Books |
Nadja on Nadja
Tsipi Keller
By
Published: May 01, 2019
Category:
Fiction
Jean Rhys — the author of the cult favorite, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie — died in 1979. But looking deep into the life of a troubled woman didn’t die with her — unflinching novels about women who are self-destructive and doomed have become a sub-genre of women’s fiction. I haven’t read many of these books, but of the novels that investigate the lives of troubled women, I am especially taken by Tsipi Keller’s.
Reading Jackpot was like taking a drug so strong you couldn’t come down, even if you wanted to. The book tracks the crackup of a 26-year-old junior editor who lives in the shadow of others. On vacation in the Bahamas, she cuts loose — she becomes a good girl gone wild. She’s hurtling toward the abyss, about to free-fall, and while you hope she’ll stop, you’re watching a process you know about but rarely see. You’re fascinated, even turned on.
“Nadja on Nadja,” Keller’s twelth book, is about a woman we see every day. She works in a Manhattan office in a meaningless job, lives in a walk-up on the Lower East Side, has a married lover. That drab reality isn’t where she really lives. She’s writing a novel, “Woman Ending Badly.” And she’s writing it at work. She spends much of her day not doing her job, in fact, which requires her to be on the lookout for her boss, who might show up at her desk at any moment — and when he does, he must not see her writing. But how happy can he be to always see her screensaver? Where is the project — the Efficiency Report — she’s supposed to have completed?
The tension of the book is between Nadja’s rich, complicated inner life and her life in the world. Inside, there are the usual dreamer’s fantasies: “Her work is published to wide acclaim, there is money in her bank account, she never has to go to the office again.” But there are also dazzling perceptions: “She longs for passion, for true and lasting partnership, something she has yet to experience. She is greedy, yes, but the hungry are always greedy.”
So a moment in the office bathroom has more than the usual possibilities. Looking out the window, she imagines she could…. Jump. “She imagines the fear catching in her throat as the wind rushes past her face — the sheer, if brief, exhilaration of giving in to nihilism and madness. In another part of her brain, it surprises her that she, of all people, would even entertain such a thought; she who, in spite of everything, is usually optimistic, not to say hopeful, and is always aware of what is good and what is bad for her.”
Who has not thought this? Yes, but who writes it? And who keeps you in suspense — not a spoiler alert: Nadja is extremely alive at the end of the novel — for 148 pages? In its way, “Nadja on Nadja” is a thriller. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Nadja’s book title — but I see I’m speaking of Nadja as a person, not as a character in a novel; that’s how seductive Keller is — suggests her acute self-awareness. “I have this idea about women in trouble of their own making,” she tells her best friend. “Women who end badly because of their own gullibility and poor judgment. In fiction and in life.”
Graduate students will note that “Nadja” is the title of a book by André Breton; it’s one of the most significant works of French surrealism, posing the question “Who am I?” Keller is a gifted translator, mostly of Hebrew literature into English; she’s won prestigious fellowships. You may confidently believe she was thinking about Breton’s question and his title when she named her character. It is a testament to the high-wire act she has created that Keller has translated her erudition into prose in a way that doesn’t show off anything but her talent.
