The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood. Hogarth, 229 pp., $27.00
The Life of the Mind begins in the toilet, a single-occupancy restroom at an unnamed Manhattan university: “Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail.” Expletives are pretty rare in this darkly comic first novel, and Christine Smallwood’s decision to put one into her opening sentence tells us that what she’s actually concerned with is the life of the body, with the embarrassing and at times humiliating details of our physical existence. Dorothy lives in Brooklyn with her blandly sensible boyfriend, Rog—neither of them has a last name—and teaches four courses a term as an English department adjunct. Now she reads a taped-up notice from student health services above the bin for used tampons and studiously avoids her phone. She doesn’t want to answer because she doesn’t want to explain why she canceled her appointment. Not “that the miscarriage was such a big deal or that she was broken up in grief about it; it was that she hadn’t told her therapist she was pregnant, and didn’t want to have a whole session about her tendency to withhold.” The miscarriage, not her miscarriage: the article locates us in Dorothy’s consciousness, and there we will largely remain, in a close third person, with Smallwood’s narrative voice hovering ironically above. And of course she does withhold; she even has a secret second therapist with whom to talk about her problems with the first. Dorothy doesn’t see herself as “the plotting type” and hadn’t planned to keep her pregnancy a secret. She just wasn’t ready to talk about it, back when she first knew, but by the following week it looked to her as if “an innocent delay had become a falsehood,” and so on, week after week until it was too late. She feels a similar awkwardness with her best friend, Gaby; how to explain that a pregnancy is over when nobody except Rog knew she was pregnant to start with? Meanwhile it’s “day six” there in the toilet, and she’s still bleeding, though it’s “not the unceasing hemorrhage of the first ten hours—now it was thick, curdled knots of string, gelatinous in substance.” Dorothy’s miscarriage was induced. The fetus failed to develop, never becoming more than a mass of tissue. Finally, it wasn’t even alive, and yet instead of having herself “vacuumed . . . clean” at the doctor’s office, she decided to take care of things at home, using two vaginal suppositories of Misoprostol to get the contractions started: “It had seemed less official that way. She hadn’t known how degrading the dribble would be.”
That dribble will last for much of the novel, but Dorothy still has her life to get on with, insofar as she can. For her classes feel stuck, and she never does much work on the scholarly book she’s supposed to be writing on female confinement in the gothic novel: the book that’s meant to “get her the contract that would get her the job that didn’t exist.” By now the subject nauseates her; she knows how closely it resembles her own life, as though she were a minor character in the very books she writes about. She worries about the time she wastes on the Web—those hours she’ll never get back—and yet misses the days of long e-mails, as older people miss stamped letters.
Texts and tweets are no substitute, but it’s what she’s got, even if the latter brings news of her more successful friends. Or rivals, really. Like Alexandra, the favorite student of their shared dissertation adviser, Judith—she has a book contract and a tenure-track job, and Judith has called her work “significant.” Dorothy has always found it silly, something about doors in the Victorian novel, actual doors, with knobs. Still, Judith has never praised her that way, and now she also feels rejected by her second therapist, who runs a podcast on which she presents entire taped sessions but hasn’t chosen Dorothy as a subject. “It’s not that you’re not sympathetic,” she says, “but—.” Though in fact Dorothy doesn’t think she is.
Christine
Smallwood got her Ph.D. from Columbia in 2014, with a dissertation on what she calls “depressive realism” in the Victorian novel, a thesis grounded in affect theory that argues that such things as dislike and ambivalence can serve as productive artistic strategies, indeed that the depressed are more likely to see the world accurately than others. I won’t go into the particulars of her claims about writers like Charlotte Brontë or Thomas Hardy, but her introductory account of what it’s like to be a “depressive” reader stands as a masterful provocation. Such a person has an acute awareness of “the schizoid-paranoid feelings that producing scholarship produces—the feelings of inadequacy and aggression, the sense of futility or pointlessness.” Thwarted, blocked, powerless, fed up—some characters in Victorian novels may be all those things, but then so too are their readers, or at least those in graduate school, though Smallwood is careful to add that she’s “not saying that the scholarly endeavor is a futile one, necessarily.” And any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.