The Language of Grief

Many fiction writers are obsessed with a particular subject that informs their work: money, sex or love, for example. Claire Messud writes in the language of grief. She uses it to speak about people exiled from their homelands, their families, themselves. Her characters are brooding, melancholy types who suffer losses both real and imagined and who tend to mistrust moments of happiness. They are often itinerant figures who, rather than risk abandonment, choose to depend mostly on themselves.

“The Hunters,” Messud’s third book, comprises two novellas that explore loneliness and exile, themes the author explored in her previous novels, “When the World Was Steady” (1994) and “The Last Life” (1999). Messud has always been a writer of beautiful, if occasionally cluttered, sentences. Just look at how much she reveals about the protagonist of “A Simple Tale” in the story’s first line, which also opens her new book: “When Maria Poniatowski let herself into Mrs. Ellington’s apartment at 7:55 a.m. precisely (she was always five minutes early; she timed her walk that way), on the third Tuesday of August in 1993, and saw, straightaway, the trail of blood smeared along the wall from the front hall toward the bedroom, she knew that this was the end.”

That sense of intrigue is maintained throughout the piece, as Messud masterfully unfolds, layer upon layer, the bittersweet story of a woman looking back upon her life.

Ukraine-born Maria has been Mrs. Ellington’s cleaning woman for 46 years, and the deterioration of her employer’s temper and health stirs Maria to reflect on their tumultuous relationship. The 92-year-old Mrs. Ellington is a feisty, stubborn woman--she often behaves like a bully--but “difficult as she could be,” Maria realizes, “Mrs. Ellington was family.”

Maria, now in her 70s, also reflects on her traumatic past: working in Nazi labor camps as a girl; relocating to Toronto with her beloved Polish husband, Lev (now deceased), to begin a new life; and raising her son, Radek, who is now married with children of his own and who seems ashamed of his immigrant parents. (He prefers to be called Rod.) Messud’s descriptions of Maria’s strained interactions with her snobbish daughter-in-law provide some of the story’s best passages.

The flashbacks of Maria’s life frame “A Simple Tale” and portray a lonely woman alternately drawn to dwelling on the past and feeling repelled by it. “The different parts of Maria’s life were like fragments of a broken mirror,” Messud writes, “and although she could see herself in all of them, she could not make them fit together.” Serving hors d’oeuvres in her maid’s uniform at a party one night, Maria cannot believe that the party guests “could not smell, from her olive skin, the stink of the camps (of camp upon camp) nor detect the ache of nights spent in German ditches.”

“A Simple Tale” describes with subtlety and deep compassion a woman struggling to feel at home with herself, to feel proud of her identity in the absence of a husband and child. Adding to the story’s resonance is Messud’s stylistic habit of using parentheses to contain heartbreaking details and insights, as Elizabeth Bishop did in many of her poems.

“The Hunters” is so unlike “A Simple Tale” that it could have been written by another person. It tells the story of a misanthropic American academic living alone for a summer in a London flat. He (or she) is researching a book on death, describing it as “an analysis of the shift between an eighteenth-century conception of death and a Romantic conception thereof, and ultimately of the poetic manifestations of that shift.” The narrator’s alienating London neighborhood evokes “to the even superficially informed visitor teetering toothless Irishmen and snarling pit bull terriers looming against a backdrop of garish discount shops, fly-kissed butchers’ displays and cratered pavement.” When a busybody downstairs neighbor, Ridley Wandor, rings the doorbell one day, the professor’s hermetic existence is effectively ended. “It was a brutal and invasive ringing,” says the narrator. “An assault rather than a serenade.”

The story takes a gothic turn when the professor suspects that Ridley, a home nurse, may have murdered her elderly mother, as well as her other patients. Whereas Messud’s tone is empathetic in “A Simple Tale,” here it is mocking and cruel. For no apparent reason, the professor finds Ridley’s presence “irredeemable, heinous, utterly unpardonable. I hated her the moment I set eyes on her, and all I ever wished was that she would not be.” The professor’s absolute hostility toward Ridley--expressed in obsessive, resentful meditations throughout the story--seems pathological to the point of absurdity.

Ridley is portrayed as a grotesque, stupid woman who is pathetically clueless about her neighbor’s contemptuous demeanor. The vivid descriptions of Ridley’s physical appearance are excessively nasty, resulting in characters rendered so unlikable as to be uninteresting. The story also poses a problem with the identity of its narrator, who is nameless and genderless. Messud’s coy, fussy efforts to keep the reader guessing about the narrator’s gender is distracting and tedious.

Although “The Hunters” begins promisingly by plumbing psychological terrain in the style of Henry James, it ends as a not-quite-successful piece, something like a hybrid of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. The author should be admired for experimenting with such different styles of writing; however, the tone of the second story seems too discordant, too jarring, to complement the first. Yet Messud is such a gifted and intelligent writer that even her missteps are well worth reading. *