Jean Rhys: The Complete

Jean Rhys's first four novels are sequential, slightly fictionalized confessions of her own sad, sordid life. [A stern warning to my teenage son: Stay clear of wistful waifs who exude sexy depression and masochistic neediness, especially if they seem to be talented with words; you won't like yourself in the novel they write about you.] Certainly Ford Madox Ford, a great unhappy writer on his own hook, would second that advice after reading the portrayal of his relationship with Jean Rhys in her second novel, Quartet. Rhys's first four novels - Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackensie, and Good Morning Midnight - are all essentially chapters in her self-excoriating semi-autobiography, the agonizing tale of her life-spiral into degradation and suicidal depression. As a pretty-but-not-beautiful young white girl from the Afro-Caribbean island of Dominica, our heroine takes one step toward shaping her life by de-exiling herself to England. From that step on, it's all adrift, from sexual exploitation (two-way) to exploitation, grimmer and grimier with each episode. She's a sad, sick kitty, this self-hating waif. She also writes with a poignant, painful realism that was way ahead of her time (the 1920s in London and Paris) in terms of confessional literature. There's something in almost every chapter of Rhy's fictionalized desolation that makes me want to run a few miles in the hills, take a cold shower, and listen to a Bach cantata to revitalize myself. There's also something so honest in her that I come back for more desperation on the page. The persona Rhys assigned herself in Voyage was more attractive, or at least more sympathetic, than the 'heroine' of Quartet. In fact, Rhy's fictional life becomes so tangibly unbearable by the end of Quartet that most readers will need a year or two before confronting the next episode, titled After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Unfortunately, for this reader, the intense sincerity of despair that fills up the first two books of Rhy's confession gets formulaic and dispersed in the latter two, and I have little to say about them That's not what I expected when I bought the complete novels. I'd just spent two weeks in Dominica, hiking, snorkling, bird-watching on that beautiful volcanic cone of an island, where equal parts are blended of pitiful colonial detritus and indomitable Black joyousness. I'd never read a word of Rhys, but I noticed a shabby house with her name on a plaque in Roseau, the mildewed rubble-heap that passes for a port city. I expected something on the order of Jamaica Kincaid, or even better, the early hilarious novels of VS Naipaul. Ooo-wee, was I on the wrong track! I seldom urge people to read depressing novels or down-hearted poems. The world has a way of supplying each of us as much despair as we need. Rhys is an exception. Her sorrow is so pure than it exonerates her degraded life. I haven't read her last novel yet - Wide Sargasso Sea, written 30 years later and consider