A sad, middle-aged woman drifts through Paris shops, cafes and bars. That’s pretty much it. She remembers loves & a lost child. And she drinks. A lot. Today “Midnight” (1939) is considered a modernist classic. But it flopped so badly that Rhys went into isolation for 10 years (people assumed she was dead) before writing “Wide Sargasso Sea.” You can read it as an epic of self-pity or an ahead-of-its-time depression story. Her work echoes in writers from Sylvia Plath to Ottessa Moshfegh. “When I have had a couple of drinks, I shan’t know whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow.”

Sasha returns to Paris as an unhappy older woman. She drinks to remember and she drinks to forget. When she drinks she cries. She meets some Russians and buys a painting; she meets a young man whom she thinks is a gigolo, but whom perhaps at the end of the book she read wrong, and at the very end she takes some comfort from her hotel room neighbour whom she has always hated.
We are right inside Sasha's head and hear her every thought even as she speaks to the people she meets. That took a bit of getting used to, and many times I wanted to shake her, but that's a good thing.
I recently wrote a post on bleak books, and if I'd written it a day or two later this would have been on it. Bleak but wonderful. Poor Sasha.
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Étrange de lire ça tout de suite après L'Invitée de Simone de Beauvoir, qui, malgré ses complications sentimentales & ses tragédies, est porté par un optimisme volontaire -- on peut changer le monde, on peut se proposer de nouveaux modèles, de nouvelles façons de lier sa vie à celle des autres. Le roman de Jean Rhys, au contraire, ne peut & ne veut plus rien. Sasha, sa narratrice, erre dans un Paris triste de l'entre-deux-guerres, butée contre un présent à qui elle ne promet rien. L'essentiel, se répète-t-elle, c'est d'avoir un programme, une feuille de route : manger un morceau, aller au cinéma, se faire teindre les cheveux (en blond cendré, une couleur difficile), acheter un chapeau, choisir le bon café où prendre un verre -- celui où l'on ne vous reconnaîtrera pas, comme personne ou comme archétype. L'énergie du livre n'est pas à chercher dans l'intrigue, mais dans le regard de Sasha, son humour fatigué mais perçant, sa voix puissante même sous la lassitude. Comment se résigner à ne plus rien attendre du monde? Comment apprendre à son corps à ne plus se tendre vers le printemps? Good Morning, Midnight ne dit pas que c'est impossible; il murmure simplement que l'indifférence est une joie difficile, glissante, creuse lorsqu'attrapée.

Reputation.

What doesn't kill you will make you fucked up in the head.

They get to them young, you see. They'll believe anything you say.

A woman lasts as long as her looks, and then I'm afraid she's no good anymore.

You mustn't talk, you mustn't think, you must stop thinking. Of course, it is like that.

But they are such sensitive, delicate creatures! Of course we must protect them from the world of self-sufficiency!

She was asking for it, wearing that sort of thing.

Did you see her? Coming in here drunk and filthy and with a man to boot? I'm surprised she had the cheek to show her face.

What kind of place is this anyways, letting someone like her in?

A man needs that sort of thing, you know. Keeps the spirits up, refreshes the soul! The wife never need know, cold and heartless bitch that she is. And besides, those girls aren't fit for anything else, not if they expect to eat.

Three weeks on a daily dose of coffee and bread. Don't forget the booze.

Oh, the child died? Shame. That's all they're really good for, you know. Having children.

You get a sense of where you're not wanted, eventually. Where it's not safe to be.

Only seven or eight, and yet she knew so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to. One must admire Nature..

Well of course you must spend your last penny on the latest gilt! How else do you expect to be able to go out in public and be seen by respectable folk?

Stupid bitches, the lot of them. Can you imagine them educated and running about? Ha!

Sometimes, the only thing between life and death is a great deal of oversensitivity to the mood swings of general opinion. Especially when they've taught you nothing else.

Behind every man, there is a great woman who was never stripped of her worth and left to fend for herself in infamy when he decided that he was sick of dealing with her self conformed by every whim and fancy of a patriarchal world.

How was I supposed to know she didn't want it? Wasn't my fault she drank so much.

