Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

  • • •

  Seven Years is the fourth novel by Peter Stamm, a forty-eight-year-old Swiss. It has a bewitching cover: a photograph of an antique bedstead with stylish contemporary sheets, set against a tasteful gray wall. I took one look at it and thought: God, I wish I lived like that. This bourgeois response proved thematically important, as we shall see. It gets under your skin, this novel. It welcomes you into a clean, modern space as appealing as that room—and then it really fucks with you, if you’ll excuse my Swiss-German. It’s about “lifestyle”—in the broadest sense—and it’s a devastating read. It begins like this: “Sonia stood in the middle of the brightly lit space; she liked to be at the center of things.” Sonia is a brilliant, beautiful young woman studying to be an architect in early-eighties Munich. The narrator is Alex, another trainee architect, who begins as an admiring acquaintance (“She was more gifted than me, and had more application”) and ends up being her husband. How this comes about is interesting. Sonia is dating one of Alex’s more gregarious friends; they seem a “dream couple,” but when that boyfriend inexplicably leaves her (“That I don’t understand, I said, how anyone could leave a woman like you”), Alex begins to consider a potential knock-through, from his life into Sonia’s: “Sometimes I entertained the idea of falling in love with Sonia myself, but however plausible it was as an idea, it didn’t seem at all appropriate . . . I couldn’t picture her as my girlfriend, not in bed, not even naked . . . She was like one of those dolls whose clothes are sewn on to their bodies.” Sonia is oppressively perfect, with a will to power that Alex lacks. She believes “the world could be transformed by architecture.” She adores Le Corbusier; Alex prefers deconstructivism.

  Still, they begin circling each other, because Sonia, too, thinks Alex “has potential.” They take a trip to Marseille to see Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. En route they have an instructive argument: “She said, Anyway, what could be bad about a building that improved the people who lived in it? I said, People have a history that you have to respect.” Their trip is, to Alex, like “a scene from a French movie of the fifties or sixties, our whole life was a film put together from distance shots, wide angles under white light, with little people moving through it, all very esthetic and intellectual and cool.” The potential couple stay in the apartment of Sonia’s friend Antje, a German artist in her forties, who is, like Alex, curious about human perversity, as he gathers from her wall murals: “I saw the strange beings in the paintings, a man with a fish head and an enormous cock he was holding in both hands, a bull mounting a cow, both with human heads, two dogs with human privates, licking each other.” Even to Antje, Alex and Sonia look irresistibly good on paper. When night comes, she pushes Alex into Sonia’s room as she sleeps. “There was a small dark sweat stain in [Sonia’s] armpit, the one flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. I stroked it with my finger, I didn’t dare any other touch.” The relationship begins. They move into an apartment together and have a strange moment in front of a mirror, more chilling to me than Levé’s:

  We stood next to each other in the bathroom and looked at ourselves in the mirror. Two beautiful people in a beautiful apartment, said Sonia, and laughed. I turned and kissed her, and thought of the beautiful couple in the mirror kissing as well, and that excited me more than the actual kiss itself. I reached into Sonia’s short hair with my hand and rubbed her shaved neck. You look like a boy. She laughed and asked if I’d gone off her? I stepped behind her and placed my hands over her breasts, and said, Luckily there were still a few points of difference.

  This is the stealthy way Stamm operates; the anxious misogyny of our narrator is not hidden (Alex wants a brilliant modern woman, but her new haircut makes him nervous; he still wants a woman in whom the “points of difference” have not been obscured). But Sonia also has a depressingly familiar way of pursuing her life as if it were an advert for itself. Christmas presents are exchanged, future plans are made: “It was a cardboard model of a single-family house, very carefully done. In front of the house stood two little human figures, a man and a woman. Someday, said Sonia. I wanted to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned her head away, and I kissed her on the cheek.” They get married, despite the apparent sexual coolness between them. They start a firm together, building housing projects, Sonia enthusiastically, Alex ambivalently:

  [W]hen I visited one of these projects years later, when I saw how the buildings had been taken over—laundry hanging out to dry on balconies, bicycles dumped higgledy-piggledy outside the doors, little flowerbeds arranged in defiance of any understanding of landscaping—then . . . I didn’t feel annoyance so much as fear and a kind of fascination with life swarming and seething and escaping our plans.

