Hustvedt's great themes are consciousness and identity, along with art, and over this latter part of her novel-writing career (The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, this one), the female experience and patriarchy have been equally to the fore; the blurb copy on my edition declaring her the 21st century's Virginia Woolf feels only mildly hyperbolic, if at all.
In its staging as a book being written by a woman with many similarities to the 'actual' Hustvedt, looking back on her younger days in 1970s NYC and littered with multiple intertexts including the diary and novel-in-progress of that younger self, Memories of the Future actively invites reading through the lens of both what one might imagine one knows of Siri Hustvedt, the author, and one's own experiences - and, subsidiarily, the intersection between those two, ie one's own experiences of Hustvedt's previous writing. For me, that goes back at least 15 or so years (but maybe, unwittingly, longer) and takes in a couple of gigantic milestones in What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American (*) as part of an ongoing engagement.
And in some ways Memories of the Future feels like a culmination of her novels to date - not because it's her best, but in the way that it draws together so many threads that have run through her writing/life specifically from the vantage at which she's now arrived ... making it all the more impressive that it's so compelling in its own right, and that it finds a way to end in a way that conveys a leaping forward into the future.
The prose is as good as ever, with the sections containing the big set pieces suffused with a sense of build-up and portent (especially the assault in her apartment and the dinner party scene that culminates in her outburst) and the threads of mystery and female-ness across the multiple layers of texts meaty and satisfying; especially good is the representation of multiple types of meaningful female relationships (mother-child, sister-sister, friends-in-twenties, induction into the mysteries of collective older feminine experience via Lucy and the witches). Whatever it is that Hustvedt has been tapping into and deepening for so long, it's still there.
