Siri Hustvedt’s new novel explores fiction’s role in feminist consciousness-raising.
Few things are more excruciating for a writer than confronting the words written by her younger self. Her tone is bound to seem stilted, her thoughts alien or insignificant. Did I really think that? she wonders, aghast. Worse yet: Did I really commit it to paper? Ensure that my words would come back to shame me in the future? As Jane Austen well knew, the real pleasure in reading one’s “Juvenilia” or “Scraps” comes from measuring the distance between talent and art. At least, that is the hope.
Siri Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future, is a self-conscious exercise in juvenilia. The narrator, known to us only by her initials, S. H., and her nickname, Minnesota, is moving her mother from one area in a retirement home to another when she stumbles across her own journal from almost 40 years earlier. She recalls herself as she was then, a lanky blonde from Webster, Minnesota, who had left home for New York City to enroll in a graduate program in comparative literature. The year was 1978. The city was severe and inviting, alive with art, music, sex, drugs, poets, punks, panhandlers—the perfect setting for S. H.’s transformation into a novelist. “This book is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery,” S. H. announces, lest there be any doubt that the novel is a Künstlerroman. It proceeds to shift awkwardly between S. H.’s present-day narration and a clutter of found texts: S. H.’s journal entries from 1978 and 1979, a draft of a novel she wrote but has never finished, and delicate, undated caricatures of people ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Donald Trump.
A relentlessly self-aware writer, Hustvedt must know that she is stacking the deck against S. H. and herself. The novel amasses all the tired tropes of urban intellectual fiction: the single girl in the city, eager to convert life into fiction; her coterie of witty, intellectual friends (“the Dear Ones,” she calls them); the graduate student she dates, who, in the heady days of high theory, is too besotted with the work of Paul de Man and Michel Foucault to appreciate either S. H.’s desire (her “low-grade genital burn”) or her literariness; the dirty and dazzling romance of New York. As she has done in all her novels, Hustvedt indulges in lengthy metafictional meditations on art, time, and truth. “Every book is a withdrawal from immediacy into reflection. Every book includes a perverse wish to foul up time, to cheat its inevitable pull,” S. H. thinks, and even she finds her thoughts annoying. “Blah, blah, and hum-da-di-dum. What am I looking for? Where am I going?”
The novel is not exactly good. Then again, a writer’s juvenilia are not supposed to be good. They are supposed to be tentative, aspirational, incomplete—imitative and unrestrained. “The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory. Hustvedt’s novel asks us to forgive its ragged edges, its aggressive mediocrity. It invites us to sift through the disordered sheaf of papers to find sentences, pages, fragments that testify to the author’s future greatness, her ability to one day write a work of fiction as celebrated as The Blindfold—Hustvedt’s 1992 debut, also about a young graduate student in New York, a concept then still fresh—or The Blazing World, Hustvedt’s previous, Man Booker Prize–nominated novel, about a female artist masquerading as three different male artists to reveal the misogyny of the art world.