  The business grows. They move into larger premises. To celebrate, Alex frames Sonia’s favorite Corbusier quote: “Everything is different. Everything is new. Everything is beautiful. She hung it over her desk and said, Everything is the way it’s supposed to be.” God, I wish I lived like that . . .

  You might feel Stamm is stacking the deck against Sonia somewhat, and you’d be right. A furious feminist reading is legitimate. So, we became your liberated partners, and now you hate us for it? I felt this but at the same time couldn’t deny the power of Stamm’s wider critique, which implicates men and women both. First you sell your lifestyle to your family and friends (the centerpiece of which is your relationship). Then you spend the rest of your life selling it to each other. In a tedious catch-up lunch with Sonia’s ex-boyfriend, now a successful businessman, Alex gets to hear all about it:

  He talked about spontaneous networks and people who had a sort of entrepreneurial approach to their lives, and kept asking themselves, Okay, what are my strengths, my preferences, my assumptions? What am I making of them all? Where am I going, and how will I get there? That’s where the future is, EGO plc. And what if EGO plc goes bust? I asked.

  But that possibility is never allowed, it can’t even be thought:

  [Sonia] had once likened our relationship to a house we were building together, something that wasn’t an expression of either one of us, but that came about through our joint wills. There were many rooms in this house, she said, a dining room and a bedroom, a children’s room, and a pantry for our common memories. And what about a cellar, I said, but at that she had merely laughed.

  Yes, what about that cellar? In this perfect picture, something is missing, or someone: Ivona. Ivona is the cellar of this book, the id to Sonia’s ego. Alex meets her just as his relationship with Sonia begins. A random encounter in a beer garden. She is a Polish immigrant, a devout Catholic, heavyset and poorly dressed, like a peasant (“She wore beige knickerbockers and a sort of folksy embroidered blouse”). She has no ambition. She works in a Christian bookshop. She is almost monosyllabic. They sleep together the first day they meet. “Without anything happening, I had the feeling she was giving herself to me.” She is perhaps insane, for the first full sentence she says to him is: “I love you.” And his attraction to her is utterly inexplicable to him: “Ivona bored me, we had nothing to say to each other. It was only in bed that I liked being with her, when she lay there heavy and soft in her ugly clothes, and I felt completely free and uninhibited.” In this upside-down world, kitsch interiors become pornographic (“At the head of the bed was a small plastic crucifix, the walls were covered with postcards and framed Bible sayings. On the bed were any number of soft toys in garish colors, the kind you can buy at railway station kiosks”), and clutter and filth irresistible: “The pokiness, the untidiness, and the absence of any esthetic value only seemed to intensify my desire.” Good sex is beside the point: “when I touched her she barely reacted, or faked a reaction. The thing that kept me fascinated with her was her utter devotion.” We seem to be witnessing the return of an ancient character to contemporary fiction: the simple, devoted girl. There’s another example in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Turns out the house of human sexuality has (a) basement, no matter how much we t
ry to focus our attention on the fitted kitchen.

  Alex does his best to forget this strange episode. But even after his marriage to Sonia, the memory of Ivona keeps returning. Then comes the seven-year itch. What happens next is shocking; I won’t ruin it for you. It is all anyway confessed—in a neat framing device—to Antje twenty years later. She is the judge of the situation, and also the social engineer who nudged Sonia and Alex together in the first place. No accident, I imagine, that she is twenty years older, and the right age to be a first-wave feminist. Unimpressed by Alex’s confession, she is a stand-in for the angry reader:

  But I had no choice, I couldn’t help myself. Antje said I was making things a bit too easy for myself. She believed in free will. Has it never happened to you, I said, that you did something, even though you knew it was wrong? That’s a part of free will too.

