Siri Hustvedt’s novel ends with "me." That’s the last word, as in ". . . began to read to me." Uh, oh, I thought, that’s not good. Since I finished it a few days and have been thinking about it, that sense of disappointment has overtaken many of the pleasures and delights I had while I was reading the book. That’s not good either. Now there is a character in the book who has a nickname that is "Me," so that last word is yet another clever turn in a book full of neat turns and counterbalances. But as I think it over I’m more sure that the last twenty or so pages are where my disappointment became more clear. The story is pretty much over, the plots have been tied up, the characters gotten what they deserved and now we have in effect a coda in which the narrator tells us what has happened to him and what he has to show for having lost everyone and pondered all that he has loved and lost and it is therein that I want him to shut up and let the story be and not tell us anymore about himself. It is disappointing because I’ve enjoyed so much in the book—the insider portrait of the New York art world in the 80s, the tangle of two couples working out their lives and loves together as intellectual and artistic New Yorkers with gifted children, the two friends who the back cover blurb were the reputed center of the story but finally didn’t really seem to have been, the portraits of the good artist and the bad artist, an interesting thesis about eating disorders and the zeitgeist worked out by the character who writes a book about it, the ways the thesis is mirrored and counter-mirrored by some characters, and perhaps most of all the fascinating character of the young son, Mark, who is a kind of Melvillean confidence man, a constantly changing cypher-character who is the bad guy, or the dupe of the bad guy, a mirror shifter, diseased, drug taking, lying victim-perpetrator, the most interesting center of the book who is allowed to drift off at the end without clear resolution or sympathy. Instead we have the ruminations of the older and wiser good-guy narrator, and it is a repeat of Milton’s wager and it doesn’t wash. We wish we could have more time with the missing bad son and less time with the long-suffering and very good uncle. The uncle is Leo the art historian and he is best friends with Bill, the real artist. But that never really washes either. For pages and pages I would say quietly, wow, this is so good. But then there would be pages when I would sub-consciously pinch myself and say, wow, this is really good, for a woman writer who is portraying both a male narrator and the friendship between two men and that is the central question of the book. We should make a list, write a book, about the novels by women in which the friendship between two men is the key question, the central relationship portrayed. Are there any great novels that belong to this list, category? Comment if you’ve read this far. Pat Berker’s trilogy about men healing from WWI does come to mind as one good example. The friendship between Leo and Bill never quite convinces this reader, another disappointment and one that makes Leo’s survivor meditations at the end seem all the more smug and self-centered without having been truly earned or comprehended. The women in the story are vibrant at times, but not vibrant enough. Violet is so important, yet I could never really see her, never really feel her presence or irritable power and delight. Mark is the most alive character, and so the novel comes across as a concerned tale about a mother’s anguish for her son. Leo’s involvement with Mark, uncle to nephew, really feels more like mother to son, displaced perhaps, but not enough. There is so much intelligence in the book, so much intelligence in the observation of human difficulty, loss, tragedy, suffering, love, but the feeling by the end is that intelligence is not enough. Still, so much in the book does resonate, does ring true. The descriptions of surviving traumatic loss, death, for example.
During the year that followed . . . , I continually found myself at a loss–either. I didn’t know what I was seeing or I didn’t know how to read what I saw. Those experiences have left their traces in me as a nearly perpetual disquiet. Although there are times when it vanishes altogether, usually I can feel it, lurking beneath the ordinary activities of my day–an inner shadow cast by the memory of having been completely lost. (254)
What I Loved has so much that is right, like this passage, that I hope my complaints about it do not obscure the fact that my memories of it are dominated not by its disappointments but by its riches.
