Appreciation: The Furies

I really can’t imagine what possessed me to read Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies. It certainly isn’t my kind of book: young woman, in a world of women, copes with the world’s most immature mother, then tackles a string of more or less unsatisfactory relationships with men, then—well, there are some plot points I shouldn’t spoil, but since the novel is named after a Greek tragedy, you can assume it doesn’t end with a song.

But forget all that. I can’t remember how long it has been since I’ve read anything so aware of its self and alert to its surroundings. NYRB Classics (which has lately republished The Furies) calls it “fiercely honest” (link). The tag is a cliché but clichés are founded in truth, and if you have Hobhouse’s kind of honesty, then ferocity may be the only possible stance. For intensity and intelligence, the best comparison I can think of is the actor James Woods (link) whose performances, like Hobhouse’s narrative, seem just narrowly to escape spilling all over themselves.

I complained a few days ago that Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram was a novel pretending to be the truth (link). Hobhouse’s book appears rather to be the truth masquerading as a novel. Her accounts of her husband and her father appear to mesh with the published data, and her specifity about addresses around Manhattan seems almost beyond invention. And the long pre-history with which she begins the book, while worth the effort, is near enough to being a distraction that she probably wouldn’t have included it were it not substantially true.

Perhaps inevitably, the best parts of the book is her lovingly realized account of her childhood with her train wreck of a mother—lovely, warm-hearted, devoted to her daughter, yet unable to fulfill so many of the most elementary responsibilities of parenthood. It’s well observed but just as important, it’s not bitter. Hobhouse’s narrative voice has a lot to complain of from this impossible woman and she doesn’t seem to gloss over the rough spots. Yet clearly she loved her mother almost as much as life itself, and she stood always ready—not so much to forgive as to accept her inadequacy.

Hobhouse has a less sure touch when her young narrator sets off to England to recover her father. I think the problem may be that here, for once, the author is too coy. The author is, after all, a Hobhouse, a member (at least by courtesy of paternal DNA) of an English west-country clan, long visible in politics in the arts. Her true-life father, if I read the evidence right, is an author and politician—and, if the novelistic evidence is anything close to the truth, a full-spectrum prick. Hobhouse doesn’t appear to let him off easy here, but again, she doesn’t really dwell on the dreadful stuff: she just rattles on with the story. Getting the background does, however, help to explain what morphed this Upper East Side ugly duckling into an Oxford-educated swan.

Having dispensed with her childhood, Hobhouse tackles her love life and here, I think she may be on more dangerous ground than she suspects. She tumbles into a passionate romance with a seemingly presentable young swain; she dumps him and leaves him desolate in favor of another, no less suitable and this time rich. After much shilly-shallying, she marries this one, but then cheats on him and, at last, divorces him (just as it emerges that he has lost all his money). I suspect the main point of all this may be to show how we never escape our childhood (else what, exactly, is the point of the title?). But I suspect not every reader will be willing to ignore the fact that she seems to have had a lot of options and to have played them for all they are worth.

I won’t detail the last part of the book because there are some plot-points that deserve to remain under wraps. Suffice to say that whatever patience I may have lost with her as I tracked through her love life, I recovered as she faced what must have been the one—no, two—great crises of her life. I can’t quite say I was sorry for it to end: it was an exhausting read and I had to put it aside a couple of times just to catch my breath. But but but: but Janet Hobhouse died in 1991, having not quite finished this her final product. It’s a rotten shame that we won’t have a chance to hear any more from her, ever again..