I really liked this review. I don't think I'll pick up Susan Minot's newest novel (I'm not its natural audience) but I thought it was a very generous and thoughtful response. One thing that spoke to me: the odd cultural conceit that we are improved by NOT wanting love with another person. An unfulfilled love is far more profound than complete self-contentment. Makes me think of George MacDonald's 'Double Story,' and the creepy scene with the girl who pats her own face and strokes her own skin in complete self-satisfaction.
So I thought about this a bit before commenting, which is not usual for me.
I think it's okay to WANT happiness in love all day long. And happiness in love is for sure a wonderful thing!
I think the problem comes in when we condition our happiness on whether we have a loving romantic relationship in our lives. This is not a good idea, any more than making one's happiness conditioned on career success, or fame, or making a lot of money, or looking lovely, or having one's candidate win the election.
I think that is all the self-actualization boosters are really saying. Well, that's all I am really saying.
I think this is right. Hanging happiness on aspects outside of ourselves and beyond our control is a recipe for disaster, stress and pain. Of course happiness in love is a lovely thing. How can it not be? But anyone who's been in the game a long time knows it ebbs and flows, and the point of relationship is not to be happy all the time but to grow. Great that this review sparks conversation.
This review did what a review ought to do, which is 1) use the book to make a larger point about the current culture (agree or not) and 2) Give me enough information to decide whether i want to read it. Most reviews are given too little space and too little freedom to do either.
Initially I thought I would skip the book because i'd be too frustrated to spend time with Ivy. but my wife read the review and came to the opposite conclusion: she wanted to understand why Ivy would stay with such a jerk. So I'll probably end up reading it too.
As for the merit of self-actualization, I'll bring in some heavy literary artillery. Proust wrote that:
"But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people."
I had the same response, David, both the success of the review and my desire to not spend time with Ivy. I felt she would irritate me to the point of throwing the book across the room. But I have been her, and so maybe I can read her with empathy.
I come from the other side of learning to not need romantic love and longing for other people but the far more realistic life of self-sufficiency, if only the occasional “-actualization.” I can totally recognize the nonsense that Ivy was caught up in. What she put herself through for years (not I, months were enough, but painful, overly long stretches of recovery, nonetheless) was not her fault, but it was her responsibility to see and extract herself from.
The stories that overly romantic women and pop social psychology have shared so abundantly about how very much (!!!) we need to be embedded (entangled, enmeshed) with other people (partners, family, tight friends) are…stories. And they’re in the minority. They’re good, and possible as good, only when the person is grounded in healthy mental hygiene and work ethic practices (basically: the attitude and willingness to make an effort to be responsible to oneself and to the other, as is so often lacking). It’s critical to have learned healthy relationship attachment either from one’s family of origin or by approaching relationships as a proper learning experience while one is young (because no one escapes an attachment injury if they’re really out there seeking love, and only the young are resilient to keep trying). Come with bad mental health, poor concept of attachment, and a shitty work ethic, and you have zero reason to delude yourself about or expect to get a facsimile of a worthwhile relationship. Participate in the charlatan’s game of sport sex or hopeful “maybe this’ll stick,” and I have a t-shirt that says “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.” You could be wearing “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys” instead.
Sorry to be so harsh. I own this personally. I have accepted and dealt with my participation in the farce, and I recognize what nonsense was handed to me, to all of us – a culture that protected men’s interests over women’s, including protecting and promoting predators through victim-blaming and grooming. See with clear eyes, develop a practice to protect your best interests and your own best motivations while living in this harsh world. Need other people very little, AKA very gently, so that when you can have it, you can enjoy them without being engulfed by them. It is quite a respite to be in this zone, and the judgments of others do not matter. You finally realize the value of friendships, which are much healthier, more enjoyable, and more numerous (without also being enmeshing or subordinating, as they were in the past) than ever. That’s where life is.
I too have arrived in this place, but from a softening of my armour-plated self-sufficiency to allowing a gentler arrangement that let's love in. I was struck by how furious I felt at the continuing story of a man's dominance and a woman's supplication; I hope Minot is making a knowing point about the toxicity of this by showing it at its worst; I'm not convinced she is, but that may well be to do with my own past and having been that woman. I realise that flies in the face of my opening sentence, but I'm proof you can be both armour-plated and a sucker for bad man.
At least for Catholics, belief in religious miracles depends in large part on ample documentation and empirical evaluation of the miracles. So that’s not a very good comparison.
This is not a strong critique of an unsurprisingly trenchant review of a relationships novel about by an author who's proven she can write a surprisingly trenchant (because the characters come from such an unlikable intellectual milieu) relationships novel but I wish I had known earlier on in the review that Waldman thinks that this is not a good novel. That is, if "Stivers is right," the "and yet" of the rest of that paragraph is basically the whole rest of this review, and the "and yet" is saying that this novel is interesting because of what it reveals about us sociologically but is actually unhelpful or even regressive on the level creating new possibilities for self-actualization or human flourishing. Isn't there a smarter novel from the past few years that can tell us something about relationships? A new "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.," I mean?
