(book) the lesser bohemians, eimear mcbride

[mirrorwitches]

tumblr might be dying for real this time! or not. to deal with my anxiety about losing the only fandom space/social media that has ever really worked for me, i started to think about how i could use dreamwidth to fill the hole it will leave, should this demise prove true. so i am going to try to gather together my thoughts about two novels i read recently, by collecting together my tumblr posts on them and trying to turn it into dreamwidth posts…

the lesser bohemians is a novel by irish writer eimear mcbride. i had a remarkable experience with this book (and its sequel which might be a different post). they have some incredibly specific and weird concerns i have tried to do in my writing in the last couple of years, so specific and weird i haven’t encountered anything that is preoccupied with them in exact combination. it felt like it was in conversation with my fanfiction, or reading my fanfiction back to me. providing a reading i never got from any reader itself, almost. those concerns are, roughly: 1) the structural demands of disclosure of childhood sexual abuse 2) age gap relationships as a way to turn up the dial on certain themes of dependency and need inherent in all bonds of love 3) unsettling substitutions for various emotional deprivations that mix the familial and the sexual (in this case, a daughterless father falling in love with a fatherless daughter the same age as his lost daughter).

i really think all writers of romantic fanfiction should read these books. they are doing simply incredible things with the question of how to write people falling in love as thrilling as falling in love can actually be (and in the second with creating tension within established relationships). like formally and linguistically dazzling but all in service of people falling in love and fucking like so much fucking half this book is sex and having emotional problems from their bad childhoods. my response to this heir to joycean experimental prose is i want to take it apart and put it back together to figure out how to do exactly this, in my fanfiction. under the cut i am going to try to bring together the more scattered form of the tumblr post to get at in the dauntingly more finished form of the dreamwidth post what i liked so much about it. a fittingly experimental attempt at a review, if you will.

• pursuant to concern 1, the lesser bohemians has like this part in the middle of the book where the action such as it is suddenly grinds to a halt so the male main character gives a like 70 page account of his past of incestuous rape abuse and addiction. and reviewers lamented it as an error but it rules. and it’s a moment after this where we learn the protagonist’s name for the first time. we get his life story, but her name (his doesn’t come till nearly the end of the novel). she thinks it’s possible maybe to grow up in a night, and she’s right: despite her own similar traumatic past it is the courage of not flinching from an encounter with another person’s pain that consecrates her as an adult. “can i grow up in a night?” she asks.

“Covering his face then, he suddenly goes down. What’s wrong? He sinks further so I stroke his arm. I’m just a bit down tonight, he says Tomorrow I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine again but tonight            is pretty hard. And I can’t bear this. I hate it. The desolation in him, spread out across this filthy room. My part in it. His own. Let me stay with you, I say. He shakes his head I couldn’t do that. Just as your friend, just for tonight and we won’t talk about what happened. I won’t try to change your mind. I’ll leave first thing and        if you let me stay with you            Stephen I promise I will let you go. But if you stay Eil, how will I ever get rid of this? he says. Rid of what? I ask. All this fucking love, and at this his voice goes out from under and tears start falling down. Quick he heels them off but there’s only more so he hides behind his hands to damp their noise. Then tries to sit himself up and be right. But he cannot yet. And I’ve never seen him cry. He looks so young in it. I can almost see the child he was with the busted lip and not knowing there would be worse. Or that half-destroyed boy, two years younger than me. Or the young man with his daughter on his knee not realising how short that time would be. All here in this man who tried to offer me the very best he had. I climb onto the bed and wrap my arms around him. Oh Stephen, oh my love, and he lets me take him. Awkwardly we hold onto each other then, tight. His skin and bones showing the other side of love we’ve arrived at. Not hate. I see it now, and so clearly tonight, that the opposite of love is despair.”

• the first time in the novel she acts as the adult he has helped make her, does a very hard adult thing.

”Out into the cold sun of morning. I am tired but I am still. That shake of losing him settling itself, becoming what it is. I do not rebel. I have given love its due. Put kindness where it should be. Now we may part in this good memory. I hope he will be happy, that today will not be bad. But now my own clock ticks and turns inside. Go on. Get on. Let your own Juliet in.”

• i have given love its due ! this is what made the end of this novel work and so incredibly romantic to me. things could end, and she would be fine - she is 18, and her whole life is in front of her, and she has been changed by him only for the better. and yet! more and more and more. the ecstasy of choosing someone for the sheer luxury of making the choice.

