Women wrote 2019’s best in fiction
Works by Steinberg and Ginzburg merit more praise
At some point after the presidential election in 2016, I began to read many more novels by women than by men. It wasn’t a choice made out of principle, or the simulation of principle — or even a choice. It was a desire, and like all desires involuntary, difficult to trace to any single source. I wasn’t trying to be an ally, and in fact even the idea of explicit alliance had quickly come to seem poisoned to me, a waiver out of the true responsibility of reflecting on privilege that you could acquire by repeating the word privilege often enough to the right audience.
Perhaps it was as simple as curiosity. A president who was so openly adversarial toward women — and seemingly not just in his actions, which were only less mannerly variants of an existing systemic misogyny, but psychologically — gave their perspective a different charge, a different urgency. I’m to blame for needing to be galvanized into that attention (“the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Simone Weil once wrote in a letter to a friend). But I’m lucky to have been, since nearly all the most resonant, lingering fiction I read in 2019 was by women, including “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellmann and “Everything Inside” by Edwidge Danticat.
Yet here, too, you arrive at a problem: To read such work through such a flimsy frame as “books by women” would be an insult, while not to acknowledge that they’re by and about women, that they clarify elements of lived female life that most men have probably never understood, would be a false piety — and a missed opportunity.
Maybe for readers of either sex the solution is as simple as operating within that tension: reading women writers as writers first, yet without losing sight of their status as a beleaguered class, besieged, exhausted, and their voices at just this moment in history of a particular and tragic necessity.
At least, that was how I tried to read two of my favorite books to receive less notice this year than Ellmann’s or Danticat’s or Colson Whitehead’s or Sally Rooney’s: “Machine” by Susan Steinberg, and “Happiness, as Such,” a work of the 1970s by Natalia Ginzburg, newly (and superbly) translated into English by Minna Zallman Proctor.
“Machine” is Steinberg’s first novel after three collections of short stories. Its narrator is an unnamed woman recalling a summer of her adolescence. She and her friends were “the stars of the shore,” as she writes, but their celebrity was shadowed by the apparently accidental drowning of “a local girl … a knockout.” This divided mood is representative — the girl and her friends are beautiful, clever and funny, but attuned with piercing anxiety to the scrutiny of their peers, and how it’s colored by sex. “The guys don’t want us looking like them; they want us looking small and weak; to the guys, I like to seem small and weak; to the girls, I like to seem something else; to the girls, I like to seem terrifying; like a supernova.”
Steinberg writes in this style throughout her novel, in quick lines broken by semicolons. It’s a perfect formal choice: the semicolon, its brief pause without the rest of a full stop, mirroring the painful and halting growth of being a teenager, the instability of that time of life, the discontinuities within what has perhaps previously seemed like a continuum.
The great courage of “Machine” is that it fuses the exhilaration and fear of female sexuality — the immense power and ultimate powerlessness. (“Our father would teach my brother that the most effective way to manage girls was just to wear them down,” she writes ominously.) It’s a book obsessed, as teenagers are, with “how a body from afar is something; and a body from inside that body is something else.” Steinberg describes this sensation so closely that you almost begin to inhabit the book physically.
The plot she offers is secondary. The local girl’s death aside, Steinberg’s narrator’s family is falling apart, her father sneering and cruel, her mother checked out, her brother lately distant. These are clichés of teen angst, and slightly unforgivably they’re moneyed, picturesque clichés of teen angst, in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis or certain songs by Lana Del Rey. But the book’s negligible plot is eclipsed by its careful memory of what late girlhood looks like. “Were I in charge,” Steinberg’s narrator
says, “the summer would go backward; we would start out split and end up not.”
If “Machine” is an imperfect but inventive and immersive piece of fiction, “Happiness, as Such,” by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, whose renown on these shores has steadily grown since her death in 1991, belongs to a different class: It’s a masterpiece.
Like Steinberg’s novel, its form is one of fracture, allusive and metonymic. In a series of letters and scenes, “Happiness, as Such” depicts an affluent family fretting together over its beloved prodigal son, Michele, who has had to leave Italy because of his dangerous political associations; the book was published in 1973, during that country’s fear-filled “Years of Lead,” when terrorist organizations were in full flower on both the left and right.
Michele’s mother, Andrea, is the book’s spirit, cynical, harsh, funny, thwarted, bereft. “It was snowing out, and her birthday, she was forty-three years old,” Ginzburg says at the novel’s beginning. After composing a brooding and hilarious letter to Michele, Andrea goes into her living room, “wearing tobaccobrown trousers and a beige sweater. She sat in the living room by the lit fire but she didn’t read Pascal’s Pensées. She didn’t read anything and she didn’t watch the snow out the window because suddenly she felt like she hated the snowy landscape with its shapes. Instead she put her head in her hands and then rubbed her feet and calves through the thick tobaccobrown socks and that’s where she spent the whole morning.”
The wobbly rules of adolescence as Steinberg portrays it have matured, like a municipal bond, into something else: society. This brief, humane passage captures the frustration of being an adult woman who must still live by those rules — stuck on the watchful periphery of the overwhelmingly male world of action, but nevertheless required to construct its retreats and domestic comforts, to solve its problems. Andromache by the fireplace.
Imperceptibly, “Happiness, as Such” coils more and more tightly around us, so that its last pages become unexpectedly yet inevitably devastating. In tones of increasing distance, as the novel passes, Michele’s old friends, lovers and above all his family commune to discuss him. His own letters are short and deeply uninteresting — “I’ve become very proficient at servicing boilers and washing dishes,” he reports — and what Ginzburg’s actually investigating are the women who must negotiate the actions of impetuous men. In one comic subplot, Michele’s sisters have to figure out what to do with a huge folly of a seaside tower that their father intended as his legacy to Michele — who has no interest whatsoever in it.
Ginzburg is a powerful writer. She has impeccable command of character, plot, form, symbolism (that tower!) and timing. Her observations of human psychology dart through your preconceptions — “the time we spent together was wonderful because it didn’t have anything to do with true love,” one of Michele’s lovers says, a characteristically acute line — and her characters constantly turn against their own thoughts, capable of love and hate simultaneously, doubt and faith. In certain moments they have a nearly Shakespearean force of life. Yet I think of her as belonging more in a line of existentialists from Albert Camus to Ben Lerner, writers whose dispassionate prose has a sense that such restraint is only required because huge emotions — sorrow, sympathy, love, humor, rage — are being martialed just beneath the text.
Clearly it would be a mistake to read Ginzburg as a “woman writer.” At the same time, she captures things about the lives of women that other novelists of her era — John Updike here, in Italy Alberto Moravia — cannot touch, the loose network of emotions, fears and boredoms that women inhabiting a patriarchal world have in common.
And the bravery that asks. Michele, in free flight, may wind up in danger, in a scrap, but he will never wind up on the edge, watching himself, waiting to be needed or disposed of. “I’ll confess that I already packed my bag to come to you,” his sister Angelica writes him in a letter, after he’s told her it’s better not to visit him in England. “I want to see you, not just to talk about you but also to talk about me. I’m going through some things too. But, as you say, that will have to be for another time.” Maybe that time has come. Charles Finch is the author of several novels, including “The Last Passenger,” forthcoming in February.