Quartet

I love all her novels despite their grimness. Most, not all, are set in Paris in another era, but the writing is so original and modern that the time could be today, the Paris I know is still recognizable.

Jean Rhys's first four novels are sequential, slightly fictionalized confessions of her own sad, sordid life. Here's what I wrote about the first novel, Voyage in the Dark: [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. 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 considered her masterpiece - but I will. If ever a life required a redemption, it was Jean Rhys's.] 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. But don't give up! However agonizing Rhy's confessi

Quartet was Jean Rhys' first novel. It is the story of Marya, a British expatriate living in Paris in the early part of the 20th century. She is acutely self-conscious and yet utterly incapable of changing her life to achieve happiness. Her life revolves around two men: Stephan, her vague Polish husband and HJ, a married British ex-pat who is extremely social and active in the arts. Marya's life has been pared down to essentials: dining, drinking, reading and waiting for her husband to return. When she finds Stephan has been unexpectedly arrested her attachment to him is disturbed. Craving affection and financial security, she desperately attempts to discover why Stephan has been arrested and how she can stay in contact with him. However, she quickly takes up with HJ and his wife, Lois. Her emotions become dangerously tangled between the two. Meandering through defeat after defeat entirely unsatisfied and pining for the money to pay for her rent and a glass of brandy, she ultimately has to face the consequences of her love affair. Marya is vaguely dissatisfied and compulsively tragic. In her life which closely parallels Rhys' own, she finds no remission for the terribly existential fact of life.In this novel Rhys subtly satirizes her affair with Ford Madox Ford and the life she led with him in Paris. This time of great artistic innovation is reduced to the bare facts of the debased livelihood of the expatriates: their drinking and intertwining sexual affairs. Rhys is unremittingly spare in her emotional honesty. Her prose are hollowed out just as the main character's personality is hollowed out. There is nothing tender about this fictitious recreating. It is brutal, just as Rhys' vision of life. Emotions seep out in sporadic bursts and the rest is contemptuously smoking a cigarette and watching passers by. But the gaze of Marya's is incredibly telling. Her feelings are projected outward onto the people surrounding her. A man or woman witnessed walking by or sitting on the opposite side of a café will inhabit the emotions Marya does not allow to pool inside her. In this way, Rhys fiction is a strong precursor to Alain Robbe-Grillet's because of the intensely violent subjectivity of the character's perception of the world. The solemn nature of novel evokes powerful feelings of sympathy and sorrow.

Why do we accept the horrible people into our social circle? What is fidelity? Why do we fall in love with idiots? These are at the heart of this book as a woman who should know better gets involved with a married man while her husband is in prison. The guy is creepy, boring and stupid but under the guise of "free love" she gives in to an emotional desperation that proves horrid for everyone involved.This is a beautiful book full of malice and evil just lurking beneath the surface and one of desperation. You will be intrigued and blown away by these stupid awful people. Just a note - DON'T rent or buy the movie. It's Merchant Ivory and it's really Merchant Ivory and this book is so much better than the Merchant-Ivory treatment.

A book well before its time (auugh! cliche!), "Quartet" explores the everyday cruelty that passes under cover of "sophisticated" bohemian culture. What haunts me after reading is the quiet, patient "voice" of the narrative, a heroine who is witty, perceptive but (alas) broke and under increasing pressure to adapt to her shallower, so-called "friends". There's brutal irony seeing a tabloid ending, KNOWING how the press will report this & how grotesquely wrong it will be, how hard it really is to "break through" to the sympathy (even, especially) of the "liberal" public