This is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about human fragility, fear, and the plight of arriving at middle age without a partner or a family as an emotional safety net, what we might call middle-aged solitude. At least I have not read its better.

Over the last year-and-a-half or so I've been reading Jean Rhys's novels in order (with the exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, which I've read a few times in different contexts). Good Morning, Midnight, sadly, for me, is the last--the cap of the cycle of her early novels. (Although I still have her Collected Short Stories to read.) Each of the first four novels centered on the tribulations of young female protagonist of the first half of the twentieth century struggling to get on to tomorrow without much means in a world in which women pretty much either married or prostituted themselves in order to survive. While each of the four novels, from Voyage in the Dark to Good Morning, Midnight, are very well written and deeply moving, this is, for me, the one that packed the greatest punch. This one feels the most raw, the most abstract, the freest of literary convention, and, therefore, perversely, both the most mannered and, at the same time, the most pure and emotionally honest.

Such a response only goes to show how much we trust literary conventions and, specifically, the conventions of the narrative structures of the novel. To be free of convention, in such a codified world of classically-structured narratives, is to be mannered. We know from the introduction to The Complete Novels that it was important to Rhys not to use "tricks" in writing. Therefore the narrative anomalies here--time slips, contextual explanations omitted, the sketchy, episodic nature of the narrative as a whole--are meant to be honest representations of her protagonist's experience rather than examples of the author's literary sleight-of-hand. Although, in a novel, these might actually amount to about the same thing. Still, the effects of these dis-junctions--what other readers may well read as narrative sloppiness or unwelcome affectations--actually made Good Morning, Midnight my favorite of the four early novels, because I took these dis-junctions as representations of the narrator's (if not the author's) emotional nudity, the tale's rawness, elements that had remained somewhat more contained in the first three novels. Here Rhys takes no prisoners--everyone walks up the gallows' steps and faces the hangman. No emotion is sublimated, ignored, avoided, or wished away, each is taken to the end of the night, to bed, and even into the protagonist's dreams.

Still, I sympathize with the more impatient reader who may well find this novel weak, even whiny. Human frailty or fragility is not for everyone. It opens our empathy and it disgusts us by turns. My own life has been rather shaken over the course of the last month and I've been reminded several times how tenuous is my own existence/place in the world, so I identified with rather than criticized or judged our fearful and desperate protagonist. I can see the other side, but I salute the author who choses to write about the vulnerability that perhaps many prospective readers simply never feel--lucky sods that they are.