Bookbug Reviews!

A fantastically tight novel with utterly detestable characters who are all too relatable still. It would be bad enough to relate so strongly to just one of the two main villains, but to find in yourself the aspects of both sides of a fruitless war is a slap in the face from the author that I cannot help but feel I deserve.

I am perhaps more of a Marguerite than an Emile, which may be why I detest her more keenly. I tend to make choices that reduce the choices of others, of being obstinate and affronted at perceived slights to the point of disillusionment in contradiction to historical precedent. Of indirect and invalid ways of seeking change, changes that I might even have no right to ask for. Not everybody is an Emile who will concede to a tantrum, and those who see it as such feel little desire to end up on the wrong end of one. Holding such a dim view of people inevitably leads to loneliness.

Where does that view originate from? In Marguerite, we find in her a fear of poverty. Her troubles are laid at the feet of two men: the Sallenaves. A "gilded childhood" lost to their hands, family fortunes 'stolen' by them, and she left with only a meager row of houses to her name. More than most, yet not as much as she feels entitled to, as she was born and raised to believe was hers by right. In the same way that she does not take responsibility or humility upon herself, she extends this grace to her family, all who bear her name. To admit their faults would be to admit her own.

She could never admit her own mistakes. It was she who first approached Emile, beginning the courting process. She who followed it all the way through as far as marriage (though never so far as love), despite being Catholic enough to know the permanence of that choice. When, after a time, she was forced to face the realities of this person, she instead strove to alter that reality by poisoning his beloved cat, Joseph. Joseph was a thing outside of her control, a cat through and through, a thing she could not exert her will upon. Neither could she will Emile to give him up. There was real love between pet and owner, a competitor she had no hope of ever outmatching. She could have accepted this loss, the price of her chosen lot paid fairly; or she could have given up, found a way out of the arrangement. Instead she chose deep and permanent harm, the same she perceived as done by the Sallenaves, a revenge against the echoes of her own anger and not at true injury.

It is a common tactic of abuse to strike at the weakest points. It's the most logical place to strike, of course, but all the worse for it. Killing Joseph, Emile's greatest weakness, was the first. Marguerite showing herself in a weakened state by regularly standing outside of Nelly's place, preying on Emile's history of taking care of his previous wife, was another. Denying communication to a man so used to boisterous freedom, yet another. I did something similar to a friend recently, in retaliation for a true harm, but not a malicious harm. Several months ago, they brought up in conversation their insecurity about being a poor communicator, about not understanding why people remained friends with them in spite of it. When, through poor communication, she hurt me deeply, some part of me -- I pray an unconscious one -- took hold of that insecurity and made the choice for both of us that indeed this friendship should end. I've been upset at other friends before for their perceived poor communication, but in no other case was the method of redress to abandon them so succinctly; none of them had revealed that as a weakness, therefore it would not cause the same harm.

I find apology so immensely complex to validate. Both harms are real; hers against me, and mine against her, though I don't truly know the harm against her, since we haven't talked since. It is perhaps enough that I perceive it to be such a harm, knowing the potential of it and doing nothing still. I have tried to reckon with it, to be angry, or sad, or nostalgic, or magnanimous, and while each of these are all true feelings, none of them are enough on their own. Yet if hers was the first strike, should not she be the one to apologize? It is this back and forth, conflicting emotions competing for primacy, that stifles progress. It is a search for perfect, when good might serve; but perfection is all that I will allow myself, another separate topic with a yet deeper trail to follow. I agree with Emile: I think Marguerite is a bitch. I know I am, too, in action. It is not enough to regret choices, especially only to regret them to yourself. Apology is an action. Remorse is mere self-pity. I hope soon I can make an apology. I don't want to end up a Marguerite when I'm older. (Editor's note: I did finally send an apology letter a couple days later).

Emile is certainly not just a victim, or perhaps remains a victim by choice (whether that choice is conscious or not), in which case it is hard to feel too much pity for him. To begin with, he had doubts about Marguerite's character, the known self-idolization of her and her family and her previous husband, her prudish and uptight nature. Ignoring his instincts for companionship was a choice, though I will give him credit that foreseeing the cost of it, the murder of his cat, was an impossibility. That's real psycho behavior. His retaliation is complex. It could have been better, sure, but it was an utterly human response to an inhuman situation. For Marguerite to take the further step of taxidermying Coco... yeah she's not great. But still he persists in the marriage, returning to it even against his own better judgement time and again. That's on him.

Grief is among the most complex emotions and perhaps is the one with the widest variety of expressions. I don't believe either Emile or Marguerite properly grieved their pasts. With Marguerite, not just her husband, but her father, her fortune, and her youth. With Emile, not just Joseph, but his mother, his wife, and his youth. A train of consquences for each, whose momentum carried them to their deaths.

Would Emile have been so taken in by a lonely widow if not for his past 'failure' to take care of his wife or his mother? His was a life of building, creating, exploring, and freedom in all things. After the death of his wife, and coincident with his retirement, those habits that he so repeatedly claimed allegiance to were no longer among the things that defined him. Sure he took walks and went to market and took a turn at Nelly, but was there true freedom in that? With his wife, there were new things, new places, new people at every turn. Emile became trapped in his neighborhood of Paris as much as he came to be trapped inside the home with Marguerite. Proper grieving perhaps would have allowed him to keep this freedom, to not be in the position to be so enamored with the idea of being needed again by someone, if he was too busy living the life he had always lived. It is perhaps the point of the story that proper grieving in this place, at this time, at his age, was not achieveable. A societal lack, resulting in such bitter endings.

