Again and Again
Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, 'had just broken into her fifty-second year.' The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce's Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response. But I would put it right alongside that epic, near the very top, because it rewards rereading at various stages of life. As Hillary Kelly wrote this week in The Atlantic, 'The novel's centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis.'
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section:
I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway, as many readers do, when I was in college, and it lit up my still-maturing brain. Like Ulysses, it takes place over a single day in June, pulling together a group of narrative perspectives to capture the physical and mental cacophony of modern city life. Its characters include Clarissa, who is about to host a high-society party, as well as Septimus Smith, 'aged about thirty,' a veteran of World War I who ends up jumping to his death. The juxtaposition of life and death, war and peace, youthful fury and wistful wisdom, reflects Woolf's ambition to deploy stream-of-consciousness style in the service of deep emotional realism. One of the first works of literature to depict what would later be known as PTSD, it is in part about the dangerous passions of youth.
And yet its title character is 51, married to a politician, and worried that she has forsaken a more adventurous life. Woolf writes that Clarissa, setting off to buy flowers, 'felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.' I know the feeling—now. When I first read one of the book's most pivotal scenes, in which Clarissa learns of Septimus's death during her soirée, I interpreted the moment as the reality of war intruding on a bourgeois order oblivious to its own decline. It is that—but it is also the specter of mortality that underpins the anxieties of middle age. As Kelly reminds us, Clarissa thinks: 'In the middle of my party, here's death.' Yet this thought is immediately followed by an intense affirmation, Kelly writes: 'She steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she's made, or perhaps because of them, 'she had never been so happy.''
Kelly finds parallels between this realization and a turning point in Woolf's own life: At 40, in a moment of respite from her mental illness, she managed to write this book, and then her equally classic novel To the Lighthouse. This was, Kelly writes, 'a season of fruitfulness' in which 'she produced her most profound work.' At 21, I was ambivalent about Dalloway 's conciliatory ending, in which a woman keeps dread at bay by learning to revel in small and ordinary pleasures. But today, I look forward to the year, not far off, when I will be Clarissa's age, so that I can read the book again, and see it with the kind of fresh eyes that only time and reading glasses can provide.
Mrs. Dalloway's Midlife Crisis
By Hillary Kelly
Virginia Woolf's wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age.
What to Read
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe loved big, colorful characters, and he found plenty of them in the cadre of postwar American fighter pilots who helped develop supersonic flight—and, later, manned spaceflight. Wolfe's subjects risked their lives in the skies over the California desert in military planes, then went on to join NASA's Mercury program, becoming the first Americans in space. They quickly became Cold War celebrities whose virtues embodied a particular vision of heroism: competent, courageous, ready to lead the world to a new and limitless frontier. But in his account of the early space race, Wolfe contrasts their boy-band glamour with a more laconic aeronautical hero: Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier while secretly nursing broken ribs and later pushed a juiced-up supersonic fighter beyond the edge of the atmosphere, barely surviving the ensuing crash. Skilled, relentless, and taciturn, Yeager embodied 'the right stuff'—that hard-to-define quality that the boundary-breaking pilots and astronauts ended up prizing above all else. — Jeff Wise
Out Next Week
📚 The Unbroken Coast, by Nalini Jones
📚 To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, by Jon Lee Anderson
Your Weekend Read
Marc Maron Has Some Thoughts About That
By Vikram Murthi
Back in the 1990s, when Marc Maron began appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien as a panel guest, the comedian would often alienate the crowd. Like most of America at the time, O'Brien's audience was unfamiliar with Maron's confrontational brand of comedy and his assertive, opinionated energy. (In 1995, the same year he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up series, Maron was described as 'so candid that a lot of people on the business side of comedy think he's a jerk' in a New York magazine profile of the alt-comedy scene.) But through sheer will, he would eventually win them back. 'You always did this thing where you would dig yourself into a hole and then come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,' O'Brien recently told Maron. 'It was a roller-coaster ride in the classic sense.'
