38 The New York Review
hospital in a semiconscious state. The
accident that brought him there is
conflated in his mind with the one on
Abbey Road thirty years earlier, and
it takes some sleuthing to untangle the
two and sort out the present characters
from their past iterations. The levity and
mystery of the first half of the book give
way to narrative-sapping backstory and
wooden summaries. “Now, nearly thirty
years later, while I was lying on my back
in University College Hospital, I seemed
to have gone back in time to that trip in
the GDR in my youth,” Saul thinks. You
can almost see the misplaced editor’s
note urging Levy to spell it out.
We learn that part of the reason
Jennifer broke up with Saul all those
years ago was that she had caught him
leering at one of her roommates. This
seems wholly out of character, since
Saul berates her at one point for being
“anti-need,” telling her, “That was your
thing, you didn’t need me.” We learn,
too, that when Saul saw Jennifer again
after his return from Berlin, she was
four months pregnant with his child;
she later took the baby to America in
circumstances that became tragic. All
this information appears in clipped
chapters, as if Levy is breathlessly try-
ing to bring us up to speed. This results
in mannered dialogue:
“You took our son to America,” I
was suddenly shouting. “You more
or less kidnapped my son.”
The sun was rising over the
Euston Road. We could both see
strips of orange sky through the
blinds.
“It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau”
—my voice was surprisingly loud:
“I have not forgiven you.”
“I have not forgiven you either,
Saul Adler.”One year after Jennifer left, Saul was
reunited with another lover—his Ger-
man host, Walter Müller—with whom
he had fallen deeply in love while he
was in East Berlin. He arrives at their
meeting place early and can hardly
contain his excitement, but when Wal-
ter appears, he seems harried. We
quickly learn why: he has a wife and
two children in tow. This allows for a
lovely description of family life:
Helga found a box of crayons and
paper in her bag and suggested
her daughter sit on her lap. Han-
nah shook her head and crawled
under the table. All conversation
had stopped. It was as if the fam-
ily were an organism, each part
depending on the other part to sur-
vive the next two minutes.On the novel goes, between keenly
observed scenes and more affected
ones. In one powerful vignette, we see
Saul as he regards his face in the mir-
ror for the first time since his (second)
accident:
Fuck off I hate you, I said to the
middle-aged man staring back at
me. His hair had been shaved. He
was a skull. His eyes a shock of
blue in his pale face. He had high
cheekbones. A cut on the cheek
and on the lip. His eyebrows were
silver. Where have you gone, Saul?
All that beauty blown to bits.But even then, Levy can’t help
interjecting:
Who were you? What languages
do you speak? Are you a son and
a brother and a father? Are you an
acquisition? How do you get along
with your female colleagues?
What is the point of them, in your
view?... In what ways do you
thwart, oppose, derail or support
each other?None of this flourish seems truthful,
however one might wish that it were.
In particular, the line about thwart-
ing or supporting female colleagues
mimes language uncomfortably close
to a human resources booklet. Surely
no man stares at his reflection and has
such a thought.
Compare that authorial heavy-
handedness with Levy’s extraordinary
novel Swimming Home, which
begins with a man and a woman
driving at midnight after a sexual
encounter the man has come to
regret. The scene reappears, in
terser form, later in the book.
By then we have come to know
the characters involved: one is
Joe Jacobs, better known to his
readers as JHJ, an important and
self- important poet whom Levy
simultaneously inflates and pleas-
ingly punctures:When they got back to the villa,
Joe walked through the cypress
trees to the garden, where he
had set up a table and chair to
write in the shade. For the last
two weeks he had referred to it
as his study and it was under-
stood he must not be disturbed,
even when he fell asleep on the
chair.The other is Kitty Finch, a self-
fashioned botanist and clinical
depressive from North London
with crooked teeth, a stammer,
and a body that “looked like she’d
been sculpted from wax in a dark work-
shop in Venice.”
That last description is courtesy
of Joe, who finds himself aroused by
Kitty despite himself. “Whoever had
made her was clever,” he thinks. “She
could swim and cry and blush and say
things like ‘hogged it.’” Joe’s teenaged
daughter finds Kitty mesmerizing—all-
knowing, possessed of mystical pow-
ers, reminiscent of a medusa, another
of Levy’s favored images. But a fam-
ily friend vacationing with them at the
French villa, who loathes Joe’s pomp-
ous flights, regards Kitty coolly: “She
was almost pretty, with her narrow
waist and long hair glowing in the dark,
but ragged too, not far off someone
begging outside a train station holding
up a homeless and hungry sign.”
Levy began her career as a play-
wright, and her dramaturgical facili-
ties are on display here. This is what
she does best: focusing on the way one
character appears in the eyes of an-
other, ping- ponging characters off one
another so that our view of them contin-
ually shifts, refocuses, and recalibrates
to allow for others’ perceptions—the
way we do all the time in real life. Levy
is less interested in interiority than in
the exact moment that interiority inter-
sects with the outside world, often lead-
ing to anguish. In Swimming Home,
Madeleine Sheridan, an elderly Brit-
ish expatriate living next door to Joe’s
villa, receives an unexpected visit from
him. She offers him a bowl of Anda-lusian almond soup, which he accepts.
