In Other Words
She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels by Kathleen Hill
After finishing a great novel, a reader can get lost in its wake, caught between reality and the world the author has created. The details of ordinary life filter through one’s mind in the voice of the author, or through the perceptions of the vivid characters so recently left behind. This afterglow provides the underpinnings of She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels, a memoir by Sarah Lawrence College faculty member Kathleen Hill. The book chronicles the first several years of Hill’s marriage and the time she and her husband spent teaching abroad as they began their family. It picks back up in the 1980s and ’90s, when Hill spent long hours each week reading aloud to an elderly writer and critic, Diana Trilling, whose more famous late husband was Lionel Trilling.
Each section of the book is named for a classic work of literature that Hill was reading at the time the events took place. She emulates the prose, aesthetics, and thematic concerns of the respective authors — Willa Cather, Chinua Achebe, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, among others. Hill is exceedingly good at this technique. The first section, “The Angle of a Landscape,” begins with a quirky but apt imagistic and thematic channeling, via prose, of Emily Dickinson’s circa-1862 poem of the same title, putting herself in the role of the protagonist, who sees the world slightly askew. “And the child standing on her head in the grass in front of the house, looking at it upside down? Who sees that the two tall brick chimneys are the legs of the house, holding it up against the sky? ... This is the same child who, when she grows tired of fussing around in the grass this September afternoon, squashing the red yew berries and pulling the yellow stickiness between her fingers, goes to sit on the front steps,” Hill writes. We next join Hill at twelve years old — in a section named for Cather’s
Lucy Gayheart — when she is under the spell of a glamorous music teacher given to romantic flights of fancy. At the same time, she is bearing witness to the trauma and grief borne by a new classmate. Hill experiences an inability to engage with the boy because she cannot take on his suffering. She perceives this moment of childhood hardness in herself as a character flaw that she will not overcome, and returns to it throughout the book.
Hill spends her first years married — to a man referred to as “C.” — in Africa. In this section, named “Things Fall Apart” after Achebe’s 1958 novel, the author is acutely aware of her white skin. She does not want to be perceived as a colonizing presence. It is the early 1960s, and she does not yet understand the nuances of American racism, though she comes to some epiphanies during her stay, during which she embarks on a luxuriously close reading of The Portrait of a
by Henry James. After that we go to the French countryside and Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Hill, who misses Africa and is unmoved by her current locale, is so enmeshed with the character of Emma that the line between the two women becomes blurred. Though she seems to identify with Emma, what exactly she identifies with is unclear, and to understand why Flaubert’s novel is relevant to her specific circumstances would likely require a side-byside reading of the novel with this section of the memoir by readers who are not as familiar with the story as the author is. She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons, though a highly literary effort and an effective homage to influential authors, is not particularly gripping as a memoir. The first two sections hold the most promise, but once Hill discovers that she lacks the capacity for empathy, the narrative becomes cold and distanced. The old-fashioned voices of the classic writers overwhelm any honest insight into who Hill is. She transforms from a child who loves reading into a woman intent on displaying her impressively honed skills in literary analysis.
We learn in the final section that Hill wrote her doctoral dissertation on Proust, and that she and Trilling enjoyed reading him together, but what exactly they enjoyed about the author’s works is never mentioned. Hill never seems changed by books. Unable to let herself feel others’ pain, she is jolted into looking outside of herself only when she visits an African museum about the American slave trade and is emotionally affected by the sight of implements used to control stolen people during ocean passage. She mentions that her driving interest in literature has always been to identify with a character who explains her to herself as she already is. Perhaps this is why, despite her world travels and important connections to major literary figures, Hill comes across as hopelessly navel-gazing. Her memoir is an exquisitely rendered formal exercise in literary style that lacks in substance. — Jennifer Levin
HIll emulates the prose, aesthetics, and thematic concerns of the respective authors — Willa Cather, Chinua Achebe, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, among others.