Gotham Diary:
How Will She Do It?
7 August 2013
It’s all right there in the second paragraph:
At forty-five, Jodi still sees herself as a young woman. She does not have her eye on the future but lives very much in the moment, keeping her focus on the everyday. She assumes, without having thought about it, that things will go on indefinitely in their imperfect yet entirely acceptable way. In other words, she is deeply unaware that her life is now peaking, that her youthful resilience — which her twenty-year marriage to Todd Gilbert has slowly been eroiding — is approaching a final stage of disintegration, that her notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her.
And as for that marriage…
Since I’m reading The Silent Wife on the Kindle Paperwhite, I can tell you that I’ve covered 66% of it. The suspense is almost unendurable. The late Susan Harrison writes like a student of Ruth Rendell who has figured out how to supercharge the formula. Several times already, I have cried out in shocked alarm.
More anon.
***
Well! That was a smashing read! But, beyond recommending it as heartily as I can, there is absolutely nothing for me to say. Not yet. Time will tell whether it’s a stunt, a magnificent entertainment, or a book of more literary haunting. Either way, it will be widely read. For young women, it will be seized on as a cautionary tale. Young men will fondle the moral conundrum that it poses. It may become a book that is read by everyone before leaving college, and rarely touched again afterward. I think that it tells one of those stories, composed of all the usual elements but to its own very peculiar ends, that everyone with some education will be expected to have read, whether or not there’s a movie.
The weather, somewhat cloudy late this morning, is sunny again, and still quite beautifully cool. Walking to dinner, we’ve carried sweaters that we’ve worn on the way back to the house. Tonight, we will stay home, just for a change; although I was determined not to cook, I couldn’t see the harm in poaching some chicken, boiling some orzo in the water, and grilling some large mushrooms, all for a salad with avocado and bottled Caesar dressing. I did bring a chunk of parmagiano reggiano. I’m throwing it together as I write, so that it can sit and steep while we take our walk on the beach — a walk that will be somewhat shorter than Monday’s and yesterday’s. (We’re sore!)
When we weren’t walking yesterday, I was bent over Confucius. Confucius say, “Vessel no vessel! Strange vessel! What a vessel!” Simon Leys pronounces this to be one of the most “terse” statements in the Analects. It is anything but incomprehensible, though, if you know that a ritual vessel characterized by squared corners was at some point replaced by one of a different shape, but called by the same name. Leys puts it thus: “A square vase that is not square — square vase indeed!” But there is no way to render the point in English. In Chinese, the name of the vessel, gu, was also its description — a single character that I can’t wait to hunt down in my modern dictionary at home. When the description no longer fits the object, the name ought to be changed, too. Confucius’s first act as a minister, he always said, would be to “rectify the names” — to call things what they really are. This is the opposite of what dictators usually attenpt, which is to rectify the named.
What makes “study” of this kind engaging is the classical language’s extradordinary pithiness: Confucius puts it all in seven characters, and only three different ones: gu not gu, gu wonder gu wonder. Hunting them down in Legge’s appended dictionary was wonderfully time-consuming