Read React Review

One review, written by three different parts of my personality:

1. A random fiction reader

2. A romance genre junkie

3. A (female) philosophy professor

1. General review

GGMEP, debut novel of British folk singer Charlotte Greig (published in 2007 in the UK and just published in the US by Other Press) is the story of a few months in the life of Susannah Jones, a Welsh philosophy student at Sussex University in the mid 1970s (Greig herself was a philosophy student in the 1970s at Sussex). Susannah has been living with Jason, a 30 year old antiques dealer, but their relationship has problems: Jason is often away in London, and he’s not very attentive. She meets Rob, a fellow philosophy student, and they begin an affair. Rob’s youthful idealism (he’s anti-bourgeois and active in various political causes), and student poverty are contrasted with Jason’s maturity, practicality (he’s a business owner), and urbanity (he takes to Susannah to trendy clubs in London).

Along with the love triangle, which Susannah’s two friends, one a practical-minded feminist, the other a romantic, help her to hash out, Susannah is dealing with the sudden death of her father a year prior, and her growing love of philosophy (her thesis deadline looms). Several chapters begin with Susannah’s bad dreams, which are unfortunately not very well integrated into the text, although they do serve to display the reactions, and thus characters, of her two lovers.

Susannah attempts to use philosophy to deal with the problems in her life.  Throughout the text, quotations from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard are sprinkled. If one is not familiar with these philosophers, no sense will be made of them whatsoever, but they can be skipped for the most part without doing any damage to the story.

The setting was done very well. There was a lot of description of Susannah’s daily life, and if one is not interested in what it was like to be a college student in the 1970s, inclusive of hair and clothing, chain smoking, partying and clubbing, train riding, and tutorial attending (Feyerabend visits campus in one memorable scene), this book will leave a lot to be desired. Susannah has a lot of troubling dreams, reads a lot of philosophy, and is generally observant and introspective (although unreliable as a narrator), giving the book overall a somber dreamlike quality.

Susannah herself is written in an age appropriate way: she is immature and impulsive, she makes bad decisions, and she is fairly passive with respect to events in her life. As a result, she becomes pregnant, and she doesn’t know who the father is. Susannah has to balance many different issues in deciding what to do about her pregnancy. She looks to her lovers, her friends (one a feminist who compares the pregnancy to having a tooth out), her philosophy tutor, and her favorite philosophers for answers.

Susannah’s ambivalence between the two men, and later her pregnancy, are both personal and, occurring as they do in the context of the women’s liberation movement, in some sense political.  For example, Susannah decries the fact that Jason has taken “complete control of their relationship”, yet at the same times finds it a “relief.”  Yet, except for the one friend who serves as feminism’s mouthpiece, little of Susannah’s introspection is political. She doesn’t consider why birth control was her responsibility alone, why men are free to decide for themselves to own up to an unwanted pregnancy or not, why she would be subject to ridicule in her small Welsh hometown while the father would not, etc.

The blurbs describe this book as a “romp”. It is not. Pensive and melancholy are the words I would choose. This is a characteristic Susannah observation:

He got us back in the car and drove us over to a trendy café that served these great American hamburgers. It was a bit like Brown’s in Brighton. In both of them, they had the best looking waitresses I’d ever seen, the kind of girls with incredibly long legs that you’d imagine would be film stars, not waitresses. I watched them, mesmerized by their glamour as they glided around the room from table to table, bending from the knees as they served the customers, their faces impassive. It was depressing, really, and made me feel that life was impossible.

The cover blurbs and description of this book are terribly misleading. This is not chick lit. It is not romance. It is not philosophy.  This book is a period coming-of-age story with a serious dramatic issue at the center of it. I enjoyed reading it.

2. Romance review (spoilers)

I find it remarkable that this book was offered to a romance review site by Other Press. Not only is this not a romance, but this book is as far from a romance as a book dealing with women, sex, and love can possibly get.

As readers of this blog know, the paradigmatic features of a romance novel are that (1) it revolves around a central love story, and (2) it has an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending, which means, in practice, that the book ends with the couple together and in unconditional love. Regular readers of romance know that as the genre grows and diversifies, more authors do stray farther from the paradigm. However, there are lines that cannot be crossed by any book that wants to call itself a “romance”.

Both Jason and Rob turn out to be incapable of unconditionally loving Susannah. Jason is a gay man in the closet and in denial, and has been having an affair since his public school days with his best friend Bear (the reader figures this out early on. It takes Susannah a while. I thought her cluelessness was believable). And Rob talks a big game about love, but is not there for Susannah when she really needs him to be. Susannah ends up alone.

Although not part of the official definition of romance, fantastic consequence-free sex are also the hallmarks of the romance novel.  The realistic portrayal of the unsatisfying sex Susannah has with her gay boyfriend and virgin lover, and the realistic portrayal of the possible negative consequences of sex (unintended pregnancy) are very far from most romances.

