks. It’s called continuous integrated steel production.

This is the setting for Silvia Avallone’s best selling Italian novel, Swimming to Elba, although the meaning of her one-word Italian title is simply STEEL. I have to admit that I picked it up simply to see what a best-selling Italian novel would consist of, totally unprepared for the powerful social-political statement I was about to encounter. 

On the face of it, this is a simple novel about two inseparable teenage girls, thirteen, almost fourteen—both beautiful, and both convinced that “the world arrives when you are fourteen.” Anna is dark and brave and intelligent, Francesca blond and incredibly beautiful, both are admired and envied not only by their peers, but by the hungry adult steel mill workers and their already old at thirty or forty wives.

An expert eye would have immediately sensed that this kind of beauty lasts for only a moment in the course of a lifetime. But in that crowd there were no expert eyes.

The two girls live in a factory town at the edge of the sea in one of a set of huge concrete barracks that had been constructed forty years earlier by public housing authority when government was in the hands of Christian Democrats and Italian Communists. 

…the public housing authority had built the giant barracks lining the beaches for the workers at the steel mills. Even metalworkers, according to the views of the local Communist administration, had the right to an apartment with a view. A view of the sea, not a view of the factory.

While much of this novel is aimed at revealing the sad lives of the women and girls who are the abused girlfriends and wives of the metalworkers, it is clear that Avalonne is also fascinated by and sympathetic towards the boys and men who live and work inside of the mills—a world that no one outside can really understand. Certainly, she is critical of the rich bosses who profit from the blood and lives of the men who work in the bowels of the factory, owners who would never deign to dirty themselves in the nearly inconceivable conditions inside, and who are willing to shutdown, downsize, and outsource at the whims of world market economies. But her fascination with the entire process of making steel and with the history of the industry is much more complex than her mistrust of an economic system that exploits the workers. 

Twenty-eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit is the melting point of steel alloy. Steel doesn’t exist in nature, it’s not an elementary substance. It’s a secretion of thousands of human hands, electric meters, mechanical arms, and every so often the skin of a cat that’s tumbled into the molten alloy. 

Although there is a large cast of characters in the book, it is the stories of Francesca and Anna, and of their two families, that provide the main focus. Anna’s mother, Sandra, is socially and politically informed, active in communist party politics, and eager for her daughter to get an education and escape the cycle of poverty and abuse of most of the women around her. Sandra is disappointed that her son, Alessio, has already given up on any life outside the mill, and is destined to a life of running one of the huge cranes that move the metal in various of its incarnations. Her husband has escaped the factory, but only by turning to criminal activities in the hopes of providing a better life for his wife and children. Francesca’s father, Enrico, a giant of a man, who left the poor life of rural farming to make his fortune in the mills, spends his time worrying about his too-beautiful daughter, and flying into rages that lead to beatings of his long-abused wife, Rosa, and of Francesca. “Just an ordinary man who had left the country with a rucksack on his shoulders to come to the city.”

As the two girls grow up, they dream someday of crossing the water to Elba, the rich sister city and tourist destination that seems to hold the answers to their dreams. Francesca, who loves Anna not simply as a sister, but secretly as a would-be lover, is contemptuous of and nauseated by the attentions she receives from the boys and grown men who constantly undress her with their eyes; she hopes that her beauty will both provide an escape from her present life and win her Anna’s love. Anna understands that her beauty, alone, will not save her. She sees the strength of her mother, and at least on some level takes in the message that only education and coming to understand the social realities can help her to a better life.

This is a powerful book. While it may have become a best seller at least partly because of the titillation of peeking into the lives of two beautiful girls who are on the cusp of women-hood, its ultimate appeal rests on the lucidity of Avalonne’s understanding of the world around her. There is so much of interest in this book that my comments have, at best, merely scratched the surface. Let me close with a quote from the book that summarizes Avallone’s own questions about her characters and the industrial city in which she was raised.

What does it mean to grow up in a complex of four big tenements shedding sections of balconies and chunks of asbestos into a courtyard where little kids play alongside older kids dealing drugs and old people who reek of decay? What kind of vision do you get of the world in a place where it’s normal not to go anywhere on vacation, not to go to the movies, not to know anything about the world, to never read the newspaper, to never read a book, and that’s just how life is? The two of them, in this place, sought each other out, chose each other.