I’m often discomfited by contemporary fiction’s ‘forced’ confessional nature, its overwrought and extravagant emotional content which gives the impression that I’m somehow intruding - an unwelcome eavesdropper on a conversation that doesn’t concern me, but which, in any case, I have very little interest in. Much of this contemporary writing can be charitably described as ‘auto-fiction’, or less charitably as bourgeois emotional pornography. Clearly it serves a mass function, and despite its recondite pretensions is somewhat akin to the explosion of ‘true crime shows’ in recent years, but for a more purportedly elevated and cultivated audience. In common with much else in contemporary culture, it is also dull and homogenous in style, and enthusiastically embraces the denatured coalescence of ideology and aesthetics as mutually constitutive and dialectically related. By this logic, the distinction between journalistic and novelistic prose has almost completely disappeared, along with that between journalist and novelist, to the clear detriment of both.
In this regard, Hannah Regel’s debut novel The Last Sane Woman goes against the grain. This would be true even if we were to only consider its eloquent style, its rich poetic texture, and poignant imagery. Yet it also offers a great deal more substance. The narrative centers around Nicola Long, a ceramic artist from the Midlands living and working in modern-day London, recently graduated and employed in a series of low-paid jobs that make her miserable and frustrated, and leave little time and energy to focus on her art career. Having recently had an abortion that ‘had not been nothing’ as she was led to expect by friends, she feels alienated from her nice middle-class software developer boyfriend Ben, who she felt was not ‘The Father’, and is probably cheating on her. She is alienated also from her successful, posher and more well-connected contemporaries. When we meet her, she discovers the letters of a woman named Donna from the 1980s in an obscure art archive called the Feminist Assembly. Donna was also a ceramicist from the Midlands, recently graduated, and trying to break into the art world. But her story ended in obscurity and tragedy when she took her own life in mysterious circumstances, succumbing to her unshakeable feelings of failure and despair. Struck by the similarities in their situation, Nicola becomes obsessed with Donna’s story, and everything else in her life gradually falls by the wayside as she attempts to discover the reasons behind Donna’s tragic life and untimely demise, and what it may portend for her own.
This narrative conceit appears, at first glance, to place us comfortably within the realm of contemporary auto-fiction, where a narrator, usually a thinly disguised facsimile of the author, indulges in a period of reflection concerning an external (perhaps historical) character, but only as a convenient opportunity for narcissistic reflection under the guise of some purportedly broad (but suitably vague) ideological comment about, for example, feminism, race, sexuality, collective or inherited trauma etc. Yet The Last Sane Woman deploys this conceit only to use it in more interesting and unexpected ways. While other works, less poetic and less well written, merely use the medium of fiction to carry their facile journalistic social comment, one which feigns empathy but is usually very far removed from it, The Last Sane Woman is most compelling in its very authentic expression of empathy. This is achieved, I think, by the subtlety of its emotion, which is authentic because it seems so un-forced. ‘There is the world of clay…’, the overly-sensitive Donna writes to her childhood friend Susan about her recent breakup with an unfaithful man whom she loved to distraction:
…where everything is ruled by fire and force and where images in my head get pushed out through my fists into something real. And then there is the other one: the soggy world of the mind. With Dev the latter seemed to overtake everything else. I lost all conscience for work and would just sit about and do nothing, pulling apart split ends, watching him. Wondering what he was thinking and how I could please him, and so, of course, the rot set in. […] It would seem that my lot in life is that I am too committed to the world of fire and force to share it with anyone else.
I was reminded of Henry de Montherlant’s aphorism that ‘Happiness writes in white ink on a white page’, that artistic inspiration is a volatile passion that mostly thrives in misery and loneliness, and, despite our best efforts, is absent in happiness. But Donna’s earnestness is so attractive to Nicola, and to the reader, because it appears already to be so quaint. Nicola’s obsession with Donna is not only due to the uncanny similarities she senses in their lives but perhaps more so, because she lived in a time and place where such frank pronouncements of artistic intent were not considered pretentious or something to be ashamed of – where one was able to express oneself earnestly, if only in letters to a childhood friend, to say what one wanted without irony or embarrassment in much simpler terms. After all, wasn’t the world a smaller and simpler place; where one had to seek out recognition and an engaged audience, instead of being constantly observed and judged by an invisible and indifferent one? Nicola becomes obsessed with Donna because she is able to write, think, and articulate ‘things’ in ways that she cannot seem to. It is, in a manner of speaking, a nostalgic obsession.
In this particular vein, Regel’s novel proposes an interesting comment on artistic ambition (and nostalgia) within a very millennial context. Millenial because, as Regel suggests, nostalgia may be absent in the younger generation - as the wayward teenager Nicola briefly looks after remarks contemptuously: ‘Nostalgia’s a disease.’ Such ambition is, as we have come to expect, propelled by mimetic desire and driven by selfish motivations to identify our private tragedies and misadventures with those of others. But Regel uses this paradigm to grasp something more universal. The novel’s signal phrase, which adorns the back cover of the proof I received, is also its opening line:
‘I want to read to read about women that can’t make things.’
This is Nicola’s request to the archivist and curator of the Feminist Assembly, Marcella Goodwoman. Yet this abstract request is immediately grounded in more material concerns, as Nicola clarifies:
‘I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money.’ […] ‘or time.’
