The Golden Notebook -- Buddy Read

[Pink]

Just thought I'd comment and say that I've finally started reading the book. I'm only about 100 pages in, so halfway through the first notebook chapter, having been introduced to Willi, Paul, Jimmy and Ted. I'm absolutely loving it, though taking it quite slowly as I'm trying to digest everything I read.

[Katy, Quarterly Long Reads]

Pink wrote: "Just thought I'd comment and say that I've finally started reading the book. I'm only about 100 pages in, so halfway through the first notebook chapter, having been introduced to Willi, Paul, Jimmy..."

Oh I don't feel quite so bad that I haven't even started this one now. Maybe I'll still pick it up and read -- I really do want to -- things have just been busy.

[Pink]

Same here Kathy. I considered sidelining this completely until next year, but I decided to squeeze it in before I start on next month's reads and I'm so glad that I did. I'll post again when I've read some more :)

[Kathleen]

Pink wrote: "Same here Kathy. I considered sidelining this completely until next year, but I decided to squeeze it in before I start on next month's reads and I'm so glad that I did. I'll post again when I've r..."

Yay! Very happy to hear you're enjoying this, and look forward to your thoughts as you go.

[Nathan]

I had mixed feelings about this book. The writing style and story structure were definitely five-star. Lessing was very talented.

The content was one or two star for me. I couldn't get past the homophobia. She goes out of her way to portray gay men as misogynists who are repulsed by women. They are presented as pretty much monolithic. It's certainly true that there are a lot of gay men who are misogynists, but there are a lot who are feminists too. She paints one group with such broad, sloppy strokes that it really made me wonder how much value there was in her observations about straight men or straight women.

A friend pointed out that maybe it's just the character who is homophobic. Maybe that was Lessing's intent, but when she creates a character who is a writer who in turn creates a character based on herself, the whole argument falls apart for me. I can't sort what is Lessing's thought from what is Anna's or Ella's. It's all muddied.

Beyond the homophobia issue, I felt like the content was dated. I'm sure it was shocking and revolutionary when it was first published. Even as recently as 15-20 years ago, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Reading it now, I felt like it strongly supported the idea of gender-dichotomy. I think that idea is on its way out, after all, Facebook has 56 gender options now. I'm glad that way of thinking is going because it forces most people into ill-fitting boxes. It's sad to make people feel that if they act like their true selves they will always fall short of being what a man or a woman is supposed to be.

At one point, The Golden Notebook probably struck a previously-unplucked chord for many readers and illuminated a visceral truth. I think as time goes on, its value will become increasingly academic and historical. I'm still glad I read it though.

[Kathleen]

So glad you expanded on your thoughts here Nathan. I agree with you about the homophobia, and whether it was Anna’s or Ella’s or Doris’ doesn’t really matter—it had the same effect of making me distrust the perceptions expressed. I had that feeling of distrust throughout the book, because in addition to the homophobia it did definitely seem dated and I found the characters really shallow most of the time.

I think for me it was all about … I don’t know what to call it, but the constructing them and then deconstructing them or something. Not just the structure of the book, but how that process impacted me as a reader was really different and made me look at people and relationships from a different angle. Not because of what was said (which was often annoying or offensive or just plain boring), but because of the way it was done I guess.

[Pink]

Thanks for posting your thoughts Nathan, I noticed that you'd rated it 2 stars and read your review, as I was interested in what aspects you didn't like. Homophobia elements are never great to read about and both this and the gender relationships do seem dated, but then again they're very of their time when homosexuality was still illegal and there was little gender equality. I've read exactly the same sort of attitudes in other writers of the day, especially from the English middle to upper classes, so while I don't agree with them, it's not surprising to read. This is also a very specific look at a specific time, dealing with the rich but shallow upper classes, race relations in Africa and communism throughout the world, which again all seems quite dated today. This doesn't really bother me, I don't think Lessing was backward in her thinking of these issues at the time, if anything she was more progressive and outspoken, which is why she was banned from visiting South Africa and Zimbabwe for speaking out about apartheid and kept under surveillance for decades by MI5 for her communist connections. It seems like a different time and more than a little 1984 surveillance worthy. I liked this newspaper excerpt about a 1956 police report -

Her downstairs neighbour "Erich George Kuehne, or Kuhne", described as a “very anti-Communist” Czech, told Sgt G Walker of Special Branch about Lessing’s movements “in connection with his wife’s application for a certificate of naturalisation”.
The memo described how Lessing had been visited by “Americans, Indians, Chinese and Negroes”, and “it is possible that the flat is being used for immoral purposes”.
Sgt Walker adds: “Kensington CID have been informed about the alleged immoral practices in Lessing’s flat and arrangements will be made by them to have the premises kept under observation.”

I think a lot of the elements in the book are taken from Lessing's real life, certain characters are based on people she knows, Anna definitely has similarities to Lessing herself. I would imagine she's writing about communist party gatherings and ideas from her experience as well. So I think the lines are somewhat blurred between truth and fiction, which seems to have happened a lot in older classics, with characters blatantly based on real life people, who we don't often recognise anymore.

I have a lot more to read yet, so I'll have to wait and see if her attitudes start to grate on me.

[Pink]

I finished a few days ago and overall I still loved it. I really enjoyed Lessing's writing throughout and liked the different sections, Free Women, the notebooks on Africa, Ella and Paul, the communist parts. I can see why people pigeon holed this as a feminist book, but I can also see why Lessing was a bit miffed over this, as it reads much more clearly as a novel about a mental breakdown. I thought she also achieved her goal of writing a book that captured the time period, cold war era, with people turning away from communism as they had a very real fear for their lives and the future.

