30: Book Review 12: Divorcing by Susan Taubes

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” - Sylvia Plath

Susan Taubes, NYT

Of course who other than Plath, who suffered a similar fate to Taubes in a premature death, could write The Bell Jar as depressingly as Taubes wrote Divorcing.

In Taubes’ novel, her main character, Sophie Blind (yes, the last name was chosen deliberately), unravels her marriage, womanhood, and her singularly Freud-conscious childhood, in a series of masterfully interwoven vignettes. The opening scene unveils her death almost unceremoniously, setting the stage for how a life could so easily be snuffed in more ways than one.

“She remembers the young wife, stoical and innocent. It was beautiful to be always busy, harried; being used up, this was what life was all about, she was becoming almost transparent. But now she is stuck with herself, a grubby phantom that fattens on her days.”(35)

Painting by Tracy Helgeson

In depicting the tragic heroine of Sophie Blind as a once selfless ideal of motherhood, we are constantly haunted by the ghost of who she, in hindsight, could have been. Taubes continuously reflects on Sophie’s potential, her stunted writing career, and her infantilization on the part of her husband, Ezra.

“No, I can’t give you a divorce unless you have someone else to marry you. I am responsible for you.”(39)

Taubes wrestles with gender expectations, marriage as a construct, social contracts, and mortal legacies. The overall tone is one of realization and surrender, a slow and steady relinquishing of imposed roles, annihilation. Taubes’ voice is critical, self-referential, and somewhat nihilistically balanced out with moments of magical realism and dream-like scenes after death. 

Her Hungarian American background is explored, alongside her Jewish descent and the overarching idea of never feeling at home or held. Her immigration during WWII to flee Nazism, her father’s Freudian impositions, her absent mother, and her earnestly dense husband, all form Sophie’s constant lack of solidarity and sense of exile. 

Sophie divorces from, more than anything else, herself and her convictions.

Divorcing falls under domestic fiction, dark comedy, or metaphysical fiction, but was experimental and subversive for the time it was published in 1969. If you enjoyed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or Outline by Rachel Cusk or An Apprenticeship by Clarice Lispector, this may be one to add to your list.