Another Marguerite Young Review

I have mentioned Marguerite Young several times this past year. Indiana-born and writing about Indiana, I find myself more and more intrigued by her. I have no idea if I can get around to reading her - I have trouble reading what I have at hand that is far shorter.

The Baffler provides another review of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.under Marguerite Young’s utopia of language, and I think these quotes capture what attracts me:

Is Miss MacIntosh any good? This is a question that a critic really ought to be able to answer—and that only a comparative handful of people probably can answer, since not that many people have made it from one end of the novel to the other. But it turns out to be the only question about this book more vexing than “What is the plot?” The novel maddens, annoys, baffles, and impresses, all the time, all at once. There are passages of stunning beauty, and chapters from which I have retained no memory except that of a stupefying boredom. Young’s use of repetition made me feel as though I were the unknowing victim of a Parallax Corporation brainwashing scheme; one more mention of Mr. Spitzer’s “high silk hat,” I felt, and I might go into a dissociative state and shoot a politician. Certainly, the book, in its cult-classic, now-you-can-buy-it-now-you-can’t career in print, has had its staunch defenders, including Nin and also Macon Leary, the hero of Anne Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist (he reads it at random, opening to any page, like a Pentecostal consulting the Bible). Reaching the end, I felt momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer size of the network of associations and memories that Young had created. But I doubted my response; I worried that actually finishing the book biased me. It has to have been good, because otherwise I went through all that for nothing.

***

But that is not what Young is saying at all. She is saying, instead: of course these things exist; look at all this print. Beauty, goodness, justice, richness, adventure—page after page of them, more than any reader could possibly want, more than even the book’s fans would advise the reader to absorb all at once. (Most writers on Young also eventually get around to the disclaimer that you should read the book piecemeal, as Tyler’s Macon Leary does, or in tiny, daily sips. They’re right.) Someone like Debs could offer a foretaste of justice, a temporary victory for a particular group of workers. Young can give pure excess in all directions to anyone with access to a library. Here, in Miss Macintosh, is utopia, well in excess of sense or design or the requirements of structure—like most vast novels, this one is loose, simple, open, and arbitrary—and finally in excess of life, that bald, bewigged spinster who denies all these possibilities while sneakily reveling in them. Language overfills this book, till it is too big to serve as a doorstop, a cliché image that Young would eagerly, democratically have taken up and then inundated with further clichés, further words, with nonsense images and changes of subject, till the thing popped like a duck’s tasty liver. This book isn’t a doorstop; it’s a door, and a house, and windows, and the lot that it all sits on, and the sinkhole that’s constantly swallowing it. How can you say that infinite possibility doesn’t exist? It’s sitting right there, and it’s so big. You may not ever reach utopia, but you can always pick up this book again. You’ll never—thank God—finish it.

sch 10/14/22