Thursday, July 22, 2010
Jake and the women
This is my second reading of "Under the Net" since many years ago, and the narrator, Jake, seems very different from what I remembered. I forgot he was such a connoisseur of women, their charms and their hangups. He was willing to love them for both but had to be on standby as their critic. Did you see that as well? Since it is the only book I've read by Iris Murdoch, I wondered, too, how she went about tackling a male narrative voice. Were the criticisms she piled on the women (save for the delightful Mrs. Tinckham) her personal POV or how she thought a man would perceive them?
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6 comments:
I thought she did a convincing male narrative voice. If anything, I thought he was unusually mild for a male narrator. There wasn't that tone of faintly sexist aggression or male entitlement that was so typical in novels from the mid-20th century. There was no sense of the women being the way they were BECAUSE they were female. They were as individual and as prone to various character weaknesses and strengths as the men were. Maybe the Bohemian spirit in this book is responsible for that. The men here weren't ambitious career types looking for trophy wives to complete their social identity and support their ego. They were nonconformists and their loves were personal.
One issue I had with Jake was his apparent emotional flightiness. He didn't seem to appreciate his love interests while he actually had them in hand. It's when he had lost them that he seemed to love them most — when his feelings were saturated with nostalgia. To me, that's not real love — it's neediness and immaturity — and it was thus hard for me to sympathize much with his romantic plight. I didn't want him to get the girl, really, because I didn't think he deserved her or would properly value her in the long term.
I also found the male narrator pretty believable. I found myself forgetting, in fact, that the author was a woman.
The women were sort of goofy, it's true, but so were the men. I enjoyed that the "hero" was sort of bumbling and lazy and short. It was endearing. But I agree with kc that I wasn't rooting for him to get the girl. His feelings seemed totally based on the moment. A woman gives him a certain look and suddenly he's in love, when yesterday he didn't think twice about her.
"I didn't want him to get the girl, really" ... yes, KC, that's so true. I didn't root for him in the conventional sense of getting the girl. There was something I wished him to reach, and it wasn't a matchy-matchy happy ending. He wasn't perfect, and his ending wasn't perfect, he just matured a little. Funny that my copy called the novel a romantic comedy. I think that's accurate, it's just not what would be shoveled out in today's day and age.
Did I already compare Jake to Woody Allen? I think that's what he is. In a way, he was really patching up a relationship with Hugo rather than the sisters who had become a part of their web. It was a curious romantic ... well, square, I think, which again had its rewards by not being very conventional.
Now that I think about it, I mostly just wanted Jake to keep the dog.
Ha! Me too. His relationship with the dog was really sweet.
I liked Jake's growth throughout the story and where he was in the end. I think it was more healthy for him, too, that he wound up alone and able to focus on his personal goals for a while.
Good point, cl, about how Jake's real interest seemed to be reconciling with Hugo. Hugo seemed to be his real passion, in many ways. I found that relationship very interesting.
It was also interesting how Jake felt sure that Hugo hated him because of the book and how he avoided him for so long, when, in fact, Hugo harbored no resentment at all. It just wasn't the sort of thing that would upset Hugo, which, Jake, if he had paid more attention to Hugo's actual character rather than focusing exclusively on his own perception of it based on how HE would act, should have known. It was a nice example of how two people's perceptions of the same event/time/relationship can differ wildly.
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