The End of the World

I wrote about Christine Smallwood’s debut novel, The Life of the Mind, for the newest Bookforum. It’s a really fascinating narrative project. At once, it’s incredibly close to its protagonist, not committed to liking its protagonist, and — strangely! — understanding and justifying the larger social and professional failures that are at play in academia, and which lead to its protagonist’s misery.

I felt very strangely about reading the novel, too, in part because I had an academic job (the thing Dorothy, Smallwood’s protagonist has been working towards when we meet her), I had miscarriages in that job (one in a faculty meeting! It wasn’t great!!!), I feel the extreme pathos of the Christminster cakes in Jude the Obscure, and I have, on occasion, picked my nose, so in many, many ways I felt like the novel dovetailed with my experience in weird, inchoate ways. In my review, I tried to get at some of the uncanniness in the narration, which is really remarkable, but didn’t delve into the oddness of reading a book that, at times, felt very, painfully close to my own life. At least I didn’t go to school in New York, and my own advisor was a model of professional decorum.

The bigger questions the novel raises are left unanswered. Is there a place for human-scale life in the project of the academy now? Is there a place for mothers in the academy? Is there a place for literary (or historical, or theoretical) enthusiasm that isn’t torqued to professional advantage? I certainly don’t know, and Smallwood’s novel doesn’t purport to have the answers.

But I do know that, for me, the problem of understanding my own mind has become less fraught now I’m not keying every breath to a tenure clock or a conference abstract. This might not be what you want to hear, but the nagging voice doesn’t go away, but you can block it more comfortably—without fear of reprisals—once you fall off of that track. Horrendous to admit it: my writing is clearer and more free-flowing than it ever was as a professor. Is that because I have more time? Hardly. I’ve been on child-care for two small children and one half of a preteen since last March 8. Instead, I’ve been reading more novels, in different genres, than I have for years. I haven’t been reading as much poetry, definitely not as much criticism. But the novels: they’re opening paths to thought that I hadn’t quite realized was missing in my daily life.

Next up, an attempt to get a long-standing project on Agatha Christie off the ground. And preparing a talk for the c19 research group at Columbia. Onwards!