  Seven Years feels to me like a Catholic novel, an intriguing addition to a tradition that includes The Power and the Glory, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the lesser-known An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (which is also about the failures of first-wave feminism, and features a proto-Ivona, heavyset and Eastern European, in the character of Karina). What links novels in this tradition, I think, is a tendency to confront perversity without trying to obscure or resolve it. Stamm’s prose (beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann) is plain but not so simple: missing quotation marks allow thought and speech to mingle and culpability to be confused, and the only things separating Alex’s benign words from his poisonous actions are a few commas, grammatical equivalents of the “thin veneer” he detects between civilization and ugly chaos while watching a Jerry Springer–style show on TV. A subtle but deadly style. You’re warned early, in the epigraph, which is (for once!) not surplus to requirements but actually essential: “Light and shadow reveal form—Le Corbusier.” I found Stamm’s light and shadow so absorbing I’d almost finished the novel before I realized he had made an argument I would have violently rejected had it been presented to me in any other form than this novel. On the last page, Alex is in an airport watching the departures and spots a man with two children: “[The father] turned to [them] and said, She’s gone now, and one of the children, a boy of ten or so, asked, Where did she go? I don’t see her. There, said the father, pointing into the air, that’s where she is. But there was nothing to be seen where he was pointing except the overcast sky.” You’ve come a long way, baby, I wrote in the margin—too far? And couldn’t believe what I’d written. Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?

  Paula Fox and Geoff Dyer

  Now that any decent American bookshop shelves Paula Fox between Ford and Gaitskill, it’s easy to forget how long she spent in the wilderness. The story of her rediscovery has been told many times: along with the restoration of Richard Yates, it’s one of the happier New York publishing stories of the nineties. Both revivals were a response to present need. A fresh crop of writers sought a way of writing “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” fiction, as Don DeLillo once called it—without incurring the scorn of writers like DeLillo. A new domestic realism: unsentimental yet vivid, self-accusatory without being morose, symbolic of a nation but not diagrammatic. Sometimes the books you’re dreaming of have already been written. Fox’s Desperate Characters turned up in Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream,” his Harper’s essay in defense of the novel, and in David Foster Wallace’s classroom; writers recommended it to readers and to one another. And though it was Yates who became the supernova, Fox remains the writer’s writer. Her adult oeuvre is smaller than Yates’s and more emotionally composed (without his penchant for self-pity), though she had plenty of reasons—both personal and professional—to feel sorry for herself. The unwanted child of two pretty desperate characters, she was abandoned often, sometimes for years, and like Yates suffered especially at the hands of a “creative” parent, who put art before child and drink before both. Like Yates, she watched her work fall out of print while mediocre peers were celebrated. Both writers were skeptics when it came to the exceptionalism so many artists claim as their right (and the commercial reception of their books must have compounded this feeling). Neither had much affection for the conventional middle-class life that awaited them on the other side of childhood chaos. Their mutual lack of bombast was part of what endeared them to readers of the nineties, wearied by the irrepressible personae and prose of writers like Wolfe and Mailer. It was time again for a writer with Hemingway’s self-described “built-in shock-proof shit detector.” Fox certainly has one; in some ways it’s superior to those of Hemingway and Yates, both of whom drank themselves into caricature. Fox knew the type well. Her father, the novelist and screenwriter Paul Hervey Fox, she flatly describes as “a writer and a drunk.” In News from the World: Stories and Essays she refines that caricature into indelible portrait:

  On the few occasions I saw my father during my childhood and adolescence, he was drunk most of the time. As a young man he had been handsome. His voice, poetic and slurred, was given over to interminable, stumbling descriptions of the ways in which he and fellow writers tried to elude domesticity and women. All writers, he asserted, were defeated romantics, trying to escape domesticity and females to aspire upward to the mountain heights, only to be dragged down to the lowlands by the female urgencies of breeding and nesting.

  Fox has spent forty-five years cultivating two qualities her father lacked, self-control and empathy: “a living interest in all living creatures.” In the new collection this interest is widely displayed, across fiction, memoir, lecture and essays, with no formal distinction made between genres. This feels true to Fox’s self-conception:

  Interviewer: But what, then, is the difference, for you, between autobiography and fiction?