If I'm honest, I really wasn't so keen on the last three chapters, where Saul comes into the story, including The Golden Notebook, but I can see how she needed another character for Anna to feed off in her mental breakdown.

I thought the elements of sex and affairs, was just the flip side of what I'm used to reading from the male perspective in novels in the early 20th century, when everyone seems to have a mistress and use prostitutes and nobody thinks twice about this behaviour. The homophobia felt very reminiscent of it's time too, portraying gay men as a certain type of effeminate Oxford student and not 'real men' at all. Although her comments about them didn't seem nearly as disparaging as other English writers from this period, who were much more critical in their views. I doubt that Lessing thought she was saying anything wrong at the time, though it feels wrong today.

If anyone enjoyed the sections on Africa I'd highly recommend The Grass is Singing if you haven't already read it.

[Kathleen]

I enjoyed and agree with your thoughts on this Pink. I felt the same about the last chapters--they seemed a little forced or contrived compared to the rest.

The Africa parts were my favorite, so I really look forward to reading The Grass is Singing!

[Jon]

Nathan wrote: "I couldn't get past the homophobia. She goes out of her way to portray gay men as misogynists who are repulsed by women. They are presented as pretty much monolithic..."

I would strongly disagree with this reading. Unsympathetic gay characters don't make for a homophobic book. Especially when everyone else in the book is of an unpleasant sort. And even a homophobic, racist, or classist text can still be a pleasure to read (though not uncomplicated pleasure one would hope).*

The three gay men, even if two conform to stereotypes in some way (the lovesick young man who fancies a hetter, the effeminate nancy boy – the older guy in the couple I don't remember being particularly stereotypical?), they felt three dimensional within their roles. Unpleasant for sure, but rounded.

I certainly didn't feel they were meant to be in some way representative of gaykind. Any more than Anna stands in for women, or communists, or ex-pats, or the mentally ill. Though she is categorised as all these things, and all these things push her behaviour in certain ways.

Nor is Anna's homophobia a simple thing. She feels ashamed of it, and recognises it as a cultural artefact (if I remember correctly). I didn't feel the book expected us to sympathise with it certainly.

As it happens, I suspect Doris Lessing didn't share Anna's views. But I definitely didn't feel like the book expected me to.

Nathan wrote: "...Reading it now, I felt like it strongly supported the idea of gender-dichotomy. I think that idea is on its way out, after all, Facebook has 56 gender options now. I'm glad that way of thinking is going because it forces most people into ill-fitting boxes..."

As for gender dichotomies, the book is about the damage done by breaking things down, sorting them by category; and about people who are seen as interchangeable because they are superficially similar. About forcing people who are forced into, exactly as you put it, ill fitting boxes.

While the book doesn't offer any real alternative to the little wife and the adulterous husband, I didn't feel like it was an endorsement of the society that breeds those roles. By the end, Anna is so beaten she just wants to live a 'normal' life with a husband and regrets all her Free Woman-ing around.

While that could feel like an pro-traditional role ending, to me it felt like a tragic one, she's been ground up and boxed in. Healed somewhat but reduced. She lacks options. It reminded me of the Pink Floyd line: 'Living lives of quiet desperation is the English way.'

I feel like I may have rambled quite a bit there. But hopefully there is a cogent argument in there somewhere.

*I am not unsympathetic to the position of anger at an artworks politics (sexual or otherwise). For example I recently spent a lot of breathe cussing out Jane Eyre's attitude towards the mentally ill woman to a friend. But when I calmed down, I realised that the angry response to the characters in that book just makes my response more complex. Art is allowed to feed you horrible characters, politics, attitudes and morals, and it can sit there and expect you to get on with them for 600+ pages. It's just a different, more difficult, and more complex sort of feeling. But feeling is the point of art, no?

[Nathan]

Jon wrote: "I would strongly disagree with this reading. Unsympathetic gay characters don't make for a homophobic book. Especially when everyone else in the book is of an unpleasant sort. And even a homophobic, racist, or classist text can still be a pleasure to read (though not uncomplicated pleasure one would hope)."

Of course unsympathetic gay characters don't make for a homophobic book. That's not the issue I had with this. For me, the gay male misogynists and Anna/Lessing's view of them didn't fit into the story very well at all. I didn't understand why they were there and why Anna/Lessing was repeatedly so nasty about them. It felt gratuitous. I don't know, maybe she felt she had to put something about homosexuality in the book because so much of it is about sex, sexuality and gender? Whatever her reasoning, it came off as terse and clumsily-handled. It didn't make me angry. I just found it baffling and disappointing, I felt left adrift as to how to take anything from the novel. It cast a sour shadow over the whole thing and diminished my enjoyment of it. Had the homophobia not been there, I may have given this book four or five stars (as goodreads rating system is based on how much you like something rather than how well written it is).

I don't mean to denigrate The Golden Notebook's literary merit at all. I think Pink is right when she says Lessing captures a very specific time and place with this story. That time is already starting to feel alien compared to the present. I think in 50-100 years readers will take away something very different from it than readers in 2016 (which is already very different than what some reading it in the 1960s would've gotten from it). Nothing about this book had a "timeless classic" feel to it, except for the storytelling structure.

Most everyone I know who's read this rates it four or five stars. That's great. I'm glad so many people enjoy it. Still, I'm comfortable enough with myself as a reader to say this really was a two star read for me.

[Pink]

I think it's great that we can all have different responses to a book. Nothing wrong with that and it's nice that we can express what worked or didn't work for us. Another one of my groups read this a couple of years ago and they mostly didn't like it, so you're not alone in your feelings.