Household Words by Joan Silber

Now he slept in her brain like a worm in an apple, and fed off her mental processes; this was what it meant to be eaten away by grief.  Only this wasn't grief--she was past the pain of fresh mourning, wasn't she?--this was the slow erosion of personality by the habitation of some other.  It was most like those mothers who died from toxemia carrying dead fetuses within them.  She was sorry she had ever let her life be so linked, so ingrown, with that of another person.  It was too late to escape now, but she was certainly sorry she'd ever had children; they were like the past, they clung and clung.

In the 1940's, Rhoda Taber is young and relatively happy, married to a successful pharmacist.  "She couldn't help feeling contempt when she saw people who would choose misery," Silber writes, when Rhoda sees a "bum" at the Jersey Shore, "carrying it with them like an unattractive feature they made no attempt to conceal."  A detail like that is a death sentence, you know, calling misery down on the character's head.  And at first it seems like the misery that will seize Rhoda will be of the ordinary suburban type, the realization that being married and having children will not make her fulfilled, and that's part of it, sure.  But the narrative shifts dramatically when Rhoda's husband Leonard dies of a heart attack in the middle of the night, leaving her as a single mother with two children.

I was surprised to flip to the copyright page and see that Household Words was written in 1980.  It seems so much more like the kind of suburban panic novel that was popular twenty or thirty years earlier, like a book by John O'Hara or John Cheever or Richard Yates.  Maybe it took that long for the novel to become something women could write about women, also, an affirmation that what Emerson said about "the mass of men" leading "lives of quite desperation" is as true--perhaps moreso--for women than men.  But in any case, it has a sort of aggressive realism that seems very antiquated; there are no metanarratives, no pyrotechnics.  Household Words is remarkable--to the extent that it wants to be remarkable at all--in the sharpness of the character drawing and the solid plainspokenness of its prose.

It's also remarkable in that it's very, very bleak.  Rhoda, having grown older and become chronically ill, perpetually in conflict with her rebellious daughter Suzanne, marvels that her life has been made up mostly of unpleasantness and misery.  And she's not wrong.  But it's hardly misery on a grand scale--she's not a refugee of war or a starving child.  Rhoda has been unlucky but not spectacularly so.  Her life is both ordinary and miserable, and that seems like the point: the ordinary life is frequently miserable.  Silber pointedly avoids any sort of grand resolutions; Rhoda neither finds love again after Leonard's death or ultimately reconciles in any meaningful way with Suzanne.  When life ends, as it does for Leonard, it rarely does so in a way that allows loose ends to be tied up or grand statements to be made.  Call it the life-sucks-then-you-die school of philosophy.

I enjoyed Household Words, if that verb is appropriate.  It seemed scarier to me than any Grand Guignol gothic novel, because its monsters are so ordinary.  And in doing so I found it much more effective than those older, similar novels, which often seem to think that ennui is the biggest punishment the world can wield, bigger than grief or illness or death.  Or, thinking about novels like Appointment in Samarra and Revolutionary Road, they seem to belief that death is the consequence of ennui, or disillusionment, rather than the destructive and random force it is.  Household Words, by contrast, refuses to offer a neat or circular narrative that might suggest it's all fictional.  Instead, Silber suggests it's all too real.