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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Siri Hustvedt: What I Loved

14:07 / 20.10.04

Ok, in the spirit of let's-start-more-threads-to-keep-Barbelith-active, I'm starting a thread on the book I finished today. I remember reading a review of it when it was released last year (I think), and it had been in the back of my mind for ages and then Ariadne read it recently and I nabbed it off her.

I really enjoyed it. It's not the greatest book of all time, but was very engaging. The narrator Leo is an ageing art historian who is looking back over the last twenty years of his life, focusing on his friendship with Bill (an artist gradually achieving some success), and their marriages and children. There is a fair bit of discussion of themes in modern art and culture, which I enjoyed, and which was a productive sea of imagery on which to float the story. Successive phases in Bill's artistic career are analysed and slowly reveal relations to the lives of all of the main characters, and to the world that informs their ways of interacting with each other.

The book has an engaging narrative and believable characters who are both ordinary and interesting, and they provide a platform for the narrator to muse on late twentieth-century culture and its relations to the past and the effect it has on the modern mind. In this respect it bears some basic similarities to The Corrections, at least in terms of what that book was supposed to be, but in my opinion What I Loved has been executed far more deftly and has a lot more to say about late twentieth-century American culture than Franzen's over-hyped novel.

Negatives: it could probably have been pruned slightly, and Mark's story is perhaps given a bit more prominence than it deserved, and Leo's conversation with Violet right near the end was totally unneccesary.

I don't want to reveal any spoilers yet unless we get into a discussion, so I'll leave it here.

Anyone else read this and care to comment?

10:31 / 10.01.05

Minor spoilers throughout...

I enjoyed this a lot -it reminded me a great deal of some of the Iris Murdoch books I've read, in that the most important character is not the narrator or the character the book follows the most closely. For quite a lot of the book, Bill is not physically 'there', but there's always a sense of his presence and how far Leo is influenced by his work and him as a person. And, unlike most Iris Murdoch characters who fulfill a similar role, Bill was (I thought) actually likeable; whilst Violet complains about his being distant in the final conversation with Leo that's not the impression that's given throughout the book.

As for that conversation... what was said about Mark was interesting, but I equally think it could have fitted just as well into any other conversation in the book. Certainly, Leo's little confession to Violet didn't add anything to the story; it seemed rather out of character for him.

Negatives for me: the way Erica completely disappeared for the final fifty or so pages. Being told that she wasn't writing much any more would have been better than hearing nothing about her; her and Leo's relationship is basically ignored, and I think that some comment on the effect of what was happening with Mark on their communication would have been interesting.

Finally, what did you think of Teddy Giles as a character? Whilst I thought there was an element of 'These crazy kids! The clothes they wear!' about the way he was written, I was actually surprised by how convincingly sinister I found him -particularly in his and Leo's altercation outside the hotel room.

12:58 / 10.01.05

Teddy Giles really frightened me. And I kept wanting to shake off that whole part of the book - it seemed like a separate story, a very disconcerting one, weaving its way through the book I was enjoying.

13:32 / 10.01.05

I thought he was well done because you were never sure whether he was for real. After a point you figure Mark out and he ceases to surprise on his own, but with Teddy you never knew what would happen. Pleasantly disturbing.

I do think that this storyline may have gone on too long though, or if it was to be the principal story then maybe the rest of the book should've been clipped. That's the problem with a book of this length. The author gets in danger of wanting to tell everyone's story and the result is often that you lose the emotional centre.

10:54 / 13.01.05

Ariadne -glad it's not just me then! Throughout that post I was trying not to admit that that was about as disconcerted as I've been by a fictional character in my adult reading life...

After a point you figure Mark out and he ceases to surprise on his own, but with Teddy you never knew what would happen.

Yes -I liked the way that (kind of) tied up the themes that Violet looked at in her work -that Mark was like the hysterical, who would utterly absorb whatever was surrounding him, and that Teddy was personifying her ideas of 'mixing'. Which I found interesting, since so much of what was sinister about Teddy was the fact that he had no concept of boundaried between people.

Another wee thing I've just remebered liking was all the descriptions of Bill's art... it's something that could have been handled really clumsily, but Hustvedt managed to make his work sound good without saying too much about it.

15:35 / 13.01.05

yes! I loved all his art, really wished I could see it for real.

11:36 / 24.01.05

I just finished The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and to be honest it doesn't come close to What I Loved. In fact it's almost as though it was written by a different writer. It's quite short and is a bit of a pot-boiler about some mysterious goings-on in a small Minnesota town.

There are some similar themes. One of the main characters is an artist and there is some reference to the influence his art has on his life and the lives of those around him. Another main character has an ambiguous morality and is quite creepy, kind of like Mark and Teddy in What I Loved. It's just a short, entertaining but fairly shallow read. Not what I would have expected from the author of such a detailed and well-imagined novel as the longer work was.

14:43 / 12.02.05

It amazed me how quickly my opinion of what the book was about changed throughout the novel,the title "what I loved" took on a much more sinister meaning near the end.

23:49 / 22.09.05

Sorry to double post but 'lula's post in The Commonplace thread and another less obvious series of connections reminded me of this. I had been thinking about it back in Feb but had little time to post.
I unfortunately have niether book to hand and am unable to reference properly but how closely did Teddy Giles and his set remind everyone of the Michael Alig and his club kids? It's perhaps just the setting or inherent similarities between any cult of personality or even that I read both novels in the same week but Alig did seem the basis of Teddy to some extent in my mind at least.

[SPOILERS for both Party Monster and What I Loved?]

Down to the murder's specifics even the mutilated and de-limbed corpse was found floating in the Bronx? river sealed flimsily in a cardboard box. Even the air of disbelief regarding the actual murder, the questioning of whether it was just another avant-gardist publicity stunt/art piece by Alig/Giles. The only major difference being how they each group were portrayed, while in Disco Bloodbath immerses us in the clubkid scene with a frightening level of candor we are less exposed to Gile and his group (alway seen from Leo's somewhat alien position).
[/End Spoilers and post]
Any thoughts?

Daemon est Deus Inversus

16:33 / 17.02.06

No, I haven't read "What I Loved," but about a month ago, someone loaned me a copy of Siri Hustvedt's latest book, "A Plea for Eros" (New York: Henry Holt, January 2006). This is a series of essays (many autobiographical; dealing not only with her early life in Minnesotta but with the inner workings of her mind and memory) plus a long one on character disintegration in the work of Dickens (apparently part of her graduate thesis). There's another one on Fitzgerald. I found this interesting; particularly the thesis that "Gatsby" is an oddly immaterial book where Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson are the only flesh and blood characters. Some of the essays were totally idiosyncratic (an essay on a minor Hollywood actor called Franklin Pangborn which had nothing to do with Eros. Apparently, Mr. Pangborn always played an officious assistand manager in the 40s and 50s. A a few of the other pieces conform to the title); all were interesting and well written. She gave a reading of the book here in Miami a month ago along with her husband, Paul Auster, who just published a new novel, " The Brooklyn Follies" (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). This lived up to its billing as, "An exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man's accidental redemption." In fact, it lived up to its promise so well that afterwards, though I enjoyed the book, I ran to the escapism of a good, old fashioned P.D. James murder mystery.

14:26 / 20.02.06

I found this a fantastic book-- it was a gift, and I am a fussy reader and book gifts often find themselves neglected and thrown into corners, yet this gift was very well judged and appreciated.

One of the things that I appreciated in this book was that it allowed many of the various narrative threads to intertwine or not. The relative disappearance of Erica I did not find shocking-- they were unable in many ways to love each other in the way they had following the death of their son. Grief for him, and for Bill, and the strange fascinations of the various characters for each other, be it on the level of friendship or obsession, gave an extremely intense, complex and ultimately judgement-free in the large part definition of What the Characters Loved. In this sense, the last third of the book, where I felt that Leo became not an unreliable narrator, but certainly a questionable character, involved us as well in the equation-- the author deliberately plays with what we, as readers, feel comfortable with. And so she plays with our perceptions of what should be, of what is art, of what is nice, of what is friendship, of what is human...

This is a lyrical book in many ways, and manages that rare trick of combining lyricism with something that may not quite be philosophy, but which certainly prompts a huge amount of thought and reflection.

Teddy Giles freaked me out, though.