He hit you, did he? And what did you do to provoke that, may I ask?

You could've said no.
You could've not slept with him.
You could've not drunk so much.
You could've been prettier.
You could've made him happier.
You could've.
Could've.
Could've.

Yes.
I could've.

Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, was my introduction to her as a writer. I read Good Morning, Midnight for a class I took in college about British Literature of the 20th century, back in 2002. I had heard of Rhys before, because her novel Wide Sargasso Sea made Modern Library’s list of top 100 novels in 1998. I remember when I worked at Barnes and Noble back in 1999 and 2000 a customer recommended Wide Sargasso Sea to me.

I was bowled over by Good Morning, Midnight when I read it in college, as I found it a fascinating portrait of a woman struggling with her demons. Re-reading it in 2020, I’m still struck by Rhys’ artistry and her deep insights into the human condition. Good Morning, Midnight, is the last of Rhys’ four starkly modernist novels that were published between 1928 and 1939: Quartet, first published as Postures, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight. The four novels aren’t really meant to be a quartet, but they fit together very nicely in their themes and in the mood that Rhys’ writing creates. The novels all deal with female protagonists who endure difficult relationships with men, and they have few resources for dealing with modern life. These women are always on the edge of poverty, and they lack the education and drive to do much with themselves. (They’re probably all also suffering from clinical depression.)

There’s no real plot to speak of Good Morning, Midnight, as it’s just the narrator, who may or may not be named Sasha, hangs out in Paris, and tell us a little bit about her past. But you don’t read a Jean Rhys novel for the page-turning plots—you read them for the beautiful writing.

One of the men the narrator meets is a melancholy Russian who has some great quotes: “When I make an appointment I always keep it, even though I think the other person won’t be there.” (p.63) “If someone had come to me and asked me if I wished to be born I think I should have answered No. I’m sure I should have answered No. But no one asked me. I am here not through my will.” (p.64) Jean Rhys’ heroines might well say the same thing.

The narrator also recounts a time when she was at her lowest ebb: “I got so that I could sleep fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.” (p.86) Yikes, that’s not so good.

In fitting with the title of the novel, time does strange things in Good Morning, Midnight. The narration constantly shifts between the present and the past. And nothing much happens in either, so it’s hard to keep them straight. That isn’t meant to be criticism of Rhys’ writing: different novels offer different pleasures. Jean Rhys was a master at mood, and throughout her four modernist novels she conjures up bleak cityscapes that offer no respite from the desperate issues that her characters face. Paris is the city of light, but it sure doesn’t feel like it in Good Morning, Midnight.

The ending of Good Morning, Midnight is remarkably similar to the ending of Tennessee Williams’ novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Williams’ novel was published in 1950, 11 years after Good Morning, Midnight. Did Williams read Good Morning, Midnight? There’s probably no way to know for sure. The book certainly wasn’t a best-seller, but Williams had been writing short stories and plays for decades by 1950, so he could have been aware of Rhys’ work. Update: No, it’s very unlikely Williams read Good Morning, Midnight, since I learned from Carole Angier’s biography of Jean Rhys that Good Morning, Midnight wasn’t published in the United States until 1970. (Jean Rhys: Life and Work, by Carole Angier, p.596)

Good Morning, Midnight was not a sales success when it was released in 1939, and after its release Rhys slid into obscurity, not publishing another novel until Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. As more time passed with no new works forthcoming, people assumed Rhys had died, not a totally unrealistic assumption, especially given the bleak ending of Good Morning, Midnight. When the actress Selma Vas Dias wanted to get in touch with Rhys about adapting Good Morning, Midnight as a play, she put an ad in the newspaper to track the author down. It worked, and Dias helped inspire Rhys to begin writing again.

Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent, if often overlooked, modernist masterpiece.

i love it, again, i love it.

I heard about this book somewhere and wanted to read it, but was shocked I logged it as read ten years ago. Why don’t I remember it?

It’s quite a bleak tale, but very evocative of the time and social customs. The narrator is struggling with the loss of her baby and husband, penniless and struggling to keep this all secret while struggling with alcoholism and at the prey of men. Pretty dark!