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Those cuts will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children over the next few years. But there is no hierarchy to such things. The images of starving children in the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip that my wife, Ali, and I made 40 years ago next month to a food station in Ethiopia following U2's participation in Live Aid 1985, amid another man-made famine. To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. When the loss of noncombatant life en masse appears so calculated—especially the deaths of children—then evil is not a hyperbolic adjective. In the sacred text of Jew, Christian, and Muslim, it is an evil that must be resisted. The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival and elsewhere in southern Israel was evil. On the awful Saturday night and Sunday morning of October 7–8, I wasn't thinking about politics. Onstage in the Nevada desert, I just couldn't help but express the pain everyone in the room was feeling and is still feeling for other music lovers and fans like us—hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re'im then butchered to set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from the river to the sea. Hamas's leadership was willing to gamble with the lives of 2 million Palestinians. It wanted to sow the seeds for a global intifada of the sort that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015, but it could succeed only if Israel's leaders fell into the trap that Hamas set for them. Yahya Sinwar didn't mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force. Over the months that followed, as Israel's revenge for the Hamas attack appeared more and more disproportionate and disinterested in the equally innocent civilian lives in Gaza … I felt as nauseous as anyone, but reminded myself that Hamas had deliberately positioned itself under civilian targets, having tunneled its way from school to mosque to hospital. When did a just war to defend the country turn into an unjust land grab? I hoped Israel would return to reason. I was making excuses for a people seared and shaped by the experience of Holocaust, who understood the threat of extermination not simply as a fear but as a fact. I reread Hamas's charter of 1988; it's an evil read. (Article Seven!) But I also understood that Hamas is not the Palestinian people. Palestinians have for decades endured and continue to endure marginalization, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs. Given our own historic experience of oppression and occupation in Ireland, it's little wonder so many here have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people. We know Hamas is using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel, and I feel revulsion for that moral failure. The government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the government of Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. There is no justification for the brutality he and his far-right government have inflicted on the Palestinian people, in Gaza or in the West Bank. And not just since October 7; well before it too—though the level of depravity and lawlessness we are seeing now feels like uncharted territory. Curiously, those who say these reports are not true are not demanding access to Gaza for journalists, and they seem deaf to the revealing rhetoric. Examples that sharpen my pen include: Israel's heritage minister claiming that the government 'is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out'; its defense minister and security minister arguing that no aid should be let into the territory; its finance minister vowing that 'not even a grain of wheat will enter the Strip.' And now Netanyahu has announced a military takeover of Gaza City, which most informed commentators understand as a euphemism for the colonization of Gaza. We know the rest of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are next. What century are we in? Is the world not done with this far, far-right thinking? We know where it ends … world war, millenarianism … Might the world deserve to know where this once promising, bright-minded, flawed, but only democratic nation in the region, is headed unless there is a dramatic change of course? Is what was once an oasis of innovation and freethinking now in hock to a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete? Are Israelis really ready to let Benjamin Netanyahu do to Israel what its enemies failed to achieve over the past 77 years, and disappear it from membership in a community of nations built around even a flawed decency? As someone who has long believed in Israel's right to exist and supported a two-state solution, I want to make clear to anyone who cares to listen our band's condemnation of Netanyahu's immoral actions and to join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides. If you will not listen to Irish voices, then please, please, please stop and listen to Jewish ones—from the high-mindedness of Rabbi Sharon Brous, to the tearful comedy of the Grody-Patinkin family—who fear the damage to Judaism, as well as to Israel's neighbors. Listen to the more than 100,000 Israelis who protested in Tel Aviv this week for an end to the war. Listen to the hundreds of retired Israeli generals and intelligence leaders who say that Netanyahu has gone too far. Our band stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine who truly seek a path to peace and coexistence with Israel and with their rightful and legitimate demand for statehood. We stand in solidarity with the remaining Israeli hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release—maybe someone like the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, whom a former head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, described as 'probably the most sane and the most qualified person' to lead the Palestinians Our band is pledged to contribute our support by donating to Medical Aid for Palestinians. We urge Israelis, the majority of whom did not vote for Netanyahu, to demand unfettered access by professionals to deliver the crucial care needed throughout Gaza and the West Bank that they best know how to distribute, and to let enough trucks through. It will take more than 100 trucks a day to seriously address the need—more like 600 —but the flooding of humanitarian aid will also undercut the black marketeering that has benefited Hamas. Wiser heads than mine will have a view of how best to accomplish this, but surely the hostages and Gazans alike deserve a different approach—and quick.
