This is not going to be one of those laments about how nobody reads the great old books anymore. Not many people read them when they first appeared, either. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully.
That’s what I mean about the gap between the book and its title. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise. Just try to say those five words without yawning. But look inside and you will be jolted awake.
In January 2023, while waiting to board a plane in Stockholm, I saw how swiftly grief can take hold of a person. In a quiet corner of Arlanda Airport, it unfolded before me like a scene from a movie: an older woman answered her cell phone, listened for a few moments to the voice on the other end, then burst into tears. Her anguish was so immediate, and so visceral, that it could only have been the worst kind of news—the end of a marriage, a dream, or a life. Not just any life, though: one so precious to her that its end was immediately comprehensible.
It was this immediacy that struck me as cinematic, because in real life, or at least in my life, death is many other things before it is something I can cry about. Last year, when my uncle Bill died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven, months passed before I could even conceive of his absence. He meant more to me than any other man, including my father, and yet his death was not at once fathomable to me. It landed with no impact I could make sense of; robbed of the clarifying weight of tragedy, I experienced his death first as an inconvenience. An obstacle. A disturbance that immediately complicated my life, or at least my career, which is what I had instead of a life. The instincts that had helped lift me out of poverty had also made it hard to slow down, and so I lived as if on the run. Next stop: Tokyo, where I planned to cement my relationship with a big American magazine by writing the definitive profile of a major Japanese novelist.
Why do people lose their minds, and where do they go when they’re no longer themselves? Is mental illness curable? To the extent that a work of fiction can contend with the enormity of these questions, Commitment, the seventh novel by Mona Simpson, does a masterful job of it. The story sets a family in motion over 400 pages, painting a portrait of a mother, her children, and their friends, in an attempt to get at the heart of what it’s like to have someone in your inner circle completely lose themselves to a mental breakdown.
This little book is beautifully done. One has sympathy for Savonarola – he is heroic and his end is appalling. But one would no more care to live in his Florence than in Calvin’s Geneva or Mau’s China. Still this is a remarkable, moving and thought-provoking book.
What was new about two women having a baby? Why did Logan’s story need to be told? These are questions the writer herself grapples with throughout the book. By the end I was convinced not only that hers was an important story, but that her obvious struggle to tell it was really the point.