The narrative framing device of the feminist archive is an interesting one since Regel was for some years the co-editor of a feminist art journal. It put me in mind of Scottish artist Luke Fowler’s 2014 film To the Editor of Amateur Photography, where he explored the ‘contested’ history of Pavilion, a Leeds-based feminist photography centre, through testimonies and archives. The history of Pavilion was contested because of the tensions between the heterogeneous feminists that were involved in that project, and the problems which emerged when its militant ideological motivations were forced to confront shifting material and psychic realities. However, if this novel is an ostensibly feminist one (and it may well be, I’m not initiated in the intellectual history of feminism enough to pick up any subtle leitmotivs), the feminist theme - whether consciously or not - appears to be a sleight of hand. After all, Nicola’s wish to read about ‘women’ that can’t make things is immediately followed by a qualification that talks instead of a ‘person’. It is a subtle, but noticeable, shift from the particular and subjective to the universal.
Indeed the world that Nicola inhabits will be familiar to many, like myself, who grew up in Britain in working-class environments or modest circumstances not too far removed from them, and who aspired to artistic or creative vocations at odds with those environments. Britain is a place where class will never cease to be the master signifier of intrinsic worth. Its creative class is still largely drawn from its ruling professional-managerial class, their progeny being those with enough material comfort to support the life of inspired indolence most congruent to artistic production. These unchanging facts of British life resonate throughout The Last Sane Woman. They’re present in the Thatcherite 1980s, where Donna is forced to take up a series of low-paying jobs when not on the dole, which had become since the 1960s (the creative golden age of the dole) a much less generous system of social security. They’re also apparent in Nicola’s present-day world of Universal Credit; an obscene, cruel, and punitive system of social support that has been cut right to the bone by years of neoliberal economic policy which, despite being proven time and again to be ineffectual, seemingly persists out of pure spite. Those from modest means that succeed in Britain today do so despite their backgrounds, and usually because they quickly learned the importance of ‘code-switching’ and cultivating a ‘proper accent’, or at least one so neutral as to be innocuous. I know nothing of Regel’s background, but the ambient class anxiety that she has imbued in her characters feels too accurate and visceral to be simply confected and invented, but even if it is, this only confirms her talent as a writer.
Mark Fisher excelled most as a chronicler of the relentless economic and psychological immiseration of the British working class as expressed in culture, music, and art. The quality of this writing, for me at least, far outweighed his often-disjointed philosophical explications. This immiseration produced some of the most vital work of the past 50 years, from the kitchen sink realism of the ‘Angry young men’ in the 1960s to Joy Division. I’m all too familiar with that rain-sodden melancholy and its fateful poetic allure. I also admit to a certain odd nostalgia for the familiarly British miserabilism that is frequently invoked when not explicitly summoned in Hannah Regel’s novel. The gloomy grey skies, drafty mould-ridden flats, the pubs, the macabre humor, emotionally stultified relationships and friendships, the compulsory alcoholism, weekend hangovers, and the stoic politesse that belies an ever-present underlying hostility, all contribute to an incomparable artistic, poetic atmosphere - and a temperament that is difficult to communicate without direct experience. I left Scotland – where I grew up and spent most of my adult life - almost eight years ago; broke, depressed, frustrated by my inability to make anything happen for myself, sick of the impecunious struggles, the hypocrisy of the political class, and the nepotism and mediocrity that rules its cultural institutions. But I’m glad that there are writers like Hannah Regel who are still able to make such abject lives into compelling art, despite all the odds against them.
A sense that the ‘good life’ is always being lived by other people and never ourselves always seemed a uniquely millennial phenomenon - this peculiar mix of ressentiment, self-pity, and (often unwarranted) self-belief. The incisive way that Regel portrays this paranoid sense of cosmic conspiracy is one of this work’s main strengths:
Some people got to walk through life with their frailty enshrined behind a steel wall. The steel wall of the sublime – their trouble with living having gained an ethereal elegance. Untouchable! How she envied them. Her inability to cultivate a convincing aura of tragedy had constituted, for Nicola, one of the great unfairnesses of her life.
One needs only to read the letters or memoirs of many artists and writers from the long-nineteenth century onwards to understand that they were affected by something similar to this millennial ressentiment. What is uniquely millennial, however, is how this ressentiment manifests: a nostalgic fixation with personal tragedy and mythology, competitive victimhood and self-abjection, a characteristically negative narcissism that sees virtue in suffering and insufficiency and covets it in others, all framed by a technological paradigm that allows a greater degree of authorship and dissimulation than ever before. We’re compelled to constantly observe and confront the dissonance between actuality and virtuality, between one’s authentic self-image, and that which one projects onto the world. What results is a profound and relentless sense of unreality, which many have felt but few can articulate as well as Regel does. This is apparent when she describes the vague miasma that envelopes Nicola after she has finished reading Donna’s letters but is unable to talk to her friends about them down the pub, as they are more interested in the unfolding social media mental breakdown of her rival:
It was the experience she sometimes had of leaving the cinema after going alone. That the film had temporarily removed her from life, and now that she had been returned to it she would have to readjust, retune her hearing, blink her eyes. Only the film was part of her life now as well. Readjusting would require recalibrating the two. And for that short while neither her life nor the film seemed entirely real.
In a sea of uninteresting and artless auto-fiction about individual millennial personas, which in reality are essentially interchangeable, this novel attempts to express more essential notions about psychological and artistic drives, and their universality across the brief expanse of time.
Zell Am See, Austria, March 2024