“And he checks my eyes. And I check his. I do not cry. I would not do that to him. That much I know for sure.”

• this was my favorite part of the confession…when he’s telling his life story which is so awful and she knows the responsibility she has by him is not to cry, even as she was a hearing someone she loves tell her how he was beaten and raped as a child - the fact that “feeling bad” about someone else’s violation, which is supposedly a mark of morality, so we all have to perform how disgusted and horrified we are by abuse all the time, can actually itself be cruel and selfish.
• the lesser bohemians is interesting after reading a little life - and they came out within a couple of years of each other. they are both of a genre one might call “trauma fantasies.” for example they both stage the fantasy of telling every horrible disgusting shameful thing that happened to you the person you are in love with and being met with nothing but love, the perfect response. but in a little life the reader doesn’t hear what jude tells willem in the closet - we’ve gotten his backstory separate from that. in this novel the unnamed protagonist hears the story of her unnamed lover’s wretched life and it’s the first time we the reader are getting it. and interestingly it’s the first time we get the protagonist’s name in the novel. like it’s her own baptism. a goodreads review referred to it as “rochesterian” which is true and an interesting lineage. i don’t really have a point beyond how weirdly comforting i find exactly such a fantasy and how i find it fascinating this exact move seems to enrage others. and a little life denies one part of the fantasy while enacting it. i have staged variations of this in fic at least on a structural level (in that emotional weight centers on a belated revelation of traumatic history) if never in quite as straightforward a form as these acts of narration.
• on a podcast where she listed five influential books, she named anne rice’s interview with the vampire because this idea of someone sitting in a room telling the story of their life is something she’s always worked through in her fiction.
• for me the biggest literary intertext was maybe jane eyre (one of the only other convincing love stories ever), although who knows how intentional that was - but the relationships involve the exact same age gap (20 years, her 18 to his 38) and both novels contain the male protagonist confessing his biography, containing their own transgressions and wrongdoings against women, about midway through. rochester’s confession prompts jane’s flight; stephen’s is the thing that seals eily’s fall into love and commitment. rochester’s is prompted by duress after he tried to bind jane to him under false pretenses, while stephen’s is voluntary disclosure out of a sense he cannot let eily bind herself to him with partial knowledge. and they are both among the best evocations of the interiority of first love/sexual awakening and love as inseparable from a new knowledge of oneself as a sexual being. and both ground that love in an obsession with an older man’s superior experience - rochester offers jane a glimpse of the bounds of an experience she can never access for reasons of gender and class, and stephen is for eily is entrancing as a sort of dark mirror of the depths of how a past can work itself out into the future. (although the difference between the early 19th century and 90s london is that eily is really as much of an agent of her present as stephen, with freedom to make his same mistakes - as shown by her very similar experiences of sexual compulsion as self-harm - and accomplish similar achievements - she does not have to live vicariously through him in the same way, but, well as the second novel is about: it turns out she’s a writer, not an actress like he is an actor. and he tells her a horrifying story of himself, and its this act of making a story of his own life for her and as strange gift to her, a story he could only tell because he has fallen in love with her, that is inseparable from her falling in love for the first time). both depend on differences in age as key to erotic and romantic appeal, because more years give more life, and so for young women an access to another, greater life as part of the spell cast. 
• as this post points out, one of the most interesting things about a little life is the relation of form to the question of telling a life. this novel is quite different but pulls a related trick. for example throughout the course of the novel we get an incredible amount of honesty from stephen about his relationship with his mother in terms of what she did to him. and you think you are getting complete honesty about his feelings about her as a result of that violence - he hated her and is glad she is dead. then at the very end of the novel stephen tells eily about a meeting he’s just had with his ex marianne where she recounts how years ago she heard his traumatic history from his stepfather. and then you get this:

“When I heard that story I was appalled, Marianne said And all I could think of was the night in the hospital when I told you your mother was dead. I don’t remember, what about it? I said. She said Stephen, as soon as I told you, you started to cry and you cried a long time for her. Of course I saw nothing strange in it then but later when I knew      I wondered what it meant. Because I still wanted to be with you though, I chose to forget. I never called your stepfather again.”

• then the last mention of his mother you get in the novel is this with eily:

“In the close night I wake alone in bed but, across “the dark, he is at his desk. Streetlight filleting the bones in his back. Cigarette, of course. So I get up and go put my arms around him. What are you doing, my love? Just thinking, he says And looking at this picture of my mother again. I can just about remember her looking like this. Who could’ve imagined what would come next? Or guessed the girl in this photograph would starve herself to death? Or that on hearing it all I’d be able to think of was        how much I loved her      when I was a little boy. In our quiet warm world we think on that. Then he drops the photo. Stubs out his cigarette. Says Come on, and takes me back to bed.”

