Book of the Week: The Bell Jar

**_”It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs…”_**

_The Bell Jar_ has an opening sentence so famous that reading it feels like stepping directly into the North American canon. Somewhere in between the two uses of summer I found myself feeling very smug: after years (and years) of not reading various things which I should have read, this sentence was the start of a title I could cross off my list. However in a bizarre reversal of expectations, by the end of the novel it is very, very hard to look at that sentence in the same way.

When Esther Greenwood wins an internship at a New York magazine in the summer of 1953 she believes it will give her the opportunity she needs to realise her dream of becoming a writer. However, she quickly becomes disillusioned with vacuous New York life and suffers depression. Psychiatric treatment and a nervous breakdown follow, and she eventually attempts suicide.

The Faber 50th anniversary edition, which I was unlucky enough not to have a copy of, has prompted debate over its choice of cover, leading Dustin Kurtz, a marketing manager at Melville House, to tweet, ‘How is this cover anything but a “fuck you” to women everywhere?’

To me this seems to be a contrived outrage: a product of instant reaction and Twitter rage. As I look at it, the Faber cover has its central element as the image in the mirror. It is more clearly defined, of a contrasting colour palette, and in the centre of the cover. This mirror image cannot, due to the angle, be reflecting the face of the woman on the cover. Instead, the mirror reflects the face of someone looking at the cover almost front on – it seems to me, that it reflects the deeper, more introspective character which emerges from the early gay world of New York. Regardless, it is the 50th anniversary and (far be it from me to be cynical) I suspect book editors all over the world were looking for something topical to fill column inches.

Where the novel takes hold, and where it’s entirely appropriate to spend my aforementioned column inches, is in the merits of the pages.

Social critique and an intimate psychological representation of mental turbulence justify comparisons with Kesey and Woolf and the imagistic style of the novel echoes elements of the poetry for which Plath is, perhaps, more famous.

Plath’s writing is filled with a delicate instability – Esther seems to take decisions on impulse, lie freely and spends most of her time drifting between procrastinations and self-reflections. Similes are ready to wantonly break the expectations of a reader, and the writing often takes itself on ramblings backwards and forwards in time, all the while maintaining the synthetic feel which gives us no faith in the past related or the results predicted. It is writing so deep and multi-layered that I felt myself looking backwards all the time, trying not to lose the insights and connections made in every paragraph.

New York reads like it is some kind of tropical wildness, Small Town America is as stifling as it needs to be, and her unnamed college, presented as the home of pretence and facade, is striking enough to make most Warwick students wince.

It is an overwhelming novel, better characterised by its ability to incite empathy than by theme or political concerns. You really feel the trauma of electro shock therapy and exhaustiveness of sleazy advances from a young sailor. It also tends to make usually fully-functioning English Literature students turn into gushing morons, as I’ve found out to my cost.

It is something to do with the weather, I think. All the way through there is an oppressive heat and an inability to sleep. Imagine living in the Learning Grid, and I like to think that you start to understand Esther better.