Against the Day, still.

[Mark Kohut]

Anne Tyler has spent a lot of her career exploring
this notion with married bourgeois women:
'''excuse me, signora...but....have you ever felt that you wished to
suddenly
disappear, even from a room full of people, just....[makes vanishing signs
with his hands] ......gone?"

"Me, all the time, why"? ---Erlys.

"Could you stand perfectly still while someone throws knives at you"?

"Then the beauty swept over her ..like a galvanic shadow,,, as her body
took on a
"vibrant dark density"...and Merle "did not know what was happening. He did
know".

There are many other writers too, of course, on this and related aspects
including that sixties milestone book *The Feminine Mystique. *

Any women on the Plist care to comment on P's presentation of this bit? Esp
that great phrase, "vibrant dark density" or-- is it great? A few good men
[care to comment]?

(I will comment only that two women I've known have told me of leaving long
term relationships, not felt as oppressively unhappy,
for someone brand-new and hardly known but.....Mr. Right, so to
mythologize...)


PS. Anne Tyler's first husband was an Iranian-American psychiatrist. She
refused to answer any questions about her marriage EVER when interviewed.
In fact
declared such questions out-of-bounds. Full privacy for him and the
marriage they inhabited. I've thought of it as doing half-a-Pynchon re
privacy.