But then:Something terrible happened. He
took a sip and felt something tangle
w ith h is teeth, on ly to d iscover it was
her hair. A small clump of silver hair
had somehow found its way into the
bowl. He was mortified beyond her
comprehension, even though she
apologized, unable to fathom how
it had got there. His hands were
actually shaking and he pushed
the bowl away with such force the
soup spilt all over his ridiculous
pinstriped suit, its jacket lined with
dandyish pink silk. She thought a
poet might have done better than
that. He could have said, “Your
soup was like drinking a cloud.”There’s an amusing distance between
Levy’s novels, which tend to take
place—perhaps wishfully—under sun-
scorched skies, and her two “working
autobiographies,” which chronicle the
indignities of English winter when
fountains are forever “winterized”
and “the London pavements smelt of
old coins.” Her memoirs pull back the
curtain—the screensaver?—on the
days she spent writing her two break-
through novels, Swimming Home and
Hot Milk. (Both were nominated for
the Man Booker Prize, as was The Man
Who Saw Everything; her previous five
novels can generously be called “ex-
perimental,” which is to say unripe—
a novelist coming into her own.) She
wishes to lead a “romantic writer’s life,”
to write only when inspiration strikes
while gazing at the crackling flames
of a wood fire. But her writing shed is
not heated, and there are bills to pay.
“Staring into the flames doesn’t help
the word count anyway,” a friend says,
trying to encourage her. Levy concurs:
“The writing life is mostly about stam-
ina. To get to the finishing line requires
the writing to become more interest-
ing than everyday life, and a log fire,
like everyday life, is never boring,” she
writes in The Cost of Living.
Although Levy’s characters are
English, often by way of foreign an-
cestry, their stories tend to unspool
on the beaches of Almeria and Alpes-
Maritimes, in Berlin and in Athens,
representing a porous, cosmopolitan(usually well-heeled) Europe that is on
the threshold of transformation. Greece
“can’t pay its bills. The dream is over,”
one character laments in Hot Milk, a
richly drawn novel told in the first per-
son by a bookish and adrift narrator
saddled with caring for her hypochon-
driac mother. In The Man Who Saw
Everything, we are reminded of Karl
Marx’s line about a specter haunting
Europe. Levy shows us layers of cul-
tural textures that her characters seam-
lessly glide through and seem to take
for granted. Inadvertently, her novels
may be as good a specimen as any of
the Remain camp.
In one seaside restaurant—in the Ca-
ribbean this time—Levy, or rather the
narrator of The Cost of Living, who is
“close to myself and yet is not myself,”
overhears a conversation between
a young Englishwoman and a
man the young woman nicknames
Big Silver, a tanned and tattooed
American in his forties, with long
silver hair piled in a bun. Big
Silver chats up the woman until
after a while she interrupts him.
“Her conversation was interest-
ing, intense and strange,” Levy
writes. The woman begins to tell
him a story about scuba diving in
Mexico, being entirely submerged
underwater, only to resurface and
find that the weather had changed
and a storm was rolling in. The
woman glances at him, to see if
he is following, but Big Silver is
distracted. “You talk a lot don’t
you?” he tells the woman.
Levy’s work examines the
question of who gets to speak.
She structures Things I Don’t
Want to Know (2014) as a riposte
to George Orwell, who in 1946
identified four motives for the
writer to write, “putting aside,”
he added almost parenthetically,
“the need to earn a living.” Levy
argues that only a certain class
of men can afford to set such consid-
erations “aside.” Orwell’s first motive
was the writer’s “sheer egoism.” Levy
demurs. “Even the most arrogant fe-
male writer has to work over time to
build an ego that is robust enough to
get her through January, never mind all
the way to December,” she writes.
In that book, she rebels against so-
ciety’s notion of womanhood as a kind
of oxymoron, “passive but ambitious,
maternal but erotically energetic, self-
sacrificing but fulfilled.” The purpose
of Levy’s memoirs, she has said, is to
lift this “mask of patriarchy.” When
she does, she discovers, somewhat star-
tlingly, that even she has been complicit
all along: “The wife also wears a mask
and her face grows to fit it.” She comes
to realize that “femininity, as a cultural
personality, was no longer expressive
for me. It was obvious that femininity,
as written by men and performed by
women, was the exhausted phantom
that still haunted the early twenty-first
century.” Perhaps it is no wonder, then,
that The Man Who Saw Everything
concerns itself with masculinity and its
own myriad masks.
As when listening to that young
woman’s conversation on the beach,
one finds, on reading Levy, that she has
likewise dispensed with the customary
and “broken with the usual rituals” of
fiction. The experience of reading her
is much like the jolt and pleasure of
being submerged in water—resurfacing
to find that the weather has turned. QDeborah Levy, London, 2017Anna^Watson