"The summer without men" by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre, 2011)

The female narrator (Mia Fredricksen, a poet who teaches at university) goes a bit mad after her husband Boris (a neuroscientist) has an affair with a younger, French colleague (Boris's brother had killed himself a few years before, Boris finding the body). They have a daughter, Daisy. Out of hospital after less than a month, she stays near her mother and her mother's friends - 5 old, lively women who she learns from. She has time to think. She's in touch with her therapist, Dr. S. She writes a journal with notes about her sexual history. She's getting threatening, anonymous e-mail from "Nobody". She has bursts of free associating -

Sturm und Drang. Whose play was that? Friedrich von Klinger. Kling. Klang. Bang. Mia Fredricksen in revolt against the Stressor. Storm and Stress. Tears. Pillow beating. Monster Woman blasts into space and bursts into bits that scatter and settle over the little town of Bonden. The grand theatre of Mia Fredricksen in torment with no audience but the walls (p.17)

Later she slides from memories of school bullying to a list of forms of cultural ostracism (apes, Apaches, Amish, etc). She quotes from her poems and those of others (John Clare, etc). To help pass the time she teaches a little poetry group of 7 prepubescent girls. She observes them as they grow and reveal themselves. She dislikes their "You just have to believe in yourself" clichés. She compares their attitude to males (how they change when boys are around) to the old women's attitude.

She gets to know the neighbours - a couple (Lola and Pete) with 2 little children (one nearly 4, the other a few weeks old).

Story construction becomes a theme - I am not so philosophically naive as to believe that one can establish some empirical reality of THE STORY. We can't even agree on what we remember (p.89) ... This story of Mia and Boris begins deep in a marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights. If it is to be a comedy, then it must fall into Stanley Cavell's territory, the comedies of repetition (p.99) ... My own head was a storehouse for multiloquy, the flux de mots of myriad contrarians who argued and debated and skewered one another with mordant parley (p.101) ... The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, (p.103)

The phrase "Dear Reader" appears, with direct addresses to the reader -

• Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people (p.105)
• We are going to leave Alice lying there ... To be frank, it's a bit boring, so we shall dispense with the long and tortured job of getting the words out of the child and return to her once she has produced them (p.119)
• How to tell it? asks your sad, crack-brained, crybaby narrator. ... It gets a bit crowded from here on in ... And we all know that simultaneity is a BIG problem for words (p.135)
• Mia, you are saying, get to the point (p.148)

The thoughts are interesting in themselves and also drive the character development forward. On p.123 she compares Columbus's discovery of America with Renaldus Columbus's discovery in 1559 of the clitoris - "Both the peoples who had been living on "New World" soil for thousands of years and, I dare say, most women would have been stupified by these "discoveries"". On p.146 she points out that we all begin female, an inversion of the Genesis myth.

She starts corresponding with Nobody - about consciousness, flux, change, and neural networks. Several times in the book she wants to pinpoint moments of change - becoming a women, going mad, gaining/losing identity.

The young poets and their mothers have a meeting about why one of them was bullied. It's not like male bullying. Historical attempts at investigating Male/Female differences are dealt with. The girls, with the help or mia, resolve their issues. Meanwhile some of the old women die. Mia and Boris make friends again. But what was the role of the Bea character? Or Lola?

Typo: "Onan, if you recall from page 77, was punished for wasting his seed" (p.123) (in this book, it's p.78)

Other reviews

• Justine Morgan
• Maria Russo (Hustvedt’s novels tend to be as somber as they are intellectually invigorating ... in keeping with the novel’s upbeat atmosphere, this time the intellectual menu includes not just Hustvedt’s usual forays into philosophy, literary theory, neurology and psychiatry, but also an investigation into romantic comedy ... What feels lacking, unfortunately, is the story itself, Mia’s respite from her marital woes via an all-female summer in Bonden.)