I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that 'uncanny' might be a good way to describe the effect that What I Loved had on me as I was reading it. It's one of those novels that really reminds one of - and there's not really any other word for it - the magic of literature, the way that words can (and, probably, inevitably do) invoke worlds, and in particular the way in which this occurs somewhere intangible between and beyond the words themselves...
What I mean could be understood on two levels, I think, only one of which I'm immediately trying to get at. The first, perhaps more fundamental level, is the magic inherent in words, language, literature - the way in which meaning emerges at all from them in the (shared) space between text and reader...and that's something of which Hustvedt is, I think, keenly aware. But it's really a second sense, in some ways more tangible - though I wonder if it's not ultimately even more mysterious - of which I was reminded by reading this novel, and that's the way in which a novel (or, I suppose, any configuration of words, form, symbols, what have you) can seemingly not be saying anything that would speak to a particular reader (me) and still distinctly have an effect and leave that reader with a sense of truth and insight.
What I Loved is strangely mesmerising, and I think that that's where the sense of the uncanny comes from; it's that strangeness which also prompted the above thoughts about the unplaceable effect of literature (its trace, perhaps)...all of this being by way of an attempt to say this: I don't understand the effect it has had on me. In repeatedly talking of 'effect', I don't want to suggest that reading What I Loved feels like it was some kind of pivotal or especially life-changing experience - it's more that I found myself throughly enchanted by the novel, and felt its lines (and, always, what lay between those lines) actively affecting (effecting) me, which certainly isn't the case with every book one reads, and possibly (though I'm not sure - it may be quite the reverse) particularly not with books without an obvious 'personal' hook.[*]
So, in a way, it's really that sense of the absence of an obvious 'personal' hook which is underlying all of this. But that, too, is kind of an odd thing for me to think, because really What I Loved is about an awful lot of things which are definite interests/preoccupations for me - an incomplete list would include art, subjectivity and selfhood, the spaces between people and between private and public worlds, and the possibilities of dialogue, understanding and communication (not to mention Lacan) - so it oughtn't to be at all odd (uncanny) that I should have responded strongly to it. Maybe it's a question of form - all of this is wrapped up as a novel primarily about people rather than about ideas (though as I write those words I wonder about their accuracy), and, let's face it, I don't read many contemporary novels in which the story and characters seem to be front and centre, and in which style is, at least in an overt sense, relegated to the background. But I don't think that that's the whole story (so to speak), either, not least because I have my doubts as to just how foregrounded said structural elements really are...and that's probably wrapped up with the novel's being at once far less simple and far less complex than it initially seems - which is maybe just another way of saying that it's both simple and complex, and remarkably subtle despite seeming to be replete with signposting and fairly overt intra-textual commentary.
Anyhow, I haven't said a great deal about 'the book itself' but that's probably quite appropriate in this instance; I could have written, briefly or at length, about the shattering transition from parts 1 to 2, or the equally shattering final twist on the novel's title, or, from a different angle, the clarity and transparency of the prose or the careful handling of pacing and tone, but all of that seems, well, certainly not irrelevant, but still not immediate, the presence through which that which is absent (etc, etc) makes itself known. I thought that maybe once I started writing about it, and its effect, I might arrive at a clearer understanding or perspective, but that doesn't seem to have eventuated, at least not so far as is immediately apparent - but I can't help but feel that something has been achieved along the way, regardless.
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[*] I started trying to pithily summarise Gatsby, The Secret History, The French Lieutenant's Woman and maybe something each by Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland or A Wild Sheep Chase, probably) and Lurie at this point, before giving up. Even though, in each of those cases, I feel intuitively that their particular appeal to me is readily available (and so, presumably expressible), in the attempt to find the words for that intuition and appeal, I came up against an apparent essential irreducibility...which must be a good thing.
[**] This being the chronology: The first time I heard Hustvedt's name was by way of an interview in the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, in which everything she said made me sure that I'd enjoy her writing, and somehow I settled on What I Loved as the one to read. In the interim came across a collection of her essays, A Plea for Eros, which I picked up because it had her name on the front and bought on the strength of the parts of the essay on Gatsby that I read in the bookstore. And then, after much searching in secondhand bookstores, at last scored a copy of What I Loved from the city library when I went to look at "Lexicon" (along with The Accidental, which is next up on the reading list)...
