Furies

Autobiography/memoir as novel, this is one of the very finest, mostly deeply felt bits of sustained writing that I have ever read. Janet Hobhouse traces her family from the time of her immigrant great-grandparents parents, who established the family fortune, through its' matrilineal line, to her impoverished Bohemian mother and herself, an established writer and great beauty of her time.It is absorbing, and I soon felt that I was part of her family, feeling as she felt. This is one of a great series of books that were out of print and have now been brought back under The New York Review of Books imprint.

I took months to read The Furies. I was completely involved in the author's life from page one; I didn't want the book to end since that would have meant abandoning the author, letting her die again. Thankfully, I can take the book off the shelf and read my favorite passages over and over. Something about the author's urgent voice, her dilemma, her triumph and ultimate loss called to me so compellingly. At many points in her archeology of the self, it seemed Hobhouse was giving me directions about my own life since many of the choices Janet-as-Helen makes are typical of women born in the second half of the 20th-century: career, intellectual pursuits, marriage, creating friendships and connections. If I have suggested that The Furies is a woman's journey, I still want to encourage men to read it. This autobiography-as-novel involves the male gender in every way: It concerns a girl child's need for a loving mother, the grudging though saving involvement of a remote father, and the rescue that a college education can provide a bright, sensitive, and miserable young woman. Hobhouse tells The Furies so simply and yet with such microscopic exactitude that I'm trying to figure out how she "did it," how she was able to write about herself with such an uncanny combination of critical distance and compassionate psychological detail. An author has to have deep insights into herself and others as well as make all the best decisions about the writing craft: narration and point-of-view, setting and scene changes, and plot development. The tale Hobhouse has given us depends not so much on her craft as on her understanding of the illogic and irrationality of relationships and human desire in general. The striking feature of this novel is Hobhouse's ability to consistently show people during their most characteristically human moments. In the end, Janet/Helen writes about her fight with cancer, "What made me saddest about dying was that I'd never get to meet and love or be loved by anyone else again. . . . [ I would miss ] Not the books unwritten or the places not seen, but the people I was never going to love." The introduction, by Daphne Merkin, offers important insights into Hobhouse's craft of writing. Even though I don't agree with Merkin that Hobhouse's prose is "baroque" or that her "sentences go on forever," I do agree with her that The Furies is "an exactingly detailed, almost anthropological portrait," an "extraordinary" work. The cover art, a detail from Gary Hume's Water Painting, is another very appropriate choice for this NYRB edition.

Janet Hobhouse's last novel THE FURIES was published two years after her death in 1991, and its incompleteness shows. The work is a thinly fictionalized family memoir of an improvident but glamorous matrilineage living largely on their wits on the edges of Manhattan life throughout the course of the twentieth century; the doomy narrative centers upon the author's alter ego, Helen, who grows up shuttling between home and expensive private schools, watched by her unhappy mother, her artistic grandmother, her odd aunt and great-aunt, and eventually her cold father living in London. The first two-thirds of the work are fantastic--as superb a fictionalized memoir as THE BELL JAR, with each chapter acting as a beautiful short story in its own right, all permeated with the author's singular blend of lush prose and sweetly rueful melancholy. But when Helen marries a wealthy Englishman and her fortunes change drastically the tone of the novel remains exactly the same. When the narrator then uses the same complaining tone she used to describe her mother's mental illness and her father's verbal abusiveness to describe how alien ated she and her husband become for having such much nicer and more expensive houses than their friends, your sympathies for her begin to dry up completely; even when Helen's luck again turns for the worse, she's by then exhausted all the reader's patience. Had Hobhouse had time to finish the work before her early death, she likely would have surmounted these problems in revision; as it is, the work is very flawed but still more than worth reading.

What I found most interesting about this book was how many details Janet Hobhouse packed into it, something that originally tricked me into thinking that it was autobiographical. It's not a book you want to sit down and read all at once, but you'll find it hard to put down if you're into aknowledging the harsh side of life.

Janet Hobhouse dipped into Greek mythology for her title. The furies hounded mortals who committed certain acts of impiety. Patricide was such an act. No, such homicide is absent from this novel, at least literally. What a reader finds is an astute mind gifted in words conducting a pitiless self-examination thinly dressed as fiction. A devotee of genre fiction may not be attracted to such a novel. No body falling out of a closet or floating in a pool. No shoot-out on a dusty western town street. No menacing or benign extra terrestrial slumming our planet. No auburn beauty breathless in the arms of a regency stud. We accompany the author's persona on a journey through a life, privy to the joys and griefs, the romances, the break-ups, the successes, the set-backs, a beautiful, talented women is subject to. The furies (three in number) serve as a metaphor for the regret, guilt, and sorrow Helen is unable to escape. A large portion of the narrative is cast in the meditative style of the essayist. Scenes are not frequent, although a crucial moment, the climax actually, is presented in what for the author must have been excruciating detail. Another metaphor, again borrowed from the ancient Greeks, is appropriate to describe this work. Ms. Hobhouse explores the twists and turns of her life as Thesus explored the labyrinth, searching for truth, however devastating, at the center of her being.