Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches.
The first impression we get of Levy in The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies is as a great enthusiast – for everything. Literature, of course, but also art, clothes, Freud and even the beauty of the lemons on her dining table, “happy in their own skin”. The literature about which she enthuses is of a particular kind – that which rejects “dull and dulling language”, which bursts out of the “oak-panelled 19th-century gentleman’s club” of literary tradition and makes things new.
Her impatience with this tradition is evident in her writers of choice: Ann Quin, who was “reaching for something new and bewildering” (and for whom, crucially, “the effort and exhilaration of that reach must have sustained her when life was tough”); Violette Leduc, whose “prose is kinetic and it is poetic, but it never collapses into poetry”; and her beloved JG Ballard. “I was not going to run to Ballard’s books to learn how to write a ‘well-rounded’ character, for God’s sake.”
I would describe Levy as evangelistic on these points, except that she probably doesn’t care whether we agree with her or not (“If this is my own view, it can be contested, and that is how it should be”). But that only makes her all the more persuasive, particularly on fiction as the most capacious of the arts, “a good home for the human mind”.
The main problem with this collection is that many of the pieces are very short indeed: three or four pages of large text. That makes essays on Colette, the Mona Lisa or the concept of hysteria rather slight. Elsewhere, the brevity is less important, as Levy is not a writer who wastes time clearing her throat. “The purpose of language for Duras is to nail a catastrophe to the page,” begins one brief essay.
The pieces that work best at this length are those unanchored to anything else: a telegram to an electricity pylon; the half-fictional, half-essayistic pieces Charisma and The Thinker. They are the sort of borderline thing that Levy does best. And the way these variform texts rub up against one another makes the book, curiously, feel more like a unified entity than a collection of bits and pieces.
Still, it is a collection, and it’s just plain odd that there is no table of contents at the beginning. But I suppose complaining about that would indelibly mark me as part of the “conservative literary establishment” Levy pokes fun at. Acknowledged, and yet estranged, again.