36 The New York Review
When Reality Slips
Ruth Margalit
The Man Who Saw Everything
by Deborah Levy.
Bloomsbury, 200 pp., $26.00
If you’ve read Deborah Levy’s punchy
memoir The Cost of Living (2018),
you know about her string of pearls.
At around the age of fifty, just as “life
was supposed to be slowing down”
for Levy, a South Africa–born writer
based in England, her marriage falls
apart. She sells her family house,
moves with her daughters to an apart-
ment building whose “communal cor-
ridors were covered in grey industrial
plastic for three years after we moved
in,” and subjects herself entirely to
“the Republic of Writing and Chil-
dren.” One day, lugging heavy grocery
bags, Levy runs into a neighbor who
has taken to scolding her for leaving
her bicycle in the wrong parking lot.
At that moment, the pearl necklace
that Levy wears all the time—even to
write in a dusty shed, even to go swim-
ming—breaks, and the pearls scatter
to the ground. “Oh dear,” the neigh-
bor says. “Tuesday is not your day, is
it?” Her unhappiness, Levy writes,
was like Beckett’s definition of sor-
row: “A thing you can keep adding to
all your life... like a stamp or an egg
collection.”
Levy has described her fascination
with those pearls as stemming from
Colette’s novel Cheri, which begins with
a couple’s quarrel over a pearl necklace
that the man believes would look better
on him than on his lover. The reference
is unsurprising. Levy’s deceivingly slim
books are crammed with allusions to
her literary progenitors: Colette, Si-
mone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras,
but also Louise Bourgeois, Claude
Cahun, and Cindy Sherman. For Levy
is, above all, a visual writer, heap-
ing image upon tantalizing image. A
naked woman floating—or is it drown-
ing?—in a French Riviera swimming
pool that is more marshy pond than
tourist-blue. (You can practically hear
the pulsing of the cicadas.) A chicken
tumbling out of a grocery bag and flat-
tened by the tires of an oncoming car,
“like roadkill,” then roasted and de-
voured for dinner. A delicate young
man caressing a neighbor’s poodle on
a “turtle-green sofa,” a telephone ring-
ing in the background while he’s think-
ing back to a lunch he had with a friend
who, Levy writes, “was somehow lack-
ing in feeling.”
Her three most recent novels—
Swimming Home (2011), Hot Milk
(2016), and her latest, The Man Who
Saw Everything—all have moments of
omniscience, short scenes interspersed
in the text in a voice distinct from the
rest of the narrative. This leads to a
sense of uncertainty and wonderment.
Who is speaking? At what point in
time are we? Her books hover between
dream and reality, consciousness and
unconsciousness. It would be tempt-
ing to think of them as improvisational,
strung together by free association, but
that would be wrong. Her novels are
meticulously structured. They circle
in on themselves, full of repetitions,
allusions, and elisions whose logic un-
failingly reveals itself at the end. With
Levy, you are never quite sure of your
footing. But she is.
In The Man Who Saw Everything, an-
other pearl necklace appears but, per-
haps as a tribute to Colette, on a man:
a rakish, ravishing, mascara-wearing
young historian named Saul Adler.
After Saul’s mother died, his father be-
queathed him her necklace. “And then
how long would it take to explain that
he did not expect his son to wear the
pearls?” Levy writes.
When the novel opens, it is 1988. Saul
is working on a lecture about “the psy-
chology of male tyrants,” which leads
him to find connections between Stalin
and his own father. His older brother,
similarly, was “always up for a bit of
cruelty.” Saul remembers being at a
pub with his father once and overhear-
ing him ordering a pint of beer for him-
self and a “glass of red for the nancy
boy.” Barely five pages into the book
we are presented with two models of
masculinity: Saul’s, searching, second-
guessing, effeminate; and that of the
“male tyrants” of his life, humorless,
rigid, violent—predators of his “freak-
ish beauty.”
Saul is set to depart London for re-
search in East Berlin on “cultural op-
position to the rise of fascism in the
1930s,” but his mind is taken up more
with his magnetic photographer girl-
friend, Jennifer Moreau, who abruptly
decides to leave him just as he proposes
to her. Jennifer has demanded that he
never describe her body or how much
he admires it, even as she takes evident
pleasure in objectifying his beauty. She
is a beguiling, jittery character, if not
quite a believable one:“Your eyes are so blue,” she said,
climbing on top of me and sittingastride my hips. “It’s quite unusual
to have intense black hair and even
more intense blue eyes. You are
much prettier than I am. I want
your cock inside me all the time.
