Pariseau is a writer and editor in New Orleans. Christine Smallwood 's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Further, the book available at Google Play Books is $9.99. See offers Yet at times they border on tenuous or tedious, as when she compares a homeless man on the train to Coleridges ancient mariner, and then the albatross around her neck, before doubling back to say that the thought was simply poetry unloosed from a book; or when she finds the experience of her ultrasound lacking in comparison to her favorite scene (transcribed in full) in Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain. Occasionally, Dorothys allusions, spanning Kafka and Du Maurier and Claire Berlant, resemble the clumsy spackling of a doctoral dissertation. But therell be another Jopher. A Lucky Jim for the millennial woman; blistering, darkly comic, and splendidly written. Youre never less than confident in the performance, and often dazzled. Christine. Something went wrong with your request. Here are 22 essential L.A. spots for every tourist, Column: We cant afford another writers strike. Its too much, communicating about being alive; being alive is too complicated, especially these days, she has decided. Such moments have the potential to shed new light on the reality of bodies, but in Smallwoods novel they seem to crop up as graphic ballast against Dorothys cerebral flights. Christine is around 31 years old although details regarding her age and the year she was born remain unknown. In these novels, women crave the clarity of crisis but will do almost anything to avoid it; suppressed anger and social frustration are usually close at hand. Megan Nolans Acts of Desperation, about a woman in thrall to an older man, stands out from similar tales with an uncannily self-aware narrator. She paces circles around her own mind, a provocative but ultimately frustrating place, not a staging area from which to launch useful action. Cathy Park Hongs book of essays bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. I'm remembering them for other things as well. While there, she began the program as a student of post-war American literature and finished as a Victorianist. Ad Choices. Hes in no position to insist on his imperfections or ambiguities. Second- and third-guessing herself comes naturally. Dorothy spends a lot of time locked in bathrooms. The Life of the Mind is her first novel. How should a person feel? she wonders. As I once heard the mystery novelist and humorist Lisa Scottoline say, if it doesn't make you wince, it's not funny. Create a free family tree for yourself or for Christine Smallwood and we'll search for valuable new information for you. On the subway, Dorothy ponders the way her fellow-passengers effectively become a group while being addressed as one, by a milky-eyed man shouting his life story (such, Dorothy reflected, is the power of a speaker). She is an adjunct English professor in New York City dog-paddling to status-signal her worth in academia; she has two therapists, the first of whom is unaware of the second; aside from her boyfriend Rog, the would-have-been father, she has told nobody not her best friend, not her therapists about her pregnancy or its end. Soon the girl shows up at his motel and demands that he give her an abortion. A cherished former editor of mine used to offer a koan-like dictum: Ideas make you stupid, hed remind me from time to time. Densmore is a doctor, trained to penetrate the body and not stay on its surface. The part of me that dislikes all my stupid ideas wants Dorothy to turn her brain off for thirty seconds, cue up Go Your Own Way, and achieve fleeting animal pleasure. This is a privilege that Densmore, the fall guy, cant afford. Smallwood writes: Judith was old and Dorothy was young, Judith had benefits and Dorothy had debts. I never asked him to elaborate, because I was afraid that any resulting ideas would indeed make me stupid in the way this dictum seemed to referenceso obsessed with perception that Id stop actually perceiving, so focussed on the conceptual that Id neglect the actual, churning world. She has worked in the City, journalism and as a tour guide, run her own consultancy, written four books on Italian food and travel and been involved in food . Christine joined the Academy of Urbanism as Managing Director in July 2022. Christine Smallwoods debut novel, The Life of the Mind, advertises its intellectual side in the title. I'm Christine Smallwood, a food and travel writer specialising in Italy. Our current literary moment is obsessed with autobiography and memoir. Thus, there are no clear details regarding her family (parents and/or siblings) whereabouts remain unknown. She thinks of losing the pregnancy as less than a trauma and more than an inconvenience., If you think Dorothy might be protesting too much, she would probably agree. Even before the miscarriage, Dorothys been having a difficult time, though she is far too circumspect, and her malaise too vague, to describe it that way. Was she tired? Novelist Lynn Steger Strong on the revolutionary passivity of Rachel Cusk, Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney how weve misread them and what comes next. The environmental crisis might be worldwide, but Dorothy, like all of us, is endlessly, claustrophobically trapped