our lovely review from our lovely guest host deja needs no introduction from me, except for a few apologies that it’s taken me a week or so to get this posted.

On Reading Sad Books: Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackensie

“I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes–a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it.”

–Jean Rhys, in Good Morning, Midnight

The plotline of After Leaving Mr. Mackensie is simple and sad. The main character, Julia Martin, has been taken care of by men her whole life, been a mistress of sorts, but now, after a split with her latest lover—Mr. Mackensie—she’s too tired to muster up the energy it would take to woo a new suitor and her looks are fading anyway. She’s broke; she’s gaining weight. She spends time fantasizing about beautiful clothes but can’t afford them. She wanders alone around Paris, reads books in the seedy hotel rooms she rents, sleeps and drinks too much, and observes a (mostly) indifferent world with (often) painful precision. The book is more about interiority than action, but the action that does take place is driven by money, by Julia trying to scrape together enough to live on. She asks for it from falsely generous former lovers, a curmudgeonly uncle, and a sister who can’t spare a dime and resents Julia’s perceived “freedom.”

It doesn’t sound like an uplifting story, does it? Why would you read something so depressing, you ask? Good question. I’ve been asking it constantly during the last few weeks.

I’ll say this first: I don’t generally have a problem with sad books. I lap them up. Still, I do have limits. I was reminded of this last week when I was watching a particularly depressing television show and I found myself shouting, “Why am I watching you?! All you’re doing is making me sad!” And maybe, if you read Rhys’ book, you shouted something like that at Julia Martin. I would certainly understand if you did. Or maybe she just annoyed you. She’s not really a pull-up-your-bootstraps and better your situation sort of heroine. (Or is she?)

Perhaps we all have an individualized sad book threshold, and I think we need to honor that limit, but I also think there might be merit in reading sad books, in coming up against that threshold. As much as I want to live in a world where everyone has “large incomes” and there’s nothing but “flat green [meadows]” and “[feeding] sheep,” I think what sad books acknowledge is that we don’t live in that world, that people struggle in lonely poverty like Julia Martin, that to pretend they don’t is to miss what’s really going on. The form of After Leaving Mr. Mackensie echoes that point: in stark, unsparing tone, we move through the heads of the main characters—from Julia’s thoughts to the thoughts of those she’s asking for money. We are not spared what they think of Julia. Rhys isn’t asking us to paint over her flaws or pretend she’s noble. She’s just asking us to look. As my husband said, when I read him a paragraph out loud, “Books are the only way we realize that other people are actually people.”

But maybe it’s more than that. Rhys famously said, “I have only ever written about myself,” which means she must have identified with Julia. I wonder if I could say that I have only ever read about myself. In a way, I think that’s true. At least I’ve most enjoyed reading about myself. Not to say I’m a heavy-drinking, aging, professional mistress, but I’ve been sad, and I’ve been lonely, and when I read Rhys, maybe what I’m feeling is a sort of equilibrium: what I’ve felt inside is finally matched by something outside. As poet Kay Ryan put it, I’m less lonely by one.

For example, in the second chapter of the book, Julia goes for a walk. The narrator tells us, “She walked on towards the quay, feeling serene and peaceful. Her limbs moved smoothly; the damp, soft air was pleasant against her face. She felt complete in herself, detached, independent of the rest of humanity” (17). I’ve been on that walk. After hours stuck in my house, literally stuck, despairing, I’ve managed to escape for a walk, and I do feel that relief, a quiet sort of lonely but delicious relief. The world is still there; it’s still possible to walk around in it, even if I don’t feel a part of it. Julia’s still breathing; she’s survived again. We’ve survived again.

And I think that’s perhaps what could even be considered hopeful here: Julia survives. She makes it somehow, again and again, and we have reason to believe she’ll continue to do so. Even Rhys survived being a sort of Julia and lived to tell about it. So now we’re reading this book, which sees the world with astonishing precision, which makes me want to go out and look more closely at things like rivers and book stalls and men’s eyebrows.

And somehow, for me, when I get to the end of a sad book, the heart swells. I want to go out and be in the universe, have the breeze pleasantly brush my cheeks. I think of another post-depressed walk I took, when I realized, walking down my front stairs, that the world had been there all along, plugging away, sunny, full of things beyond my despair. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, but I walked along, twirling my arms like twin pinwheels, not caring who saw me, shouting out loud, “The world! The world!”

Here’s what I want to know, in addition to (or in lieu of) your thoughts on After Leaving Mr. Mackensie: Do you have a sad book threshold? How do you know you’ve reached it? Do you enjoy sad books? Do you shun them like rotten cabbage? Why or why not?