In Coming-of-Middle-Age Stories, Adults Grow Up, Too

Virginia Woolf recommended a room of one’s own, but a time may come, in a woman’s life, when she prefers a house, one that she can have all to herself. It might happen after her children, if she has children, are grown, or think they are. Her marriage has perhaps run its course. She has been, among whatever other professional or creative lives she has lived, a “homemaker,” a title that has always implied the making of a home primarily for the use of others, and now she finds that she wants to make a home for her own use.

This is what happened to the writer Deborah Levy. She was born in apartheid South Africa, where her father, a member of the African National Congress, spent four years as a political prisoner; he was freed when Levy was nine, and the family moved to England. Levy started to publish in her twenties: fiction, plays, poetry. (She has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize.) She married and had two daughters. As she was nearing fifty, her marriage broke up. The family house was sold. Her daughters had begun to find their own way in life. What did she want from the rest of hers? Could she make a new home, and what kind of home would it be, with just one solitary woman living in it? These are some of the questions she asked herself; in her wonderful new book, “Real Estate” (Bloomsbury), she records her search for the answers.

“Real Estate” is the third and final volume of what Levy calls her “living autobiography.” (Levy is only sixty-one. Her trilogy may end here, but she has, it is hoped, a lot of autobiography left to live.) She wrote the first volume, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2013), as a response of sorts to George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write.” There was a feeling, throughout that short, intense book, of being smothered, constrained, hounded: first, by growing up under racial tyranny in South Africa, which lay like a lead blanket over the consciousness of even a privileged white child, and then by the duties and expectations of womanhood, so frequently at odds with Levy’s literary ambitions. There was also an obscure but powerful sense of grief, which welled up in the silent space between sentences. It wasn’t until Levy’s next book in the series, “The Cost of Living” (2018), that she revealed the dissolution of her marriage. She had to learn a host of new skills—how to fix the clogged pipes in her bathroom, for one—and began to write in the first person. Levy, whose prose is at once declarative and concrete and touched with an almost oracular pithiness, has a gift for imbuing ordinary observations with the magic of metaphor. Stuck in a help-desk chat to fix her faulty Microsoft Word program, she notices that “the letter I on the screen was blinking and jumping and trembling” and realizes, “That’s how I felt too.”

The new volume, which follows the death of one version of the self, describes the uncertain birth of another. It begins with a mundane purchase, which inspires an imagined one. On the street in London, where she lives, Levy—her trembling “I” is both a character and its creator—spots a banana plant, and brings it home to her apartment. Her building is dingy and crumbling; with smiling irony, she calls its grim hallways “the Corridors of Love,” which makes it sound as if she lived in a sonnet, or a brothel. Levy’s younger daughter, who will soon be leaving for university, ribs her mother for doting on the banana plant, joking that it is Levy’s third child, her own replacement. She’s not wrong. Levy has begun to fantasize about making a new kind of nest to succeed her empty one:

Even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism. I yearned for a grand old house (I had now added an oval fireplace to its architecture) and a pomegranate tree in the garden. It had fountains and wells, remarkable circular stairways, mosaic floors, traces of the rituals of all who had lived there before me. That is to say the house was lively, it had enjoyed a life. It was a loving house.

This is cozy and glowing, but there is an ambivalence to what Levy calls her “unreal estate.” Whenever she tries to picture herself inside this glorious house, she feels sad: “It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.”

“Real Estate” covers a period of about a year, during which Levy wanders far from the Corridors of Love, auditioning new models of being settled, or unsettled. She travels to a literary festival in Mumbai, and is awarded a nine-month fellowship that takes her to Paris, where she lives in a comically spartan apartment by Sacré-Coeur, an almost too perfect symbol of her domestic dispossession. (The building’s concierge carefully goes over the inventory: two cups, two knives, one chair.) In cold, rainy Berlin, she visits a friend who has also recently divorced. All this is the ordinary stuff of modern life, made radiant by Levy’s clarifying prose. But Levy never lets us lose sight of how extraordinary, both historically and personally, her casual, roving freedom truly is. She likes to think through the work of other writers, as all real writers must; they are her history and her family, and, like family, they are there to be adored and argued with. Among Levy’s personal band are Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose preoccupation with female masochism she now finds tedious but whose lines from “The Second Sex” she still quotes with conviction:

The domestic labours that fell to her lot because they were reconcilable with the cares of maternity imprisoned her in repetition and immanence; they were repeated from day to day in an identical form, which was perpetuated almost without change from century to century; they produced nothing new.

