Divorcing by Susan Taubes

For a little while longer she tried to understand what induced her to abandon a more exciting, important pursuit just for lying in bed in this room, till she realized it was not a considered choice. She blundered into awakening. If she is still baffled, and even while getting on her feet with relative ease, struggles to recall by what tremendous effort she flung herself or was cast out of sleep, if this Wednesday morning seems so odd in its banality and part of her mind continues to dive for some deep reason it's because in the dreamer's world it had to make sense. Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living--a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end.

Sophie Blind wants a divorce from her husband, Ezra. They are already living apart, Ezra in New York and Sophie in Paris, shuttling their three young boys between them. Sophie is already seeing other men, men who provide her with passions missing from her marriage to Ezra, but no more a possibility of permanence. Yet, Ezra is adamant that the marriage cannot end, refuses to grant the divorce, until the problem is solved--Sophie is killed by a car while crossing a New York street. Wait a minute, we ask--is this novel being narrated by a dead woman? Sure enough, in the very next chapter, we find ourselves within her consciousness as she lies in her coffin, being attended by her family, her still-husband, her children, each rewarded by her death by being more in control of her life and being than ever.

Divorcing is one of those books that rhymes unsettlingly with the author's life. Shortly after its publication to tepid reviews, Taubes took her own life by drowning. (Her body was identified, in another one of those lovely literary rhymes, by her friend Susan Sontag.) The sense of an eerie coincidence in Taubes' death is undercut by the fact that it was a suicide. Sophie is self-evidently a version of Taubes herself, also a Hungarian emigre to the United States and a daughter to a notorious psychoanalyst; in her suicide, perhaps, Taubes brought her life even further in line with that of the character she had created. This knowledge only amplifies the bittersweet fantasy of the dead narrator, who can hear as her life is measured and assessed, and who is called on by an angelic jury to make an accounting of it.

One of the strange things about Divorcing is that it moves backwards. It opens with Sophie's post-Ezra life, and her tragic death, and from there moves back in time to her young relationship with Ezra and her childhood with her father, the analyst. In a way, it's a novel that mirrors the process of analysis, moving deeper and deeper through layers of agglutinized time to what, one hopes, are the fundamental truths at the root of Sophie's ennui and despair. The logic is implacable and undeniable; as Sophie's father notes, the "new science" is incontrovertible because it "said that it was part of human nature to dislike and reject its view about human nature. You thought you were saying something against the doctrine or about human nature but in fact everything that was said in the doctrine was about you." In the same conversation, he notes that Sophie "was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it." The narrative plumbs back father and farther, trying to explain Sophie, and pulls out this plum--her issues with men are, at root, Daddy issues. And yet the role of men--her father's carelessness, Ezra's domineering--are for their part absolved.

As it goes backward in time, Divorcing goes backward in style. By the end of the novel, Taubes seems to settle into a skillful but straightforward realism, abandoning some of the more avant garde touches that characterize the novel's first chapters: the structural and temporal shifting, the narration by the dead woman--this aspect of her point of view never returns or is reemphasized--and the loose play with genre and form: a long conversation between Ezra and her father, for example, is formatted in dialogue like a one-act play. A biography of Ezra is captured in Renata Adler-like vignettes. It might be said that the novel moves toward realism as analysis uncovers the truth; to me, we are meant to be reminded of the ways that realism, too, conceals and obscures, and that truth--and liberation, that goal which is reached for an not attained--requires new modes and styles from us. I think you can feel Taubes reaching for that, a literary mode that would free the spirit and mind from the cage of bourgeois marriage; that the novel expresses its own failures makes it doubly sad.