In fairness, the promotional material for the book does not describe it as a romance, but rather as  “intelligent chick lit” . I don’t have much experience with chick lit, but my impression is that the tone of chick lit is much lighter than the tone of GGTMEP.

3. Philosophy Review

It is my general policy not to accept free books for review, but I made an exception in this case because I thought I may be able to use GGTMEP in one of my courses (it’s common practice to receive free “examination copies” for this purpose). The blurb claims that this book “succeeds where many introductions to philosophy have failed, by effortlessly bringing to life the central tenets of the most important philosophers of modern times.”

I have to disagree with this claim. I cannot imagine any reader actually learning about the central concerns and methods of the discipline by reading this book. Quotations are introduced without context, and things get worse when Susannah attempts to explain them. Philosophers, especially the ones Susannah is reading, tend to build worlds, complete with their own terminology. They are also always engaged in a very long conversation which began around 400 BCE. To understand any given text, it’s ideal to read not only something of the philosopher’s other writings, but something of the philosophers with whom he is engaged.

What often happens when people try to use philosophers (and Nietzsche is a prime victim of this tendency) as a kind of contemporary self-help manual is that they sound ridiculous, or, worse, banal. For example, to say that when Nietzsche refers to an “unsuspected pregnancy” in Human, All Too Human, he is saying something that might be helpful to a young woman with an actual unintended pregnancy, is hard for me to believe. In fact, Nietzsche is talking about a nascent form of what he will later call the “higher man”. (I talked about this concept in another post which I labeled “silly”, because it is. Very silly.). Suffice it to say that while Beethoven and Goethe were prime example of the higher man (creativity being a hallmark), Susannah shows no signs whatsoever of being anything other than a regular gal.

Another example is Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. For Susannah, the leap of faith becomes the moment when she has to decide whether to have an abortion. I can see some connections between Susannah’s dawning realization that she is all alone in her decision and existentialism (I can also see connections to feminist ethics. For her influential study on women’s moral reasoning, Carol Gilligan interviewed women with unexpected pregnancies precisely because they could not escape making a decision and bearing responsibility for it). But to equate that secular, ethical decision with Kierkegaard’s leap of faith — a Christian concept — would be to badly misunderstand Kierkegaard.

I think it would be very hard to write a book that succeeds as a novel and at the same time as an intro to philosophy. Sophie’s World succeeds much better as the latter, and GGTMEP succeeds better as the former.

For me, the way to understand the role of philosophy in GGTMEP is akin to the way I understand the role of the descriptions of glass blowing in Nora Roberts’s Born in Fire. I don’t expect to know how to do glass blowing after reading that book, but I learned enough about the art to have a better understanding of the heroine’s character and motivations. It served the story.

I want to give credit to Greig for writing about a female philosophy student in a way that resonated with me as both a former undergraduate student of philosophy and as a current teacher of philosophy to undergrads. The tendency to think Nietzsche is talking about you when he writes of the “higher beings” who scorn the conforming masses in their struggle to greatness is very common, as is the urge to take passages out of context and apply them to one’s own life. Embarking seriously on the study of philosophy, even as an undergraduate, is just not like studying other fields, such as engineering or history. It’s more like adopting a lifeway than a course of study, and Grieg got this right. Susannah often felt “weird, disconnected” and that’s very true to serious philosophy undergraduates, and especially true of women in philosophy. I think the ways that Susannah tries to make philosophy work for her served the story, and the failures are representative not just of the size of the challenge Greig set for herself, but endemic to the discipline.

The struggle to adapt traditional philosophy to the concerns of women, or to create new philosophies from the point of view of women’s experiences, too often ends in frustration (philosophy is the least representative of women in the humanities, with 27% PhDs and 21% faculty). And racial diversity? Fuggedabout it. I conclude with a quote from Sally Haslanger’s Hypatia article of last year:

My point here is that I don’t think we need to scratch our heads and wonder what on earth is going on that keeps women out of philosophy. In my experience it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isn’t actively hostile towards women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act like a (traditional, white) man. And most women and minorities who are sufficiently qualified to get into grad school in philosophy have choices. They don’t have to put up with this mistreatment. Many who recognize that something about choices is relevant have explained to me that women choose not to go into philosophy because they have other options that pay better or have more prestige. This may be true for some, but this doesn’t sound like the women I know who have quit philosophy (and it sounds a lot more like the men I know who have quit). Women, I believe, want a good working environment with mutual respect. And philosophy, mostly, doesn’t offer that.

Other reviews of this book:

Bookopolis, 4 stars

Books I Done Read, negatory

Harriet Devine, positive

The Independent, mixed

Grace’s Book Blog, 5 stars

RhiReading Blog, 4 stars

Interview with Greig in the Philosopher’s Magazine

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