inside herself. It has no shape or size. Therell always be abortionists just as therell always be prostitutes and pimps and pushers. Densmore is bizarrely jumpy, unfree, concerned with being observed. .more Learn more Woven throughout The Life of the Mind is Hetis keen observation of her social circle, glimmers of Cusks medium-like once-removed storytelling, and a tendency toward the fragmentary, of which Offill has become the literary establishments patron saint. And with that, Densmorebattered and beaten from a fight with Bonnie Lee Crumbs nasty boyfriendcollapses on the floor. Smallwood's talent for psychological acuity shines through here as she paints an achingly familiar portrait of someone who spends too much time in her own mind. Christine Smallwood's debut novel dives deep into her single-named protagonist's postmodern blues, probing into the atomized life of an adjunct professor of writing who recently miscarried and who is precarious in every possible way. On his way into Arizona, he makes the mistake of picking up a hitchhiking girl out in the desert. 3,561 posts. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. A debut novel has some uncomfortable answers, Is the literary trend toward passive women progress? Dorothy had once been a rising star, thanks to a published essay on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, but after a decade in grad school she's gone stale, even as she can't imagine what else to do. The final scene of Smallwoods novel is perhaps the books most successful. A French graduate, she lived and worked in Paris before settling in London with an architect. Christine is secrative when it comes to details regarding her family. Smallwood is a shrewd cultural critic, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harpers Magazine. (Things even sag a bit when Dorothy lands at an academic conference in Las Vegas and moves through the city and her human interactions there in a more conventional storylike way.) That is, Hughes was able to explore race and difference because she put evil somewhere else. Smallwoods work brings to mind that of Elif Batuman and Sam Lipsyte, writers for whom the form of the novel can feel like merely an excuse (and a fine one), a vessel to hold roving psychological and social observation. Christine Smallwood holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Only the unborn can be blameless and incorruptible. Another and another and another. Get started Geni World Family Tree. Unable to align the miscarriage with a narrative frame for her life, she doesnt talk about itnot with her respectfully distant partner, Rog; not with her buoyantly self-absorbed rich friend, Gaby; not with her therapist; not with the backup therapist shes sought out to discuss her need for a backup therapist. All rights reserved. She lived in the epilogue of wants. The book contains 208 pages and is New York Times, Times Magazine, LitHub, and White Review Best Book of 2021. Hughes has been accused of whitewashing the Densmores, and its true that they conform to a white ideal: they fulfill every upper-middle-class expectation, whether its reading Longfellow, quoting Milton, or achieving scholastically. At precisely those moments that seem most conducive to considering her lost pregnancy, she slips into abstraction; looking at the ultrasound of her recalcitrant uterus, she thinks about synesthetic paradox and Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain. Still, her mind keeps presenting her images of the primacy, and casual monstrosity, of the body: a dog shed once known, so riddled with tumors that he felt like a sock filled with gravel, and a friend who had a cyst on her elbow, and who was putting her hair in a ponytail when suddenly streams of white confetti burst out.. Christine Smallwood, whose debut novel is The Life of the Mind., Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Pamela Paul criticized for anti-trans opinion about the word woman, A starry-eyed Elizabeth Taylor biography misses a golden opportunity, Katie Couric scrapped RBGs remarks on national anthem protests to protect her, Review: Why do women stay with toxic men? Sylvester Burr Smallwood. Her career kicked off in 2005 when she worked as an editor at The Nation. Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. She has started seeing a second therapist in whom she confided her doubts about the first therapist., Dorothy teaches two to four courses per semester, including one called Writing Apocalypse, at a private university whose list-price tuition was twice her annual earnings.. Christine stands at a height of 5 ft 6 in (Approx 1.71 m). For fifty pages before the girl dies, a humidity of suspicion and paranoia hangs over the novel. It's in this mistaken understanding between knowledge and truth, ideal and reality, that literary critic Christine Smallwood situates her debut novel The Life of the Mind. The problem of the twenty-first century is a problem of waste, the book scolds. Her bank balance delivers only panic; meanwhile, her best friend regards a ten-thousand-dollar couch as a steal. Dorothy had debts unfree, concerned with being observed that densmore, the Life the... Hongs book of 2021 put evil somewhere else way into Arizona, he makes the of. 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