If you loved Miranda July’s “All Fours,” Knopf suggests, try Susan Minot’s “Don’t Be a Stranger.” How depressing. Minot is an O.G. writer of female desire who published the spare and potent “Lust and Other Stories” in 1989, when July was still in knee socks and Sally Rooney just a glimmer in Mr. Rooney’s eye. Its neon-lettered cover blazed from every cool girl’s bookshelf.
Minot’s 2002 novella “Rapture” took place during a single act of oral sex, a then-radical retort to the boys’ club of literary smut, the Brodkeys and Bakers. More successful was “Evening,” about a dying woman’s flashbacks, which she and Michael Cunningham turned into a Hollywood movie.
“Don’t Be a Stranger” lands more quietly than either of these works: an autumn leaf drifting to a pile on the pavement (leaves and trees are recurring motifs), but an intricately veined and gloriously colored specimen. Rather than a book you “can’t put down,” it’s one you might pause from precisely to prolong its mild suspense and poetic pleasures.
Even the main characters have a certain leafiness. The rule-averse, itinerant Ivy Cooper is a 52-year-old writer and divorced mother to a third-grade boy, Nicky, living near Washington Square Park in New York City after marrying in Tanzania and leaving his father, a solid but scowling do-gooder, in Virginia. (“Staying in one place was a challenge Ivy had not yet faced.”)
She falls into what is now known as a “situationship” with a 30-something musician named Ansel, like the nature photographer (he even occasionally picks up a camera), following a dinner party intended not so much to fix them up as throw them in each other’s paths. The dialogue there is quintessential New Yorker cartoon caption: “I’ve given up trying to quit,” a female guest says. “I’ve quit quitting.”
Obama is president and Occupy Wall Street is a low rumble in the background. But public affairs only faintly concern Ivy, a member of the class that the cultural critic Paul Fussell called X, wafting between privilege and glamorous penury. She is blessedly “bored to tears by talk about children’s schools,” often lets friends pick up the check at the chichi restaurants they frequent, and wants to do feminist charitable work, but has to scrabble for babysitters and the cash to pay them.
“Her feeling about finances,” writes Minot, herself from a New England family of eroded fortune, “was that if she looked too hard at them they’d turn you to stone.”
Ivy has little in common with Ansel besides, comically, their toiletry brands. He seems to be on the verge of celebrity, playing concerts, making videos, less a rolling stone than a “comet.” After spending seven years in prison for drug trafficking, he now has long hair, a black leather couch and an allergy to clear communication, let alone commitment. As far as I’m concerned he should be thrown back in jail for his sporadic, withholding, inscrutable texts and bouts of ghosting.
The reader is under no delusion — well, maybe briefly — that these friends with benefits but not enough health insurance might become a proper couple. Minot’s strength has always been to stay with her female protagonists’ pain: poking around in the shadows, dignifying their experience. “It was like tending an opium crop on your back terrace, and you had to make sure your guests didn’t look out there,” Ivy thinks of this erotically compulsive “thing” she can’t even call an affair. “So you invited fewer guests over.”
Edith Wharton, invoked in “Don’t Be a Stranger”(along with Henry James, Toni Morrison and altogether too much Rumi), wrote in “The Fullness of Life” that “a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” It’s interesting, then, that Ivy (living as she does in modest Manhattan quarters) seeks in a later chapter a cure for her Ansel addiction by visiting a series of chambers she codes by color: brown for psychotherapy, pink for yoga, gray for 12-step groups, red for the movies. Her social circle contracts and changes. A harrowing hospital episode completely changes the pace and quickens the pulse.
These are experimental flourishes, risky but brilliant, in the manner of psychedelics — just go with them. Otherwise, most of the novel passes in a dreamy cycle of coitus, seeking it and missing it (“the eddies before, the eddies after”). Compared to this year’s big erotic novels, “Don’t Be a Stranger” offers relatively conventional and heteronormative sex. But its effect on Ivy is totalizing, religious; it allows her to see “the miracle” of the world in an entrancing way. (“As long as you know that you’re licking honey from the razor blade,” warns the inevitable gay male friend.)
Shere Hite, Helen Gurley Brown and Nancy Friday may have passed on to that great water bed in the sky, but female libido is hot, hot, hot in serious fiction, and Minot continues to maintain one of the bluest flames. Somebody put her on a panel with July and R.O. Kwon, stat, and see what sparks ensue.
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