Sarah Crown 

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt review – who tells the story?

A novelist looks back at her younger self in 1970s New York in this smart investigation of misogyny, authority and the nature of fiction
  
  

'The book feels less like a novel and more like an intellectual reckoning'... Siri Hustvedt.
‘The book feels less like a novel and more like an intellectual reckoning’... Siri Hustvedt. Photograph: Rebecca Miller/The Observer

The narrator of Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel describes it as a “portrait of the artist as a young woman”. Now 61, and an established author, she’s clearing out her mother’s apartment when she comes across the journal she kept aged 23, when she arrived in New York from rural Minnesota. Reading it she finds herself delivered back into the deep furrows and jagged edges of a time that the intervening years seemed to have smoothed out. From this point, the novel unspools in a series of interwoven threads: extracts from the journal are set against the present-day reflections of the author – initials SH – and both are intercut with chunks of the novel that SH had gone to New York to write.

As the strands twist together, and present and past echo and amplify one another, a series of atemporal themes begin to emerge: the incomprehensibility of time and the fragility of memory; the strengths, failings and enigmas of fiction; misogyny, authority, entitlement and selfhood. Memories of the Future is a portrait of the artist, certainly, and of New York in the 1970s, which Hustvedt joyously depicts as hot, dirty and cacophonous. But it’s also far more than that. As layered as a millefeuille, as dense and knotted as tapestry, it feels, by the time you reach the final pages, less like a novel and more like an intellectual reckoning; an act of investigation into how, as a woman, it is possible to live well in the world, and enter effectively into the conversation about it.

It’s a mark of Hustvedt’s thoroughgoing intelligence that the idea of investigation is another of the novel’s explicit themes, as well as an aspect of its undertaking. The similarities between criminal detection and literary criticism – both require the reading of signs, the following of clues; both involve the construction, and deconstruction, of narratives – are widely acknowledged, and Hustvedt makes hay with those connections here. This is a novel laden with signs, which knowingly positions detection as its central metaphor. Installed in Manhattan in a “grim apartment … with views of two dirty brick walls in the stinking summer heat”, SH works at a desk she’s built herself from “two-by-fours and a plywood sheet” on a novel whose teenage hero, Ian, “read so much detective fiction as a boy that his mother worried his eye would be strained”.

Ian attempts to live out his Sherlock Holmes (another SH) fantasies by investigating the supposed crimes of his Minnesotan hometown, and recruits his friend Isadora – smarter, more sensitive and altogether more interesting than he is – into the sidekick role of Watson. While SH wrestles with her characters, and the dawning realisation that her blithe assumption that her hero should be male is in fact open to question, she is distracted by a real-world mystery unfolding in the apartment next door.

Through the flimsy wall she hears, night after night, the sounds of a woman in the grip of some great distress. The woman – Lucy – alternately wails for her lost daughter, who either fell or was pushed from a window, and talks on the phone, discussing what sounds like a plan for revenge. SH asks her mother to post the stethoscope that had belonged to her doctor father (the original and beloved male authority figure whose actions she is also beginning to doubt) so she can hear more clearly, and begins to transcribe her neighbour’s utterings, in the process creating texts that she attempts to sift for meaning.

But when it comes to texts, meaning, as the older SH understands with absolute clarity, is malleable; it shifts and slides depending on what you yourself are bringing to the reading. When SH shares the transcripts with her “gang of five” friends, they each come up with their own interpretation of Lucy’s actions: she is mad; murderous; a cult member; an artist. It’s not until SH comes to know Lucy – after an episode which sets off clear #MeToo resonances – that she discovers the lie at the heart of detective fiction: the idea that we live in a logical universe where “every sign is the route to a solution”.

In the end, Hustvedt offers one possible solution to the riddle posed by this teasing, complex, disconcerting novel: that the greatest influence on the meaning of a story begins and ends with authorship – “who gets to tell the story, and in what way”. This holds as true, she suggests, for family mythologies as it does for novels; for history as it does for fiction. Unless and until women are fully in control of their own stories, meanings are being lost.

Memories of the Future is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

 

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