CK Stead's latest novel is certainly fun to dissect, writes Cushla McKinney.
THE NECESSARY ANGEL
C K Stead
Allen and Unwin
BY CUSHLA MCKINNEY
The Necessary Angel, a truncated version of which appeared in the short story collection The Name on The Door is Not Mine, presents a year in the life of four people as they re-evaluate their primary relationships and the direction of their lives.
At the heart of the story is Max, a New-Zealand born professor of literature at the Sorbonne, around whom three women revolve in non-intersecting orbits. First is his French wife, Louise, who has exiled him to the basement of their apartment while she works on a new edition of Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, a trial separation that may or may not become permanent.
Then there is his colleague Sylvia who, overwhelmed by existential angst and the transitory nature of the Universe, has decided to pursue happiness in the moment, although her attraction to Max is complicated by the fact she is living with another, equally married man.
And finally comes Helen, a student from England who smooths her bipolar mood swings with a combination of lithium, Zen and Gurdjieff, and is determined to become Max’s muse.
Max is in love with Sylvia (or at least the idea of her), is sleeping with Helen, and longs to re-establish his old routines with Louise. Rather than choose between them he retreats into literary theorising and self-pity, allowing things to drift until, like the collapse of a quantum wave function upon observation, the theft of a valuable painting leads to a resolution of relationships for all four of them.
In many ways this is the epitome of one of Stead’s most familiar tropes, featuring writer-narrators whose self-referential reflections on the creative process and the relationship between word and meaning invite the reader into the authorial mind.
To take just one example, Max reflects upon the difference between learning language by ear and by eye, the inability to fully grasp the subtle nuances of words tied to symbol rather than heard like music, akin to being born deaf and thus unable to learn to talk "like everybody else" (perhaps he would benefit from reading Sack’s Seeing Voices rather than Amis’s The Zone of Interest).
Similarly, Helen has come to Paris in an attempt to understand a sentence from Derrida by putting herself inside "the French Mind, the French language", and eventually concludes this is impossible and that he is "something you just had to struggle with and make the best of, like the refrain of a song by Shakespeare".
My biggest difficulty with this style of writing is that it can easily turn into a pretentious game, and I can’t decide whether the fact this may well be Stead’s last novel abrogates or amplifies this tendency. Although the invitation to conflate character and author is a deliberate and deceptive conceit, in some ways it feels like he is attempting to reclaim his work from classification as post-modernist anti-realism.
As he has argued elsewhere, his writing goes beyond realism in an attempt to "get nearer to reality, not to dispense with it" and this assertion is fully in evidence throughout the novel; Louise is editing a new edition of Flaubert and hopes to argue in favour of clarity, intelligibility over the obliqueness and uncertainly of New-Wave novels in which readers are "freed to make new meanings, new interpretations and so to become yourself the author of the work". Max is working on a comparison between Doris Lessing and VS Naipaul — one so effortless, the other so effortful — and concludes that "pleasure and pain [is] felt in every sentence of the one and the other; and yet neither [is] better", a sentiment that leads Louise to reflect that, unlike theorising, literary criticism is real writing. Even Helen, the most sympathetic character and the only one who actually does anything, eventually abandons Derrida and Max to return to her scientifically-minded, rugby-playing boyfriend.
In a further attempt to counteract accusations of superficiality, the personal turmoil of the novel’s characters are set against the backdrop of political and social turmoil in the face of which, an authorial interjection reminds us, "literature ... meant almost nothing in the bigger picture, and almost everything to those oddballs for whom life was meaningless and ugly without it". But the need to tell rather than — or in addition to — show feels unnecessarily clumsy.
At the risk of raising the ire of one of our country’s foremost critics and authors, I have to say that as fun as it is to dissect The Necessary Angel, it ultimately left me unsatisfied. For those who love Stead’s writing, however, I’m sure it will be a welcome addition to an extensive and illustrious body of work.
- Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