I really liked this review. I don't think I'll pick up Susan Minot's newest novel (I'm not its natural audience) but I thought it was a very generous and thoughtful response. One thing that spoke to me: the odd cultural conceit that we are improved by NOT wanting love with another person. An unfulfilled love is far more profound than complete self-contentment. Makes me think of George MacDonald's 'Double Story,' and the creepy scene with the girl who pats her own face and strokes her own skin in complete self-satisfaction.
So I thought about this a bit before commenting, which is not usual for me.
I think it's okay to WANT happiness in love all day long. And happiness in love is for sure a wonderful thing!
I think the problem comes in when we condition our happiness on whether we have a loving romantic relationship in our lives. This is not a good idea, any more than making one's happiness conditioned on career success, or fame, or making a lot of money, or looking lovely, or having one's candidate win the election.
I think that is all the self-actualization boosters are really saying. Well, that's all I am really saying.
I think this is right. Hanging happiness on aspects outside of ourselves and beyond our control is a recipe for disaster, stress and pain. Of course happiness in love is a lovely thing. How can it not be? But anyone who's been in the game a long time knows it ebbs and flows, and the point of relationship is not to be happy all the time but to grow. Great that this review sparks conversation.
This review did what a review ought to do, which is 1) use the book to make a larger point about the current culture (agree or not) and 2) Give me enough information to decide whether i want to read it. Most reviews are given too little space and too little freedom to do either.
Initially I thought I would skip the book because i'd be too frustrated to spend time with Ivy. but my wife read the review and came to the opposite conclusion: she wanted to understand why Ivy would stay with such a jerk. So I'll probably end up reading it too.
As for the merit of self-actualization, I'll bring in some heavy literary artillery. Proust wrote that:
"But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people."
I had the same response, David, both the success of the review and my desire to not spend time with Ivy. I felt she would irritate me to the point of throwing the book across the room. But I have been her, and so maybe I can read her with empathy.
I come from the other side of learning to not need romantic love and longing for other people but the far more realistic life of self-sufficiency, if only the occasional “-actualization.” I can totally recognize the nonsense that Ivy was caught up in. What she put herself through for years (not I, months were enough, but painful, overly long stretches of recovery, nonetheless) was not her fault, but it was her responsibility to see and extract herself from.
The stories that overly romantic women and pop social psychology have shared so abundantly about how very much (!!!) we need to be embedded (entangled, enmeshed) with other people (partners, family, tight friends) are…stories. And they’re in the minority. They’re good, and possible as good, only when the person is grounded in healthy mental hygiene and work ethic practices (basically: the attitude and willingness to make an effort to be responsible to oneself and to the other, as is so often lacking). It’s critical to have learned healthy relationship attachment either from one’s family of origin or by approaching relationships as a proper learning experience while one is young (because no one escapes an attachment injury if they’re really out there seeking love, and only the young are resilient to keep trying). Come with bad mental health, poor concept of attachment, and a shitty work ethic, and you have zero reason to delude yourself about or expect to get a facsimile of a worthwhile relationship. Participate in the charlatan’s game of sport sex or hopeful “maybe this’ll stick,” and I have a t-shirt that says “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.” You could be wearing “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys” instead.
Sorry to be so harsh. I own this personally. I have accepted and dealt with my participation in the farce, and I recognize what nonsense was handed to me, to all of us – a culture that protected men’s interests over women’s, including protecting and promoting predators through victim-blaming and grooming. See with clear eyes, develop a practice to protect your best interests and your own best motivations while living in this harsh world. Need other people very little, AKA very gently, so that when you can have it, you can enjoy them without being engulfed by them. It is quite a respite to be in this zone, and the judgments of others do not matter. You finally realize the value of friendships, which are much healthier, more enjoyable, and more numerous (without also being enmeshing or subordinating, as they were in the past) than ever. That’s where life is.
I too have arrived in this place, but from a softening of my armour-plated self-sufficiency to allowing a gentler arrangement that let's love in. I was struck by how furious I felt at the continuing story of a man's dominance and a woman's supplication; I hope Minot is making a knowing point about the toxicity of this by showing it at its worst; I'm not convinced she is, but that may well be to do with my own past and having been that woman. I realise that flies in the face of my opening sentence, but I'm proof you can be both armour-plated and a sucker for bad man.
Needs copyediting. At the very least run it through a chatbot.
insane that this was published as is — basically unreadable
Excellent review. I'm going to read Minot's novel. Haven't read anything or much by her since Monkeys.
At least for Catholics, belief in religious miracles depends in large part on ample documentation and empirical evaluation of the miracles. So that’s not a very good comparison.
This is not a strong critique of an unsurprisingly trenchant review of a relationships novel about by an author who's proven she can write a surprisingly trenchant (because the characters come from such an unlikable intellectual milieu) relationships novel but I wish I had known earlier on in the review that Waldman thinks that this is not a good novel. That is, if "Stivers is right," the "and yet" of the rest of that paragraph is basically the whole rest of this review, and the "and yet" is saying that this novel is interesting because of what it reveals about us sociologically but is actually unhelpful or even regressive on the level creating new possibilities for self-actualization or human flourishing. Isn't there a smarter novel from the past few years that can tell us something about relationships? A new "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.," I mean?
Quite right, Martin. That'd be weird, if it were true. Happy reading!