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‘If You Love It, Let It Kill You' turns navel-gazing into art

‘If You Love It, Let It Kill You' turns navel-gazing into art

Washington Post5 days ago
A few weeks ago, David Brooks ran out of things to write about in the New York Times and so decided to pour more water over some old tea bag about the death of literary fiction.
'America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,' he wrote, and 'the public taste is occupied with their trash.'
No — wait — that was Nathaniel Hawthorne back in 1855, but you get the idea. Our latest novels, Brooks wrote, have grown timid and insular.
As someone who's been reviewing fiction every week for three decades and often feels moved and dazzled, I could sense a rebuttal swelling in my evidently easily pleased brain. Just over the last few months, Bruce Holsinger's 'Culpability' tackled the ethical implications of AI, Susan Choi's 'Flashlight' explored the abiding tragedy of North Korea, Karen Russell's 'The Antidote' conjured up a magical tale of environmental destruction in the American West, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Dream Count' followed the intertwined lives of women in the United States and Africa.
Timid and insular, sir? I think not.
But it was then, perched atop my high dudgeon, that I noticed I was reading Hannah Pittard's 'If You Love It, Let It Kill You.' Pittard, as you may know from her 2023 memoir, 'We Are Too Many,' is an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. Now she's written a novel about an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. It sounds like the kind of book you'd want to keep on the bottom shelf if you had to debate David Brooks about the ambition and audacity of contemporary American fiction.
At times, you might even wonder whose side Pittard is on. Early in 'If You Love It,' the narrator admits, 'I'm a chronicler of the everyday mundanities of life.' She imagines her students complaining, 'Where's the plot?' Her partner tells her, 'You're a family of navel gazers.'
He's not wrong, but that Brooksian dismissal hardly tells the whole story, because the success of such a novel depends on the navel and the gazer. For all its quirky self-referentiality and cramped plot, 'If You Love It' is an account of female anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction. For decades, male anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction passed as capacious themes for fiction (See: 20th-century novels by White guys named John). That such audacious writers as Pittard, Kate Folk, Ada Calhoun and Miranda July are turning those themes on the lathes of their own sharp fiction isn't just fair play, it's cause for celebration.
Pittard's special contribution is her ability to braid strands of pathos and comedy. The melancholy narrator, an avatar of the author trimmed down to 'Hana,' feels besieged by the close presence of family, including her sister's household next door; her severely unbalanced father, who wants to be a charming character in one of her books; her eccentric mother, who's dating three men simultaneously online; and her partner's 11-year-old daughter, who has surely heard Hana say she doesn't like kids.
What's worse, Hana has just learned that her ex-husband is about to publish a novel about their ruined marriage that portrays her as a smug, insecure hack. The publisher will be using her full name in the publicity material.
'You can't use fiction as a means of making false accusations about living people,' Hana says. 'It's unethical. Fiction isn't a platform for revenge.'
These indignant lines are funnier if you're tuned into the literary kerfuffle that's been rumbling between Pittard and her ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, who did, in fact, publish a novel last year called 'Set For Life' inspired by their ruined marriage. But what's pertinent to most readers is that this story follows a mad woman, a woman mad at life, who lives too much in her head, is dogged by erratic erotic urges and suspects there might be something troubling about her desire to play dead. 'It's all happening too quickly,' she thinks, 'and it couldn't be over too soon.'
Hana's humor keeps rolling over these adamantine terrors like waves, but periodically when that tide of comedy pulls back, we find ourselves stranded with a middle-aged woman crying, 'oh my god this is not what my life was supposed to be, is it?' At such moments, 'If You Love It,' feels almost too heartbreaking to bear.
But Pittard doesn't leave us there. For one thing, Hana imagines her writing students critiquing her story as it takes place. And they aren't particularly kind — 'Is this some sort of plot device?' they ask impatiently. Hana doesn't hold back on them, either. She portrays her students as chronically unimaginative writers always pestering her for permission to add vampires and talking cats to their work. Until, what do you know, a particularly acerbic kitten paws into Hana's life and starts mewing no-nonsense advice. And with that surreal intrusion, 'If You Love It' tilts another few degrees away from reality's plumb line.
If memoir is that pious figure who vows to tell the truth and then lies, autofiction is the cheeky kid who wants extra credit for confessing her deceit up front. Is Pittard working through her own private catastrophes in this novel? Of course — but so is every other novelist. She's just letting us see the splintered timbers of her experience clearly enough to recognize our own.
'This book,' Hana tells us, is 'neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life.' And what is that, really, besides the long struggle to understand — and appreciate — that we're all characters in each other's stories.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.'
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