Levy, finally liberated from such labors, has taken on the exhilarating, excruciating challenge of trying to produce something new, in life and on the page. Repeatedly, she returns to the idea of the “female character.” What kind does she want to write? What kind does she want to be? A solution to both riddles is suggested at a meeting that Levy has with a trio of film producers, two women and a man, who are interested in hiring her to write a script. This could be a nice coup; movie money would go a long way toward turning her unreal estate real. She pitches the idea of a female protagonist who’s allowed “to mess up, to be foolish and profound, kind and cruel, to exist with full complexity and paradox,” one who, like the male protagonist of an Ingmar Bergman movie she’s been watching—like the male protagonists of any number of movies—“ruthlessly pursued her own dreams and desires at the expense of everyone else.” But the mood in the room sours: “The cruellest female executive asked me how the audience were supposed to like such a character.”

This scene itself follows a sort of script; the freethinking heroine goes up against stolid establishment Goliaths, glorifying herself in the process. Even as you scoff at the prerogatives of conventional storytelling, which demand allegiance to the stale (and the male), you feel a twinge of sympathy for Levy’s nemeses, pitifully outmatched as they are. She herself is not always a purely likable, or reliable, narrator of her own experience, and her book is the richer for it.

Those movie producers may not embrace the kind of female character Levy most wants to see, but “Wayward” (Knopf), a comic, vital new novel by Dana Spiotta, does. Here, too, real estate is the paradoxical symbol of a middle-aged woman’s illicit desire to break away from constricting domesticity. Spiotta’s protagonist is fifty-three-year-old Sam Raymond, who begins the novel by starting an affair—not with a person but with a “run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse.” Sam’s heart is fickle; earlier in her life, she fell in love with the big, suburban, open-plan house that she shares with her husband, Matt, and their daughter, Ally, a high-school junior. Actually: “They had fallen in love with it.” Thus, the problem. Sam is not supposed to be house-hunting. She should be shopping for groceries and performing sundry other wife-and-mom duties for Matt and Ally, who have no inkling that she would rather be anywhere else. Even Sam doesn’t realize what she’s up to until she pops into an open house one Sunday morning and is instantly seduced:

It had leaded glass windows, built-in shelves, and hidden storage benches. Two of the benches were framed by wood-beamed closures (the “inglenook”) and sat at either end of (oh, and what she longed for!) an elaborate tile-lined fireplace (“Mercer Moravian tiles”). Sam imagined sitting in the nook, gazing at the fire, reading a book. The tiles were dirty with layers of dust but still intact. She could pick out a narrative in the relief images. (“Saint George and the Dragon,” the agent said.) The clay finish was a rustic, uneven glaze, the colors pink, green, and white. She touched her fingertips to the tiles and felt an undeniable connection.

Shelter-magazine enthusiasts will know this to be erotica by another name. Like all infatuated lovers, Sam believes that the object of her desire will ennoble and refresh her soul, “make her feel close to something elemental.” She puts in an offer on the house before she screws up the courage to let Matt know that she is leaving him.

“Wayward,” Spiotta’s fifth novel, is set in 2017: Trump time. Sam dates the fissure in her marriage to the catastrophe of Election Night. She receives the bad news as a personal disaster, a cause for grief, and grievance. For Matt, she thinks, “it was the equivalent of watching his beloved Mets lose a closely contested World Series.” This isn’t quite fair to Matt, a nice guy with conscientious politics. (He and Sam met, cutely, at a NARAL march.) But Sam has had it with being fair. She reasons that “the world had moved against her more than it had moved against Matt,” and draws on that sense of cosmic betrayal to justify herself. Even Matt decides to go along with Sam’s new journey toward self-discovery, or whatever it is. Maddeningly decent guy that he is, he insists that she keep accepting his money—“our money,” he calls it—and she does. Sam, who works part time at a historic house dedicated to a local nineteenth-century feminist and free-love advocate called Clara Loomis (you can tell that Spiotta had the time of her life inventing this kooky Victorian), cannot otherwise afford to finance her existence. Sam’s unprincipled pursuit of her confused principles gives the novel a loopy energy. Is she experiencing a liberation? A regression? When a wife, not her husband, is the one to indulge a midlife crisis and abandon her family, her behavior is either derided as selfish or championed as subversive. A good novel shouldn’t ask us to choose between those readings, and Spiotta has written a very good novel.

