Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

"But you have gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?"

"True enough, said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years. I know I am guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before."

Mrs. Copperfield was getting drunk and looking more disagreeable.

The "two serious ladies" of Jane Bowles' novel are Cristina Goering and Frieda Copperfield. "Miss Goering" is a rich woman who begins to collect companions to fill her empty house, like the truculent Miss Gamelon, and Arnold, a hapless and pathetic suitor who is soon followed by his more charismatic and interesting father. "Mrs. Copperfield" is a married woman who leaves her inconsiderate husband in Panama to take up with a beautiful prostitute named Pacifica and live in a run-down hotel. These two stories are largely separated, though Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield intersect briefly at the novel's beginning and ending. Both depict a woman "going to pieces," as Miss Goering describes Mrs. Copperfield, throwing off the absurdities of bourgeois expectation for the absurdities of free love and squalor, which are no less absurd but are at least a little more fun.

It's hard to describe how strange a book Two Serious Ladies is. It has the light tone of a comedy of manners, but there is something alien and alienating in the aspect of the two women, and the people they come across. Two Serious Ladies is mostly a series of encounters; either someone will take an interest, often at random, in one of the two protagonists, or they'll take an interest in someone else. (Such interests are often one-sided, and when mutual, deeply ambivalent.) These interactions are mostly circular, non-eventful, without forward progress except in the sense that everyone keeps drinking and gets drunker. Structurally, the book is pointedly uneven and off-kilter. And yet, on the whole, the downward thrust of both women's story is clear. In throwing off the shackles of bourgeois, it isn't clear that either of them is much happier or more free, but neither are they significantly punished for their transgressions.

It's hard to know what to make of the novel; it's outrageous and over-sized but not quite funny in the typical sense. Its primary quality is it strangeness, which I suppose is a virtue in and of itself--I may not have done a good job of explaining or showing how, but there really isn't another book like it. Like the "two serious ladies" themselves, it's truly original.