DNF BUT! I understand the importance and cultural significance of this novel. I enjoyed the writing and how it is from a classical period where stories like this were few and far between. It just wasnt for me right now and I didnt want to continue reading it for the sake.

THOUGHTS ON A RE-READ: As I had posited in my initial review from 2016 below, I fully expected to 01) feel an inexplicable need to return to this sooner than later, and 02) this inimitably odd novel would totally click for me knowing what I was getting into from the start. Both of these things came to pass. What a mysterious, supremely unlikable text, in all the best, most fascinating ways. Rating bumped up from four stars to five.

[Read #20 of "2021: My Year of (Mostly) Midcentury Women Writers"]
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ORIGINAL REVIEW: By the time I felt like I was finally getting a handle on this bitter, black-hearted little novel, it was all over. As I quickly discovered, to make the acquaintance of these titular two ladies is to be initiated into a state of perpetual disorientation; I was not, I’ll frankly admit, adequately prepared, even if Bowles’s novel frequently brought to mind the work of her contemporaries [a:Djuna Barnes|30013|Djuna Barnes|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1212886093p2/30013.jpg] and [a:Flannery O'Connor|22694|Flannery O'Connor|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1469878767p2/22694.jpg], two favorites of mine.

All three authors have an uncanny ability to distill unsettling visions of the world into terrifying portraits of individuals who, by simply defying the “natural” order of things, unleash an aura of chaos and existential anarchy around everything they do. Yet turmoil is often the source of humor, and I’d say the work of all three is funny—albeit in bleak, dark ways. But where Barnes and O’Connor employ violence (both emotional and physical) and grotesquerie to elicit the kind of laugh that transforms into a horrified gasp before it manages to escape the throat, Bowles’s approach is more akin to screwball comedy, a comedy of manners where the main players have decided to redefine what “manners” entail, upending the world around them (ie “until recently [Miss Goering] had never followed too dangerously far in action any course which she had decided upon as being the morally correct one”). That said, these forms of comedies depend on a sense of order and decorum reestablishing itself by the resolution, typically with a romantic pairing reinstating the “unruly” female safely back into the social order. Not so with Two Serious Ladies: it’s instead a whirligig of despair whose last words offer no sense of solace. Instead it feels like a temporary stopgap in an inevitably continuing story destined for misery and destruction.

But also, in the meantime, a sense of escape, even freedom. Perhaps?

Aware of the general outline of Bowles’s biography (sadly, an infamously tragic one), one of the things I was curious was if she would be working in the grand queer tradition of taking up a certain term to signify covert lifestyles and behaviors, and there does seem to be some evidence to support such a reading. In the novel’s first few pages Miss Gamelon inexplicably moves in with Miss Goering—indeed, I assumed these would be the two “serious” ladies—and immediately entwine themselves into an incredibly intense codependent relationship; Mrs. Copperfield has a similar impulse toward Pacifica, noting that the Panamanian prostitute “takes everyone quite seriously” as she takes “Pacifica’s hand in her own.” I’ll be paying closer attention to this on inevitable (at some point) repeat readings, but whatever inflection one wants to read into them, it is undeniable that there are not only more than just two serious ladies populating Bowles’s novel, and, furthermore, all take their relationships with other ladies very, very seriously.

Barnes’s rueful observation the she was “the most famous unknown in the world” also resonates with Bowles’s own legacy, having long been regarded as one of the great, undersung prose stylists of the twentieth century, inspiring an almost cult-like veneration from writers who achieved a much larger degree of fame than she ever managed to (Tennessee Williams’s proclamation that Two Serious Ladies is “his favorite book” and that he “can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic” continues to adorn current reprints of the novel; Truman Capote, John Ashbery, and Bowles’s own husband Paul were other prominent supporters). Millicent Dillon has more recently described how “one soon begins to know the sound of a Jane Bowles sentence, its odd jumps, the way in which it continuously confounds expectations, the way in which secrets are withheld and as suddenly revealed.”

Perhaps Bowles does reveal some secrets throughout the tangled trajectories of the two serious ladies of Two Serious Ladies, but it seems more defined by its resolution to always remain something of an enigma, restless and on edge. I can’t say I actually much enjoyed the process of reading this novel, but I nonetheless sense that it will be joining the small cadre of texts I find myself returning to on occasion, almost inexplicably, trying to scratch some kind of deep itch it has created. To try and discover some answers to the unnerving existential questions it poses—even if I never really expect to ever actually find them.

"She thought that she was only interested in duplicating a dream, but in doing so she necessarily became the complete victim of a nightmare."

