The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (3)

I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.
---


Outside in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, "It's so bitter."
"What, Mama?"
"Old age."

The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (2)

The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural form dominated almost entirely by a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of woman read fiction. Most men don't. Woman read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does." The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at the time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B's, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.

The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (1)

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless, an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank. We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, an the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay.