The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
Love, sex, loneliness, meaning, power.
The first time I read this I gave up after a couple of chapters, and then later a friend told me to push through the first few chapters. And now I think I see why they said to, but I also found most of this book a slog: basically it's all redeemed (for me) by the interlaced segments that are just heartbreakingly accurate, perceptive descriptions of sex and power in relationships. There's a quality that a very few writers have of being able to render incredibly apt, honest descriptions of the dynamics of human relationships that we usually avoid thinking about (including the dynamic of avoiding thinking about them). Lessing is so so good at this, and it's beautiful/awful to read.
That said, I personally wish she'd just extracted those segments into a much shorter, more traditional novel: the entire meta of the novel was completely lost on me, the interspersal of different notebooks confused me, I could rarely remember what was what or who was who, and the point of the intererspersals as a device was lost on me. I am told it is profound and meaningful! It certainly isn't pointless! Just the point was lost on me, personally.
In a strange way, the writer Lessing reminds me of most is... Houellebecq. Originally I wrote here I do not know how either of these writers, or any of their readers, would feel about that comparison, but then I got to a part in Lessing where a character says:
the generation after us are going to take one look at us and get married at 18, forbid divorces and go in for strict moral codes... the chaos otherwise is just too terrifying.
Is... is... is Doris Lessing based?
[I have now googled Doris Lessing Based, wondering if anyone else has ever uttered those three words together, but ofc the results are all variants of "...by Doris Lessing, based on her novel..."
Specifically, she wrote the libretti for TWO Philip Glass operas! Insanely, I cannot find recordings of either of these online.
guys: I realise it's basically malpractice to have a tangent inside a square-bracket, but: can we talk about how cool it would be to be the kind of writer who gets SO famous that people start asking you to do entirely unrelated stuff? "Oh hey I loved your novel, would you like to write the libretto for an opera?" "I really dig your political commentary, do you want to write a comic?" I dream of being this writer!]
The other author Lessing weirdly reminds me of is Roberto Bolaño, specifically in two properties:
1) being such a good writer that they can hold people's attention during incredibly long stretches of seemingly-deliberately boring text, such as in Lessing's case long quotes of cutouts from newspapers, even if they can't actively make those sections interesting. Admittedly Golden Notebook doesn't stretch this as far as Bolaño's 2666 does – I will honestly never forgive Bolaño for making me read what-felt-like 2666 pages of dry, police-procedure descriptions of murders in Mexico – but I found myself with the same critique for Lessing: yes you're so good at writing that you were able to make me read this, that's impressive in its own right, but... why not use your talents on writing something I'll enjoy/engage with/actively want to read instead?
I feel like in both cases their admirers would say that they used that stretched-out-tedium to achieve a psychological effect, that in both cases they were making a point, but... eh, I just don't feel like it worked on me. I would rather read something I actually like.
2) endless tangential small stories (1-3 pages say?), most of which don't seem to actually have relevance to the larger story?, but which are all told well and engagingly. I sometimes tell people who I'm helping with their writing that they usually need to make clear whether something is a tangent or not, that the reader should be able to tell whether a newly-introduced character or event is going to be important or not, but... I think Lessing, and iirc Bolaño, basically violate this rule all the time, so maybe it's a bad rule.
Overall: I suppose I'm glad I read this, but also not sure I can recommend it to others, given the shortness of life (etc) and the length of this book: vita brevis, Notebooks fucking longa. There is a decent chance I missed the deeper point of it all, and specifically a chance that I missed the point by being a man (or rather, through cluelessness derived from, though still theoretically avoidable while, being a man), and presumably if you do get the point then the book is much more worth it.
I did adore some segments of this book! -- as I described previously, the apt observations of love sex loneliness meaning power, and they will stick with me. Maybe it's worth reading just for that, but god there is a lot of reading to do for that.