fall from grace

Whenever I’m looking for an apartment, which seems to be all the time, I think about Carrie Bradshaw’s much-quoted line from Sex and the City: ““In New York, they say, you’re always looking for a job, a boyfriend, or an apartment.” What Carrie didn’t consider is that sometimes you’re looking for all three. These are the totality of your hierarchy of needs in New York. This has been repackaged into a meme format: no one has all three.

Because I’ve spent so much of my adult life looking for an apartment, a boyfriend, a job, or some combination of the above, I’ve spent a lot of time considering this. The three things have started to become all mashed together in my head, entangled through a complex process of different kinds of systemic forces. I work in book publishing, a notoriously low-paying industry that is overwhelmingly made up of white women. It’s also an industry built around the assumption that someone else is supporting you, usually either a father (who works in finance) or a boyfriend (who works in finance). Because it’s so expensive to live alone in New York, most of the women I know have stayed in co-ed style sorority living until they either get a boyfriend or luck into a miracle apartment.

A lot of this has to do with the housing market and the ways it’s reinforced traditional forms of dependency: dependency on your parents, on a partner, on abusive jobs or situations. A lot of people were apparently mad at the Curbed article about vacant apartments, housing instability, and artificially inflated rents. None of those people, I assume, live in New York. I never believe in hell so much as when I’m interacting with landlords. An urban planner I talked about this with told me I had religious fervor about rent control. He was right, but the time has passed for believing in trickle down theories. It’s good to know where you stand.

Last weekend, I went to view a studio apartment listed at $1500 in a 1960s Soviet style building near Prospect Park. It was 5 degrees outside. When I got there, the broker told me that the $1500 one was still undergoing renovation and wasn’t ready yet, but that there were multiple other identical units in the building. He proceeded to show me 4 different studio apartments, all with separate kitchens, a lot of closets, big windows, all priced between $1175 and $1500. I felt dazed and confused, like I had stumbled into some alternative fantastical version of New York City, one in which there are a lot of affordable apartments readily available upon demand. A girl can dream.

The only fictional character I really strongly identify with is Lily Bart from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (my slightly problematic fave). Lily is the impoverished child of an upper middle class family that has lost its wealth. Like an Austen character, she has been educated for decorative purposes. She is witty, cultivated, beautiful, artistic, intelligent, a turn of the century style party girl. She also has extremely expensive tastes and has accrued significant debt from her lifestyle and from gambling. But in the novel, she’s almost 30, and still ostensibly looking for a wealthy husband. Lily’s problem is her duality of self: she’s torn between her superficial desire for luxury and her instinctive rebellion against the repressive mores of her social environment. She is courted and she fumbles it. She almost goes to church one Sunday to impress a very serious and uptight heir and then can’t quite make herself do it.

What I like about Lily is that she’s not an especially noble character. She’s not morally superior to the people who surround her, she just finds their pretenses and obsessions boring and hypocritical and deeply unlikeable. Her hesitation about finding a husband isn’t about her need for true love or her revulsion at compromise. She simply can’t play by the rules. She even destroys incriminating evidence against the woman who has ruined her reputation because it would harm the one man she actually likes, finally taking a moral high ground. Her contrariness is threatening to the fragile social fabric of her milieu which depends so heavily on everyone playing along. She is eventually made the victim of malicious gossip and disappears from society to work at a hat-maker. She becomes increasingly dependent on opium, overdoses and dies.

Although The House of Mirth was written in 1905, it feels stunningly relevant to me. More relevant than a lot of contemporary fiction. If there’s one thing that puzzles me about most contemporary realist novels, it’s the earnestness with which they approach everything, how worried their characters are about being good. Everyone in these novels is too anxious to be contrarian and too uncertain to assert control over their own desires. If they diverge from the norm, it tends to be moralistic, telling the truth in a world full of lies. Most of the time, they just go with the flow.