Everyone is frightened in the GDR
aren’t they? I still don’t understand
how the people of a whole country
can be locked up behind a wall and
not be allowed to leave.”Levy makes us see Jennifer: pilot
cap pulled all the way over her eyes,
traipsing naked in and out of the tiny
sauna in the basement apartment she
shares with two women, one of whom
is “a vegan who was always soaking
some sort of seaweed in a bowl of water
in the kitchen.” Yet perhaps because
the descriptions of her are filtered
through Saul’s eyes, Jennifer remains a
little cartoonish: a New Wave starlet, a
wannabe Lee Miller, a model-turned-
photographer. “She looked so excited
and young and mean,” Saul thinks.
It is Jennifer’s idea to photograph
Saul crossing Abbey Road in a white
suit and to send the Beatles-inspired
photo to his future host in East Ber-
lin, whose sister, they have learned, is
a fan of the band. But as Saul steps off
the pavement, he is almost hit by a car.
He is mostly unhurt, but the accident
looms over the novel and will reappear,
in different form, in its second half.
Levy employs this kind of repetition
and foreshadowing often in her work,
toying with the chronology of her tautly
devised narratives.
After Saul’s accident, small anach-
ronisms and incongruities begin to
populate the text like specters from
another time and place: the driver whohad nearly hit him holds a cell phone
(in 1988?) from which someone hisses
invectives while he touches Saul’s
hair “as if he were touching a statue
or something without a heartbeat”; a
florist is “terrified of flowers”; a Wal-
Mart plastic bag blows through wind-
swept London. (“That’s odd,” one of
the characters thinks. “Isn’t Wal-Mart
American?”) Later, there’s this ex-
change between Saul and his German
host’s sister:“Listen, Luna.” I felt as if I were
floating out of my body as I spoke.
“In September 1989, the Hun-
garian government will open the
border for East German refugees
wanting to flee to the West. Then
the tide of people will be unstop-
pable. By November 1989, the bor-
ders will be open and within a year
your two Germanys will become
one.”
“You are lying to me.” She made
her two fingers into a revolver and
shot herself in the head.It’s as if, after the accident, time in the
novel becomes elastic, or else creeps to
a halt, much as it does when Septimus
Warren Smith steps into traffic on Bond
Street in Mrs. Dalloway (the theme of
gender fluidity is Woolf-inspired, too)
or, even closer to Levy’s arsenal of in-
fluences, when James Ballard sends his
car spinning in J. G. Ballard’s Crash.
These novels all depict haunted young
men who are hemmed in by society’s
fixed notions of what it means to be a
man. They are symptomatic of their
respective eras: a traumatized war vet-
eran in the case of Woolf, a technology-
and-sex obsessive in the case of Ballard,
a dreamy and confused (and Jewish)
Englishman transplanted to the Com-
munist East in the case of Levy.
Levy has praised Ballard for incor-
porating both Freud and Surrealism,
two “very un-British influences,” into
his novels and short stories. The same
could be said of her. Less transgressive
and more stylistically palatable, Levy’s
novels nevertheless rely on Ballard’s
use of defamiliarization and estrange-
ment, what he once called the “private
mythology” of a writer’s obsessions.
She returns to the same themes and im-
ages over and over in her work. Pearls.
Swimming pools. Howling dogs. Wan-
dering Jews. Daughters attempting to
please difficult mothers. (From Hot
Milk: “I am always thinking of ways
to make water more right than wrong
for my mother.”) Absent—or absent-
minded—fathers. Families that are
“neither unhappy nor happy” (a de-
scription that recurs, in slight variation,
in three of her books). All of these are
signposts through Levy’s singular ter-
rain. Her novels, short stories, and two
memoirs vary greatly in their preoccu-
pations, but they all plumb what hap-
pens when, in her words, “reality slips.”In The Man Who Saw Everything, re-
ality “slips” quite literally. The oddi-
ties that accumulate in the novel’s first
half gain clarity in the second. It is now
2016, a day after Britain has voted to
leave the European Union. Saul Adler,
in his mid-fifties, is lying in a London‘Fading Memory,’ 2014 ; collage by Johanna GoodmanJohanna^ Goodman