The Pumpkin Eater (New York Review Books Classics) in NYRB Classics

Mar 17, 2019 Juliana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2019/03/29... ...more

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Apr 04, 2022 Luke rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: antidote-think-twice-all, dubious, shorty-short, reality-check, r-goodreads, antidote-think-twice-read, nyrb-classic, r-2022, reviewed, 2-star

2.5/5

It's been a while since I read something like this, full replete of the sort of white women contentions that might have easily sidled in during the days I majorly concerned myself with the likes of Rhys and Plath and settled down to roost. Since then, I've both intensified my focus and widened my view, so while I don't mind a deep dive into the sort of text that writes out the content of my major depressive disordered brain more explicitly than does the usual, I have little time for pieces 2.5/5

It's been a while since I read something like this, full replete of the sort of white women contentions that might have easily sidled in during the days I majorly concerned myself with the likes of Rhys and Plath and settled down to roost. Since then, I've both intensified my focus and widened my view, so while I don't mind a deep dive into the sort of text that writes out the content of my major depressive disordered brain more explicitly than does the usual, I have little time for pieces which wallow rather than grasp, especially if the former is in any way needlessly hateful. So, the narrator of this text and Mortimer herself certainly had their share of issues, but the choices made in what was portrayed (gendered straitjackets, sitcom devolvings, snip snap nearly nonsensical branch overs through emotional time and space) and what wasn't (pedagogy, personality, anything indicating a believable evolution of sexual/emotional relationships before the fallout) was gratingly vacuous, especially with the couple of antiblack slurs thrown in. The text started pulling itself together near the end and became all the more credibly devastating as a result, but that wasn't enough to save it overall from a severely mismatched feeling of trying to be intensively interiorized without actually committing to the less smart aleck aspects of the interiorization. Not the most straightforward of descriptions, I know, but it's the best I got at the moment, and perhaps I'll be able to better explain it by the time this review is through.

Apparently there's an argument in a few small corners of the Internet (and perhaps some larger ones in academia) about whether this is a "feminist" text or not. I've spent so much time alongside such considerations that such a label means next to nothing for me, for if it isn't a case of something being included without any consideration for the broader kyriarchy, it's something being excluded for radfem reasonings, and I'd much rather someone put in the actual effort of laying out all their cards and letting individuals decide then slapping the latest trending Twitter tag on it and calling it a day. What that means that, if a reader finds this work a useful affirmation of their own experiences with gynophobia of various shades, all well and good. For a queer like me who finds the whole "true love at first sight/hop into bed at the slightest provocation/capable of loving without liking" laughable at best and fatuous otherwise, it was hard to commiserate with a narrator who seemed all but hellbent on inviting in every possible manner of dissociating from one's life/relationships/general efforts and then wondering why they were so miserable as a result. Emphasis on the "seemed" when it comes to both the narrator and the author having undergone sexual assault as children, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if laying this text alongside compassionate analyses of C-PTSD through a lens of amatonormativity and monogamy found a significant number of intersections. Combined with the limits on what was allowed in ye olde England of the 1960s without a masculine pen name, it's no surprise Mortimer's range on allowed topics was rather limited to anything more than a glancing understatement, but in this case, I'm not going to argue myself into liking something just because I've found an adequate theory of interpretation for it. So, if you can deal with the harder aspects of the aforementioned aspects plus forced abortions/sterilizations and the sort of flitting narrative scope seemingly more suited to Los Angeles than London, this certainly makes a statement. Whether such a statement can stand on its own today without much excuse and other forms of outside assistance is questionable.

I'd be curious to see how NYRB Classics handled their edition of this work. Lord knows they often choose their "underread" works based on the opinions of those who, for all their lack of public interface, still have enough social capital to have their extended family marked with the blue hyperlink on Wikipedia, and the fact that the writer of the introduction of their particular edition is described as concerned with her "battle with depression [and] unacknowledged complexities of growing up rich on Park Avenue" comes off as about right. So, another case of rich white woman problems clever enough to make its way into the more curious imprints and the occasional film award but so weirdly out of touch with most of the rest of us that its readerly longevity is far from the most assured. It's the sort of reading result where, I'd probably take up another of Mortimer's even more stringently lesser known works, especially if I stumbled across a VMC edition, but only out of curiosity to see whether these more buried works go further in pushing the buttons that I can see the most incipient appearances of in this text. Otherwise, I have my preferred writers when it comes to reading about these sorts of themes, and I'm not that desperate to have one aspect affirmed whilst the rest are steamrolled. ...more

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