• he can only be honest after being told this thing he can’t even remember - because he was heavily medicated in a hospital bed - that he only could weep when he heard his mother was dead. the layers that must be unfolded for any knowledge, that it requires both being observed and narrated and self-narration to others…
• one of the only convincing love stories in contemporary litfic i think because like genuinely these people should probably not get together. they are allowed to truly treat each other badly and for that to not be disqualifying but merely a thing that happens in most real human connection and it’s thrilling. BUT LOVE REALLY IS LOVE! also it’s refreshing to have a book that isn’t like neurotically ashamed of its own heterosexuality/from the point of view of a woman who genuinely desires men…this sounds like smith college problems but you read enough mid contemporary lit where a straight woman is obsessed with men but also deeply repelled by them and you get fed up. lezz out then. i’m not talking about lamenting men’s perfidy which is fine. but i mean the stuff where it’s the pov of a woman who clearly thinks men’s bodies are disgusting and the sex is bad. and you have to read 300 pages of iowa writer’s workshop prose about it. leave the REAL man lovers to their torments! like this girl who is really suffering for how much she wants to suck this middle aged man off.
• one thing i found electrifying about this novel is i feel like contemporary litfic is just scared to let mostly “normal” people (as opposed to characters figured as pathological so we can gawk at their “transgressive” construction, which is often falsely counted as radical acceptance of the darkness of the human condition) behave truly badly. reddit aita brain has infected everything. the reaction to any interpersonal conflict of any real weight is “you should dump them/cut them off” and any assertion of love or attachment contrary to that means you are a dumb pitiable sucker. this is simply not how human life works, and is thus really boring. but it means you can palpably SENSE the lines not being crossed, so no one ever has to forgive the unforgivable even though - it happens. sometimes people do give others second chances because the attempt matters, or there is still something more to be gained from a relation you can’t yet quit, or there are joyous compensations for the negatives, or something good might in fact lie on the other side of it, that it is rare but people can be changed.
• another related thing that was refreshing to me was the approach to sex all around…even though stephen does have this past of like hypersexuality - the term “sex addiction” is not used but it is a compulsion that replaces a void left by drug addiction, and i don’t know if “sex addiction” as popularly conceived is real but i do think you can use just about anything to ruin your life - it’s also just that he’s a person who clearly really enjoys sex. like the book ultimately both has space for how it can destructive and how it can be central to life and beautiful too and it is crazy what a regressive moment we’re in where that somehow feels rare even with just like hetero fucking. and i hate it. sex can both be very very bad and very very good and this is a novel that has space for both comfortably side-by-side. and even though the good sex is happening in the context of a relationship that is going to be monogamous it really doesn’t come off as being saved from promiscuity by coupledom for a couple reasons. like…
• his relationship with his one long term relationship with a guy is fascinating. he’s like situationally bisexual in that he’ll fuck guys and enjoy it but describes himself as not into men like he is women. important representation of a type of man that definitely exists but no one realizes exists which is “straight man that fucks men.” one of my favorite sexualities. and this relationship was with a like older theater director (in his 50s to his 20s) who got him clean and gave him his breakthrough role and then like they had a sexual relationship that he phrases as like, i was grateful to him and he was giving me a place to live and he was in love with me so i was happy to have sex with him. and this is portrayed as a positive and moving relationship and the dude becomes his like replacement family. usually the idea you might have sex for reasons that are not pure lust or love and it not be traumatizing is like. treated as impossible even though it happens all the time. another novel would treat this as straightforwardly exploitative with no room for how a specific individual might experience it differently. again refreshing and made me contemplate how deranged the sexual politics of most contemp litfic is these days.
• i just appreciated the honesty about how people even in mostly loving or ultimately positive relationships don’t always have sex “healthily” and sometimes use it to satisfy complex and thorny emotional needs but also like it’s mostly fine. it’s fine if sex is occasionally a coping mechanism or whatever and that can exist alongside sex as pleasure connection intimacy etc, it doesn’t kill the possibility of those other meanings. it’s not sacred. you have two people who take turns occasionally using the other’s body for emotional relief and this is just a thing that happens without the need for hysterical moralizing.