Recently finished Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and it drove over me like a steamroller. It’s a thousand things at once: First, an exploration of female desire, as the book states clearly as its objective; but also a stunning document of the decline of America, the soulessness of its cultural infrastructure, the way it terrorizes women then demonizes them for fighting back; it’s the most relevant, urgent book I’ve ever read.
The book’s mission is to document these things unflinchingly, not to resolve them. There’s no hypothesis it seeks to prove. The course of the three women is frustrating, upsetting, admirable, horrific, enviable, joyous, and depressing all at once, and it doesn’t care what you think. In fact, it doesn’t even want you to think. It’s simply presenting three lives as they stand, with as much truth and emotional accuracy as possible, no matter the contradictions. It’s so precise a book that it could be carved in stone.
I walked away from it wanting something fixed—not knowing what, but knowing that something needed done, something changed—but I’ve only recently come to terms with the fact that the book doesn’t care, that that isn’t the book’s intent. Any reaction the reader has is his own gut reacting, nothing else. The book’s only job is to exist like a monument. It’s a chilling exchange.
I also read Trust Exercise by Susan Choi just before Three Women. (I wasn’t consciously planning on a deep dive into sexual politics and demagoguery but that seems to be exactly what I did!) Trust Exercise was a frustrating book to read in a lot of ways, entertaining in others. It’s very much a writers’ book, with its playing around with perspective and reader expectations. Like Three Women, the visceral experience of the book itself is the point of its existence; it’s not making a ruling on its own complicated case.
If anything, Trust Exercise wants you to question who owns a story. Is your own retelling of an experience automatically betraying the truth? Does the mere fact of perspective distort any attempt at fact and impartiality? Does the violence of trauma just rip everything to shreds? The “exercise” at the heart of Trust Exercise sits uncomfortably alongside the unwavering (nearly stagnant) presentation of the Three Women. If we’re meant to question everything and no lens to look through is correct, then what exactly is the point?
I think, out here in the pits of 2019, that the whole point of both books is to champion the act of just looking. Just have a look. There’s not enough of it going round these days.
(Sidenote: I love that I can just END these posts without any proper wrapping-up or conclusion. Just blah, blah, blah, then bye! It’s a blog!)