Meanwhile, Sam is being held hostage by changing hormones. (If “Wayward” has competition in the category of best American novel devoted to the subject of perimenopause, I am not aware of it.) Her beloved mother is dying, and her daughter, appropriately furious that Sam has abandoned her as she prepares her college applications, ignores her texts. Sam takes to trawling Facebook groups of like-minded wounded women, whose righteous comments and snippy crosstalk are made to sound realistic, and therefore, on the sober page, absurd. Facebook, in fact, provides a kind of tonal model for the novel: Spiotta, sticking as close to Sam’s consciousness as the third person will allow, channels the mouthy freedom and inchoate urgency of an unhinged post. Sections of the novel told from Ally’s point of view are more restrained, because smart, school-focussed Ally, in a classic role reversal, is invested in the kind of control that her teen-spirited mother has discarded. Even Ally’s greatest rebellion—an affair with a real-estate developer—originates in her precocious discipline: the creepy guy is her “mentor” in a school club for budding entrepreneurs.

This familiar theme of mother-daughter conflict is made darkly resonant by its political context. In 2017, daughters everywhere had had it with mother figures, even before the fallout from #MeToo created a further rift between the generations. At a living-room meeting organized through a Facebook group called Women Won’t Wilt, Sam judgily drinks a New Zealand sauvignon blanc (“finally chardonnay and pinot grigio had become cliché and déclassé even in Syracuse”) and listens to the assembled parties “chatting and commiserating, each reporting her blow-by-blow election night story with the same boring annotated specificity with which women report their labor narratives after giving birth.” All the women are of a certain age, save two outliers in their twenties, who take the floor to berate their hosts in majestic uptalk:

“Look, I’m Larisa and this is Emma (?). We are from Ithaca (?). And I have to be honest with you all, I’m feeling pretty angry (?). At all the white women that voted for him (?).” This girl was, of course, as white as one can be, her skin made almost bluish and translucent by her platinum hair.

The older women are astonished—everyone at the meeting voted against Trump. Surely his victory can’t be their fault. But Sam is secretly excited by Larisa and Emma’s righteous contempt for her cohort: “She too hated the smug entitlement that seemed manifested in their silvery haircuts, their Eileen Fisher linen pants, their expensive, ergonomic shoes. They reeked of status quo collusion, safely protected from it all.”

Spiotta, who is fifty-five and teaches at Syracuse University (“Wayward” pays the city the compliment of true devotion), is satirizing her own demographic, and with verve. Her novel is laced with cranky comic passages on the nostalgic manias for crafting and mommy blogging, and on addictions to social media, personal fitness, and self-improvement—trappings of comfortable, contemporary womanhood, which Sam at once enjoys and deplores. On their own, these observations may be too familiar to have much bite; the satire works because Sam is never sure whether she’s the butt of her own acid judgments. The most corrosive of these have to do with getting older. “Wayward,” like “Real Estate,” is a reconfigured coming-of-age story, set during a new kind of adolescence. Like a teen-ager, Sam fixates on her changing body and those of other women her age, “their lumpish midsections and their aged necks, which she knew was awful, unfair. . . . She did not feel solidarity just because they were all women; she felt estranged from them.” And yet it is because Sam knows that she is one of their number that she allows herself her disdain.

In Spiotta’s knowing paradox, Sam’s keenness to critique the “status quo collusion” of liberal American middle-aged white ladies is exactly what marks her as a liberal American middle-aged white lady par excellence—a comic predicament that is made suddenly nightmarish, late in the novel, when Sam, roaming the Syracuse streets at night during a bout of insomnia, witnesses a police officer shoot and kill a Black teen-ager, a refugee from Somalia. She is desperate to do something, but there is little for her to do. She didn’t take her phone with her, so she has no footage of the event. She makes a donation to a GoFundMe account set up for funeral costs, and sends a letter to the boy’s mother. Sam, who nursed her own sense of victimhood after the election, is now a mere appendage to an actual American tragedy: internally tormented, externally useless. Spiotta’s eagerness—it may be anxiety—to take on so many big issues of the moment can have a certain cumulative staginess that interferes with the novel’s fine texture, and the reader may reflexively recoil at her visceral use of Black death to dramatize white guilt. (Notably, Spiotta, in this novel consumed with motherhood, does not try to inhabit the perspective of the grieving mother; it is as if she were keeping a respectful distance.) But Sam’s agonized distress at what she has seen, and at what she can’t do about it, reflects its own pressing reality. Such terrors, unjustly borne by some, belong to all who share this country—this house divided.