  Fox: Well, for me there isn’t much difference.

  Certainly the fine texture of her fiction, its visual acuity, folds seamlessly into non-fiction. In the Paris Review interview, defending herself against the identity “intellectual,” she explains her gift thus: “I can see.” She really can. In an essay detailing her move to Brooklyn: “But you saw the sky in a way you rarely saw it in Manhattan. As I looked up at it I realized . . . that it was limitless, not a roof for a city, not a part of a stage décor, but the heavens.” Being shown round her future home: “I saw a bathroom, its door open, looking like plain white underwear, slightly soiled.” Reaching forty years back for a memory, she reanimates an acquaintance with masterful adjectival amalgams: “I shared a vast room with a woman who had been a member of an acting troupe in her youth. I saw her sober infrequently. She slept mostly, and when she was awake, showed me an elaborate blurred courtesy.” Occasionally all this fine attention is lavished on obscure subjects. Like many a New York writer, she assumes our intimate familiarity with behind-the-scenes machinations at famous local literary journals, in this case Commentary, where the Greenbergs (Fox’s husband’s family) apparently played out their dramas. More interesting for the general reader is her encounter with D. H. Lawrence’s widow, Frieda, in Taos, New Mexico, where she comes across Lawrence’s paintings: “I found them repellent. The subjects were naked women crawling on a stone floor, their breasts and buttocks enormous, their faces angry or as blank as balloons. The work was done in raw, brutal colors, full of energy and hysteria.” The precise opposite of Fox’s MO: controlled anxiety. Holding back the savagery that lies at the edge of civilization—the classic Foxian situation. “Is this what thousands of years of human life is to come to?” she finds herself crying at two fighting children she is attempting to separate. “Is this all we are—snarling, murderous things?”

  Whether Fox believes human savagery to be innate or the product of circumstance is a troubling ambiguity in her work. A persistent racial tension runs through it (white liberals representing civilization, poor blacks and Latinos symbolizing chaos), a theme made more uncomfortable by her refusal to place her cards face up on the table. Severe judgments tend to
be placed in the mouths of other people: “[I] mentioned neighborhood crime, attributing it to poverty and hopelessness. But then she took me by surprise. ‘Human beings,’ she said, ‘have an inborn capacity for wickedness.’” I think she means to track misery, from whichever direction it comes, as it encroaches on happiness, wherever it may be. Et in Arcadia ego. And that’s a large enough battlefield to stage a lot of messy American contests: between classes, races, beliefs. It ain’t always pretty. In “The Tender Night,” a moving account of her friendship with a gay neighbor, AIDS is the beast in the garden, and Fox brings her crisp yet tender view to the poor man’s bedside: “his fingers felt like a handful of pencils.” But some of her conclusions will sound a little off to contemporary readers:

  What I had sensed, fleetingly, as a child with four uncles, three of whom were homosexual, had become plain as I grew older. There is as much diversity among homosexual people—in some instances, more—as there is among other people.

  An uncivilized part of me wants to call that a “senior moment,” sweet in its superfluity. Then you remember it’s a supernatural writer who is able to travel as far in age from her readers as Fox (she was born in 1923) and not fall out of step with their orthodoxies. Generational gaps show up now and again. Fox spends perhaps more time than is necessary bemoaning latter-day linguistic infelicities (misuse of “like” and “role model,” of “impact” as a verb, and so on). This line of attack invades the recent stories, appearing in the dialogue of disgruntled types as they shout at the TV. For Fox, the degeneration of language represents another phalanx of the encroaching chaos, but in combating it she sometimes loses her sense of proportion, as people who make their living out of words are liable to do. She mourns the replacement of radio by TV, and sees in modern childhood a kitsch myth of innocence. She quotes E. M. Forster (“She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words”), but if you’re warning against platitudinous thought, you must also strive to avoid the oldest and deepest: Things were better back then.