Novel Readings

I’m running a bit behind on writing I need to get done sooner rather than later, but I don’t want to let Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen go unmentioned, so I thought I’d say at least little bit about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Briefly, then, I liked The Chosen but didn’t love it: it was not as absorbing or revelatory an experience as Tóibín’s The Master, which is my touchstone for books that undertake to convey authorship in this kind of intensely personal, mostly biographical way. (I think The Master is the only book in this genre that I have found as exceptional as its subject was or deserves.) It is a smaller book than Tóibín’s, in both scope and in spirit, and I think it is possible, even likely, that someone who really knows Hardy would find it a more resonant experience: in her author’s note, Lowry says that she has “quarried his fiction, poetry, verse dramas, personal notebooks, interviews, letters, manuscripts, and his self-authored biography”—and that “the cornerstone of The Chosen . . . are the ‘Poems of 1912-13.'” Of this material, I know only the fiction, and I only know two of his novels well (Tess and Jude), so other echoes will have been lost on me.*

There’s a way in which that’s appropriate to the Hardy Lowry depicts, who is pretty pessimistic about the lasting value of any of his labors (“Surprise!” says absolutely nobody who has read any Hardy at all). Looking around the house he laboriously designed and built for himself and his first wife Emma (whose death is the immediate occasion for The Chosen), he thinks

Hasn’t he only imagined living here? In spite of his plans and designs and refurbishments, he never gave his heart and soul to it. His real existence has always been elsewhere. And now that he’s had to become the exhumer of his own life, forced to dig up its chattels and heaps of rubbish, he finds that they’ve disintegrated in his hands. Just fragments are left.

He’s feeling sad because of Emma’s death, but also and even more because the notebooks and diary he discovers Emma has left behind tell a story of their marriage in which she is bitter and unhappy and scornful of his work (even though, as we learn through the diary and through flashbacks) initially she was his greatest supporter. “Does it happen to all husbands and wives, must we all end up as enemies to each other?” he mournfully wonders.

The novel is primarily an excavation of their past and a meditation on the pain of being unable to close or make up for the gap that opened between them. Because I don’t know much about Hardy’s life, I found it interesting finding out more about it, and I thought Lowry effectively conveyed the atmosphere of the gloomy house and its (often equally gloomy) surrounding landscape. I was interested too in the picture she gives us of Hardy the writer, especially his despair about ever capturing in words the ideas he has for his novels, and the frustrations he has about their reception that lead him to give up fiction for poetry. Emma, on the other hand, seemed more elusive, although that fits with the novel’s theme of the otherness of people we think we know well.

*A quick look around turned up this review by Amitava Banerjee, posted at the estimable Victorian Web, that confirms my intuition about this.