Letty Fox, Her Luck

Seurat, Pissaro, and Van Gogh painted pictures made up of points of color---seen too closely, they look just like a bunch of dots, without much meaning. Step back and you see a sophisticated landscape or portrait. These were the pointillistes of French Impressionist art. As I read this penetrating character study constructed of 517 pages of trivia, banal conversations, epigrams, and thoughts, I thought over and over that this novel resembled more than a little a pointilliste painting. Any one page seems trivial and even directionless. As you continue, you realize that a powerful portrait is being built. There is no plot except the life of Letty Fox, a strong young woman whose licentious, impecunious, immature/mature ways stem from her own dysfunctional family background of similar qualities. It is a coming of age tale that takes place from the mid-1920s to 1945 in New York, New Jersey, and (occasionally) England and France in a welter of bizarre characters. Letty Fox is the kind of person who, in real life, never writes her autobiography, or if she does, writes in a most self-aggrandizing manner. She longs for romance but gets mostly men interested in one-night stands, for marriage to a wealthy man, but most of them skip town, for interesting work but she tires of a job quickly, for a normal family (but does such an animal exist ? I think Stead would say no.) Letty Fox is in love with life, but unlike some of her leftwing friends, she is more realistic. She samples whatever she can, but chooses very little. Contradictions abound. Freedom vs marriage. Sex vs. love. Friends vs. living alone. Idealism vs. cynicism. Above all, Letty is a feminist, though she never refers to herself in such terms.. She refuses to kowtow to current prejudices, yet revels in modern New York life as much as she can. You can pick out hundreds of quotations like the following to express her feelings: "I sometimes wondered at the infinite distance between the state of not being married---and whatever the gradation of not being married, it made no difference---and the state of being married. How did people bridge the gap ? It seemed to happen to others---most others: never to me; and I thought it very peculiar. I couldn't figure it out; perhaps I was too young, anyway; but it savored to me of magic, and I felt very miserable that in this modern world something so primary, this first of all things to a woman, smacked so strongly of the tribal priest, the smoky cult, the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the hidden mystery. It didn't seem fair. We should have abolished all that with enlightenment." p.413-14 "I was born to live with all the ardor of my blood and to mate and breed, and laugh at my grandchildren. These monastic notions were not for me." (rejects sacrificial fantasies, rejects ideals of doing good) p.419 "What is the use of a man if one can't be forthright with him ? I would never hedge and plot with a man, thought I." p.489 W