Thanks to Facebook, Sam falls in with a bizarre, charismatic sixty-five-year-old woman, “wrinkled but beautiful in an austere, Walker Evans way,” who favors motorcycle boots and goes by the digital nom de guerre MH, for “Mother Hubbard.” MH is in the habit of showing up at an open-mike night hosted by a comedy club at the mall and speaking her truth. Starting with a description of her first period, she continues on to her abortion, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and menopause in an act that serves as a provocative verbal striptease, flaunting the kind of female body that no one wants to see. The set, such as it is, contains no jokes; beneath MH’s equanimity lurks a mastered fury. Audience members squirm, or glare, or leave. For Sam, it is an electric moment. MH has strolled into hostile territory and made herself at home.

Anger—at how men treat women, and at how women learn to accept this treatment—is one of Levy’s big subjects, too. Like MH, she treats it calmly, a battle tactic that she has taken from Woolf, who warned, in “A Room of One’s Own,” of the harm that indulged rage could do to a female writer’s work. Levy’s tone can be like cooled magma, obsidian-sharp. The pervasive sense of emotional control in “Real Estate” may be a matter of principle—don’t show them how they get to you—but it also reflects Levy’s determination to enjoy her life. Like “The Cost of Living,” “Real Estate” is dotted with manifesto-ish passages about the ways that patriarchy saps the female spirit, but Levy tries not to let her own spirit get sapped. “I had always been furious, but life had to go on, we could not be defeated by it,” she writes. Even her feminist lodestars are not to be taken too seriously. After she quotes Beauvoir on the curse of domesticity, she goes out and buys some new dishes.

Can a book be a kind of home? Many readers feel so. Levy does, too. “Real Estate” embodies a mode of hospitality; she welcomes all kinds of interesting people into her pages, new and old acquaintances alike. One frequent visitor is a man whom Levy calls her “best male friend.” (Whether to preserve his privacy or to knock his ego down a peg, she doesn’t give him a name.) They met when they were fourteen, and have remained loyal to each other ever since, though loyalty is not a quality that the best male friend is in the habit of displaying elsewhere. His third marriage is breaking up; Levy watches him seduce a dazzling younger woman. The best male friend likes to press on the bruise of Levy’s solitude; he doesn’t think it’s good for her to be so alone. Levy finds him exasperating and lovable, a combination that feels true to life. Affection is a complex allegiance, not neatly resolved by politics. She won’t throw him out of her story. But she occasionally gives him the slip. One morning, on vacation in Greece, she promises to join him for breakfast and instead goes for a luxuriant swim in the Aegean by herself.

What the best male friend doesn’t seem to understand is that there are possibilities for living that involve neither isolation nor romance. For both Levy and Spiotta, the restoration, and necessary transformation, of the mother-daughter relationship points a way forward. Ally finds her way back to Sam, and Levy begins to find her way toward her daughters. “Perhaps we could see that we were not that similar to each other, we were different, we did not have to be the same,” she writes. Her children are growing up, and so, it seems, is she.

Another scene in “Real Estate” touches on the possibility of a different kind of living. For years, Levy has written her books in a back-yard shed she has rented from a couple she knew, a haven during the decline of her marriage. The husband has died; the wife, Celia, is now elderly, and lives with a blind dog and two cats. She is looked after by an “official carer,” and also by two young men, both students in their twenties. The pair “kept the house cheerful, put up with Celia’s volatile moods, cooked imaginative meals, played music that everyone enjoyed, and as anyone who has been in this caring situation will know, they had tremendous responsibilities to handle while they studied for their academic degrees.” This casual yet momentous inversion of the domestic labors that Beauvoir cursed yields the indelible image of a crotchety old lady propped up with her small menagerie in bed, while, in the kitchen, the men marinate a leg of lamb for her dinner. “It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us,” Levy writes, in a hard-won piece of advice, “especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.” ♦