FICTION: CLAIRE KILROYreviews Private Lifeby Jane Smiley, Faber and Faber, 218pp, £12.99
JANE SMILEY has published so many remarkable novels, won so many prestigious awards – including the Pulitzer and the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature – and become such a fixture on the American fiction scene, that it is difficult to believe that she is only 60. Her achievements in the world of letters are those of a writer who has spent over half a century at her desk. This sense that we are reading the work of a wise old master is strengthened by her latest novel, Private Life– her 14th to date – by the considered tone, the subtlety of the insights, and the judiciously-metered prose. Scrupulous meanness, as Joyce would say to describe the writing method, employing the word "mean" in the sense of even, measured.
The novel follows the life and marriage of Margaret Mayfield from her Missouri childhood in the 1880s to her transition to Vallejo, California when she becomes Mrs Andrew Early, the wife of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, a naval officer and astronomer. It ends with a decisive moment in Margaret’s life in 1942. The action is buttressed by a prologue and epilogue both set in 1942, in the wake of the Pearl Harbour bombings. Margaret’s Japanese friends have been taken away for interrogation. She eventually finds them in much reduced circumstances and failing health.
Private Lifeis a 21st century example of that female-dominated genre, the novel of manners. The first part of the novel is set in the period most associated with the genre, the 19th century, when the form reached its apotheosis in the work of Jane Austen, and later, Edith Wharton.
As in the work of Austen, Private Lifeobserves behaviour, custom, class, and of course, the search for a husband. Unlike the work of Austen, the novel does not end at the point at which the heroine marries but, rather, nominates this as the starting point from which to excavate the pathology of wedlock within the social constraints of the time, when divorce was not a readily available option. "Margaret could still remember what grounds for divorce were – abandonment, drunkenness, beatings, criminal behaviour. Mere torment was not among them."
For Margaret gradually realises that in marrying Captain Early, or, rather, in being manoeuvred into marrying Captain Early, a man who, according to the local paper, is a genius who has changed the universe, she has been sold a pup.
Margaret’s winning quality, by her mother-in-law’s reckoning, is not so much a strength as a frailty: when Margaret was four years old, her brother brought her to the public hanging of a young, illiterate boy. The child was so traumatised by the event that she wiped it from her memory, or tried to. This marks Margaret out to women like her mother-in-law – and indeed her own mother – as a girl blessed with obliviousness, and thus an ideal wife.
The gender divide within the marriage could not be starker. Captain Early leaves the house each morning to change the universe, or to believe that he is changing it, for the Captain is crippled by his ego. It dictates his every move. Margaret is confined to knitting groups, which are effectively support groups to help women cope with marriage. (“That’s what knitting groups and sewing groups were for, wasn’t it? Commiserating about marriage.”) Not that Margaret’s life is that of the idle rich – she cooks, she cleans, she gardens, she chauffeurs, she does charity work, she is her husband’s amanuensis, typing up his interminable discourses for up to five hours a day. It is during these typing sessions that Margaret begins to grasp the extent of her husband’s delusions.
PRIVATE LIFEIS A NOVEL about treachery. A central image in the narrative is a Japanese painting of a gift which has a snake coiled around it. Though Margaret dislikes the painting, she finds herself compelled to buy it. "It depicted, she thought, something that she had never seen in a picture before – that moment just before the recipient of the gift realizes the evil intentions of the sender."
Margaret is guileless and spends much of her life trapped in that pre-realisation moment.
It takes her many years to grasp that she has been the recipient of a gift sent with evil intentions, that she is a dupe, a patsy. A cache of letters addressed to Captain Early reveals her betrayal by those who should have protected her.
An extraordinarily tender and moving section depicts the death of her baby, which marks an irreparable rift in her marriage, since Captain Early, for the brief duration of his son’s life, had found the infant a disappointment. Margaret herself seems capable of enduring her unhappiness indefinitely, but when her husband’s righteousness damages the lives of her Japanese friends, her equanimity finally snaps.
Private Lifemarks a refreshing change from the flood of novels depicting outpourings of grief which has dominated the American literary scene in the wake of 9/11. No such sentimentality is to be found in Smiley's writing.
The novel is a portrait of forbearance and stoicism, examining both the merits and demerits of those qualities, and it makes for a rich, absorbing and thought-provoking read.
Claire Kilroys latest novel, All Names Have Been Changed(Faber and Faber), is out now in paperback
