Novel Readings

For maybe the first time since I was fourteen I don’t care what I weigh. I don’t care how my clothes look because most of the time I’m not wearing any. I don’t care that I’m getting older. I don’t feel bad about my neck. I feel like a source of good in the world. Everywhere I go I’m making things happen. My life hasn’t been like that in a long time.

Jeanne Ray’s Calling Invisible Women is what I think of as a ‘concept novel’: she clearly had an idea–what if we made the metaphorical invisibility older women so often experience quite literal?–and then carried it out. It might well have fallen completely flat, and I think it’s fair to say that in fact Calling Invisible Women walks a fine line between being sharply funny and being pretty silly. On balance, though, I think Ray pulls it off: the novel is a pointed but mild feminist satire softened by empathy, including for those who are too busy or self-absorbed or distracted to notice that they can’t actually see the wives or mothers who are doing so much for them while dealing with so much themselves.

“What would it be like to be actually invisible?” is the initial starting point for the novel’s plot (tl;dr version? pretty disorienting, and yet oddly familiar, for these women). Annoyance quickly follows: it’s one thing to joke about being so familiar to your spouse that he hardly sees you anymore, and another for him to be oblivious to your literal disappearance! Then comes, for our protagonist Clover at least, a growing sense of exhilaration. “Had I really spent that much time on personal grooming?” she wonders.

On small exchanges with the postman when he came to deliver the mail? Now I dressed for rmaximum coverage without any thought as to how I looked. No one cared how I looked. no one saw. I felt like I was under quarantine, except that I could go wherever I liked. I picked up Arthur’s suit from the cleaners, I went to the grocery store. Sometimes someone would notice something was off and it was always a young girl who wouldn’t allow herself to believe what her eyes were telling her and so she’d look quickly away, the way she might have if I’d had one eye in the middle of my forehead. It was obvious her mother had drilled a lifetime of good manners into her. It isn’t polite to stare. But I always wanted to say to the girl, stare all you want, there’s nothing here to see.

Once she embraces nakedness (so there’s nothing to be seen at all), she likes being able to intervene in ways she never dared before. She can whisper in ears like an externalized conscience; she can give a nudge or a push; she can even foil bank robberies!

Clover’s courage grows out of the solidarity she finds with other invisible women–it turns out they have a support group (bonus: you don’t have to pay booking fees for hotel conference rooms if nobody can see you in them!). She also finds other older women quicker to notice and quite ready to help: if they haven’t actually been invisible themselves, they have felt like it. (I sure have! Now sometimes I stand stock still on my side of the sidewalk when being approached by a group walking three abreast and showing no sign of noticing that there’s someone they need to make room for.) Some sensitive men also are in on it: “A woman becomes invisible and nobody seems to care one way or the other,” one young fellow says; “But it’s my mom, you know, and now it’s Evie’s mom. I’m going to do something about it.”

It’s Clover and her fellow in(di)visibles (Invisibles Indivisible!) that really get a movement underway, confronting the pharmaceutical company whose products are the one common factor in every case of invisibility. This part of the plot is neat enough but also a bit strained. Would the novel maybe have been more fun and, oddly, more convincing if there had been no attempt to give us a “real” explanation? The drug combo that’s to blame does work well enough to represent the kinds of self-perpetuating trap older women might fall into (menopause, loss of bone density, depression, in a cycle both created and treated by Big Pharma). Once you’ve taken the risky move of literalizing a metaphor, though, how far do you want to lean into “and this is how it happens,” even if that too is obviously pure fiction (if rooted in reality)?

I picked up Calling Invisible Women at the library because I recognized Jeanne Ray’s name from her pretty delightful novel Julie and Romeo, a rare romance about middle-aged lovers. (Is there a name for this, as a trope? Please don’t it be “elder romance” or something like that!) It reads quickly and I found it both enjoyable and (sorry) relatable–and sometimes even touching, as when Clover suggests that her exhausted paediatrician husband doesn’t notice her invisibility because “he knows me so well [that] he sees me even when I’m not there.” “That is a very beautiful thought,” says her interlocutor, “but I do not believe it is true.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but it captures Ray’s care not to make her feminist critique too one-sided or unforgiving, as does the shock and penitence thoughtless husbands and children show when they realize that (to adapt Sherlock Holmes’s famous quip) they have been seeing, but not observing.