The Furies (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: The throes of a talented, beautiful woman
Review: Janet Hobhouse dipped into Greek mythology for her title. The furies hounded mortals who committed certain acts of impiety. Patricide was such an act. No, such homicide is absent from this novel, at least literally. What a reader finds is an astute mind gifted in words conducting a pitiless self-examination thinly dressed as fiction. A devotee of genre fiction may not be attracted to such a novel. No body falling out of a closet or floating in a pool. No shoot-out on a dusty western town street. No menacing or benign extra terrestrial slumming our planet. No auburn beauty breathless in the arms of a regency stud. We accompany the author's persona on a journey through a life, privy to the joys and griefs, the romances, the break-ups, the successes, the set-backs, a beautiful, talented women is subject to. The furies (three in number) serve as a metaphor for the regret, guilt, and sorrow Helen is unable to escape. A large portion of the narrative is cast in the meditative style of the essayist. Scenes are not frequent, although a crucial moment, the climax actually, is presented in what for the author must have been excruciating detail. Another metaphor, again borrowed from the ancient Greeks, is appropriate to describe this work. Ms. Hobhouse explores the twists and turns of her life as Thesus explored the labyrinth, searching for truth, however devastating, at the center of her being.

Rating:
Summary: Two-thirds of it a great work
Review: Janet Hobhouse's last novel THE FURIES was published two years after her death in 1991, and its incompleteness shows. The work is a thinly fictionalized family memoir of an improvident but glamorous matrilineage living largely on their wits on the edges of Manhattan life throughout the course of the twentieth century; the doomy narrative centers upon the author's alter ego, Helen, who grows up shuttling between home and expensive private schools, watched by her unhappy mother, her artistic grandmother, her odd aunt and great-aunt, and eventually her cold father living in London. The first two-thirds of the work are fantastic--as superb a fictionalized memoir as THE BELL JAR, with each chapter acting as a beautiful short story in its own right, all permeated with the author's singular blend of lush prose and sweetly rueful melancholy. But when Helen marries a wealthy Englishman and her fortunes change drastically the tone of the novel remains exactly the same. When the narrator then uses the same complaining tone she used to describe her mother's mental illness and her father's verbal abusiveness to describe how alien ated she and her husband become for having such much nicer and more expensive houses than their friends, your sympathies for her begin to dry up completely; even when Helen's luck again turns for the worse, she's by then exhausted all the reader's patience. Had Hobhouse had time to finish the work before her early death, she likely would have surmounted these problems in revision; as it is, the work is very flawed but still more than worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: A dizzying experience
Review: What I found most interesting about this book was how many details Janet Hobhouse packed into it, something that originally tricked me into thinking that it was autobiographical. It's not a book you want to sit down and read all at once, but you'll find it hard to put down if you're into aknowledging the harsh side of life.