For one reason or another, the most likely one being I can't quite put my finger on what it is I'm getting from it, this book draws a number of other titles and times to my mind. The introduction mentioned Carson McCullers, I had suspicions of Flannery O'Connor, and then there's the famous husband and and the quoted (more?) famous playwright on the cover. I'm sure this has as high a chance of amounting to an indication of personal interest as it does the obsessions of today's academia, what with the word Modernism being thrown around at times, but that doesn't lessen the instance of when I thought of [b:Under the Volcano|31072|Under the Volcano|Malcolm Lowry|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390014193s/31072.jpg|1321805] and everything clicked. I read that one long enough ago to not have had an awareness of exotification in literature and all that colonialist jazz (the irony), but the messy scrabbling at the corners of civilization for a barest scrap of ethics is familiar. Putting UtV's lushfest of a military industrial complex next to TSL's quagmire of white female performance of sexuality and class in the late 30's and early 40's, you can't really say one's more obvious than the other.

A number of people describe this book as crazy, or the author as crazy, or use the word crazy somewhere in the vicinity of their review; all I can think is that if I were looking into this book today, I wouldn't have added it like I did two years ago. As someone whose history of "crazy" could get her fired or institutionalized if the wrong individuals catch wind of it, the carelessness with which people throw this word around is both threatening and lazy cause seriously, what crazy we talking about? Major depressive disorder? Bipolar disorder? Borderline personality disorder? A mix of all three and then some? Cause things get really fun when the diagnoses cross borders and doctor's don't want to know what the hell is going on.

Crazy's got a hierarchy like any other grouping of human beings, from the marvels of creative folks to the recent adaptation of Deadpool having his schizophrenia erased cause producers don't want him to be "too" crazy. Look up the way schizophrenia literally eats at your brain, compare how often schizophrenic individuals are killed compared to the rest of the not "too" crazy, and you can see the mess these adapters are trying to avoid. In light of that, next time you call someone/something/somehow "crazy", are you doing it cause they're weird? Cause they're different? Cause they shot up a school and that correlation between mental illness and violence must be upheld as absolute? I can't tell if one person did it and the others are just following or the ideological connectivity of the concept's really that universally convincing and it's flat out unnerving.

Trust me, I liked the picking at presentations of femininity, socioeconomic brutalization, the ethical heaven of one being the moralizing hell of another, the rich being rich and the poor being poor and a modern day saint of a woman instantly regaled to the line of sex work cause that's how females on the lam always function in this society of ours, but seriously, where the fuck is this lazy "crazy" business coming from. Do you actually know what you're talking about in the wider spectrum of what many have to take into account every day of their lives? Or are you just being cute. The slurs didn't help either, but someone's going to throw a tantrum about chronological universality if I go down that pathway, so I'll just leave that there.

Look, if you're some sort of crazy like I am in the literal, biological, governmental sense of the word, you can do whatever with the crazy cause that's your life. The rest of you, I'll be over somewhere else for the sake of my well being while you figure out what exactly you mean by this "crazy", and what you intend to accomplish.

This is a really strange little book. It's taken me a while to post a review because I really don't know what to say about it. It's at times hilarious, and I loved Mrs Copperfield, it's totally surreal and I'll probably never forget it.

I found this book in an article about gay authors' favorite books, and this was mentioned multiple times. The title is like the book, both in earnest and in jest. The two "ladies" in question are Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, who both are trying to discover themselves in different but absurd ways. Goering is an heiress who moves out of her mansion into a desolate shack on an island, allows her house to be inhabited by gold-digging hangers-on, and finds herself going home with a series of disreputable men. Meanwhile, Copperfield goes to Panama with her husband, only to abandon him in order to take up with a teenage prostitute and the middle-aged proprietoress of a run-down hotel. For being published in 1943, it's quite frank about bodies and sexuality. It's oddly compelling and amusing, though I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it at times.

What in the what?

This was perplexing and not enjoyable. The introduction (which I read last) was illuminating, calling the book an existentialist exploration of the grotesque lives of “neurotics and freaks,” and yes, it was definitely that, but rather than feeling stirred to sympathy and understanding, I felt little more than that I had been snatched from the real world and thrown into a cocktail shaker full of nightmares. The introduction to the 2014 version quotes from a 1978 intro that compares the book to something by Lewis Carroll, and I can see that (the characters are all mad here), and it also recalled what I remember from having hated my way through “Confederacy of Dunces” twenty years ago. I’m definitely not a reader who connects to the constant disorientation of trying to follow characters who act and think in wholly irrational and unrealistic ways. While I bet this made a hell of a splash in subject and style when it was published in 1943(!), it was far, far too far out for me.