In an essay for The Drift about the “millennial sex novel,” Noor Qasim writes: “Neither robust enough to truly function as novels, with rich worlds populated by independent characters with their own attitudes and anxieties, nor self-aware enough to eschew convenient, classical plotting, these novels reiterate the same curiously unsatisfying pattern, as if repeatedly rehearsing the fundamental “need to tell” — to confess something, to speak one’s life aloud…”

It’s a strange current, one that people tend to ascribe to “cancel culture.” I think instead, like Noor argues, that it’s a faulty obsession with narrative convention. Becca Rothfeld makes the same argument about Sally Rooney in The Point, placing her novels in the narrative tradition of Twilight. Like a Rooney heroine, Bella Swan is aggressively normal and so when it turns out that her blood is like catnip to a handsome undead vampire, her normalcy is her salvation. She can’t process the idea that her lover might kill her, she believes in his potential for redemption. There’s a deep traditionalism underlying this, as Rothfeld points out. At least Fifty Shades of Grey (Twilight fan fiction) makes the traditionalism explicit. Grown-up Bella cures her lover of his BDSM fetish and helps him settle down. Marianne of Normal People also needs to be healed of her masochism by nice guy Connor.

Annie Levin links this overarching narrative tendency to the professionalization of writing, a lot of which happened during the Cold War. The idea of writing as “craft” and style over content is dogma in MFA programs and among the generations of writers they have produced. They “show don’t tell,” “write what they know,” are obsessed with interiority. Reading much of white American mid-century fiction is like falling into the recesses of someone’s really boring mind. “Serious postwar fiction,” writes Levin, “whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems.”

I think contemporary literary fiction has steered away from this tendency in some ways. It’s less introspective and more plotted. But it relies on a lot of the same basic rules: writing that is almost perspectiveless, that is about bland, normal life, and that has the naive, affected voyeurism of reality TV. It’s like Updike with YA beats, dead white men for book club women. If The House of Mirth was written today, according to contemporary rules, Lily would be at once less interesting and more exceptional, her anxieties would all vaguely resolve into “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” her aimless flirtation with the one man she actually likes would become a full blown love story, instead of dying at the end (a real buzzkill), she would be saved from debt by some extraordinary intervention. Or she would freeze her credit card, like Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic, and auction off her designer shoes — a very moral kind of self-salvation.

The other fictional character I think about a lot is the first disaffected woman of literature, Anna Morgan from Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys. Like Rhys, Anna grows up in Dominica and then moves to England at eighteen years old. Depressed and alienated and constantly sick, she gets involved with Walter, a wealthy man who eventually abandons her. From there her life spirals out of control and in the end, she nearly dies from an illicit abortion but survives to “start all over again.” Like Lily Bart, Anna Morgan doesn’t know how to play by the rules. She knows that her beauty is her only currency but she’s not self-aware or pragmatic enough to use it effectively. She is impulsive, she wants to fall in love, she is desperate for meaning. Her survival at the end gives her the chance to grow up and get world wise, but this isn’t a coming of age novel. Instead of acclimating, Anna is increasingly horrified by the world.

Her fall from grace has a lot to do with her status in 1930s London society, her promiscuity, her independence, and her colonial background. But Rhys is less interested in the story of a fallen woman shunned by the world, and more interested in how Anna becomes severed from herself, develops a duality of self. When she meets up with Walter, after he has broken up with her, she has a vivid fantasy about her own funeral, imagines telling him that she will die if he leaves her. Instead, she tries to reason with him, disassociating from her body in the process:

“It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it’s like to try to speak from under water when you’re drowned?”

The stakes are certainly higher for Anna and Lily, living in the first half of the 20th century, their lives more constrained by gender norms that they would be today. But what makes both books interesting to me is that the primary urgency that drives them that drives them isn’t the danger of being ruined. This is the thing that will eventually bring both women down. But the real danger is in the societies that surround them, in learning to conform and to navigate expectations. Both Lily Bart and Anna Morgan self-destruct because they want more from the world, because they believe they deserve more, more feeling, more honesty, more freedom. Anna’s deadly abortion is very much a thing of the present, society still has rules. So much has changed, so little has changed.