Would Marguerite have needed a new husband if she had not always had a man around to define her, her father who provided her wealth and gilded youth, her husband who provided prestige and polite society? Acknowledging the relentless misogyny of the world (then and now) that likely enabled it, it is true that Marguerite never claimed to have done anything of her own in life. She had no part in the business, no part in the opera. She was defined by those around her, and especially with the early loss of her mother, those people were all men. She gives this same power to Emile after they marry; "her new husband had the rights to her body." It is tricky, because she chose the man and chose to despise him, but I don't believe the assignment of authority to him was her choice. Even with her own income, housing, and true independence, she was still embedded in a patriarchy that drove her into the arms of a man she despised, for the sake of having one. Though her actions are poorly done, blame is impossible to lay squarely at her feet.

Nelly had more freedom, though how that freedom was portrayed is iffy. She owned and ran her cafe, independent after her husband's death. She was not sexually restricted by her marriage, though I have a hard time discerning if that is intended as genuine freedom or is the expression that a male author would like to intend as freedom. She did maintain full choice in that regard, I suppose. She had more social control over the situations she found herself in, more ability to maneuver around and through complex issues. It is surely this freedom and self-assuredness that attracted Emile, but simultaneously deterred him from staying. Nelly does not need him, and I don't think he holds it against her in any way that perpetuates objective negative bias against women like her. My personally being intimidated by women who are more put together than me (which is most) is my own issue lol. As far as 1967 male-authored female characters go, she could be a worse representative.

Emile is treated far more fairly overall. Knowing the novel was born of the author's poor relationship with his mother does explain a lot. I don't find anything to be particularly egregious in its context, though it surely holds few punches. It's always a treat to have older media still be so topical, the sign of a good story.

I've never been one much for murder mystery vibes, but this one clicked pretty well for me. Read it all in one sitting, because it was fairly short and I knew that if I took a break, every name and place being Japanese meant I wouldn't be able to keep track of anything without rereading everything anyways.

The imagery and scenes played out nicely. I think I'm lucky to have just recently had my first experiences on trains and at stations, to have been able to use that to produce the imagery for many scenes. Europe is not Japan, but I don't find the story to be disserviced in any way by my not knowing Japan intimately. Things still felt familiar and comfortable, and gaps in broader geographical knowledge were taken care of throughout the story. Stony beaches and mountains and pines were all easy enough to visualize and ground the story to.

I was unsure how much I wanted to attempt to solve the mystery myself versus enjoying the ride and seeing where things took me. Obviously, engaging with the story meant living in the mind of Mihara and working and reworking through all the evidence and leads. Some of the 'revelations' he had felt a bit obvious, but others were not, so I think it's a fair balance of the fact that people can find different tracks in different places. Everybody's got their own strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, nothing about the resolution came as much of a surprise by the end; not that everything was easy to solve but that it was all cohesive and laid out, much to the credit of the author. The final tragic reveal was a good twist of irony.

Not my favorite flavor of novel so I don't think it's something I would continue to seek out, but it was good to try something wholly different than usual. I don't think I'll take any big conclusions away from it, other than a nice morning with a nice novel.

This story is like a piece of art in a museum, in that I know nothing about fine art including how to think about it. My lacking historical knowledge of pre-WW2 Austrian society, culture, or *anything* makes the characters' stories simply words on a page. I can't draw any commentary or allegory to anybody outside of Dr. B. Nazis are bad, that much I do know.

As far as the game of chess goes, I'm not unfamiliar with its addictive lure, especially during the covid years. It's a fantastic stimulus, and playing online gave some semblance of human interaction, even if only to acknowledge that there's somebody else out there in the world just as bad at chess as you are who wants to play at that very moment. I had to force myself to quit playing because it was a fruitless hole I was throwing myself into, not learning, not practicing, just playing and playing and playing to the detriment of meals and hydration and life (not that there was much life going on). I won't say it was as bad as being tortured by Nazis, but there's no small element of truth in derangement through isolation. Some of the tools we create to escape our prisons find little other use than as reminder.

I think if this book was ten thousand pages I could have picked away at it little by little and never truly gotten tired of it. A bit like how so many others treat Mildred, come to think of it. It is delightful and unassuming and always prepared to serve some nice tea. I trust it to do good by me, and it never disappoints. That's its purpose, an object for my consumption. It is an Excellent Book.

---

I started doing pushups about a month and a half ago, and I finally got to the point the other day where I noticed a visible change in muscle tone. This was the goal, the idea of making this body more attractive to people that I find attractive. But as I was there making muscles in the mirror, I hated them. This thing that I've been working towards, that I perceive value in having, makes me feel gross. So I'll stop working out for a long while, until eventually I get the idea that I might want to catch somebody's eye again and find that to be a step I take. I am male, that's the ideal male body configuration, ergo...

Excellent Women is all about the ways that we lose little bits of ourselves trying to satiate the innumerable hungry mouths of societal expectation. I'm struggling to enumerate in detail the ways that I find this book a fascinating insight into the grasp that social pressures have upon some of us. It makes me question many things about how I identify myself and why. What about me would be different if I were born in a different era, in a different country, a different city, to a different family? As a different sex? Are there fundaments of people that do not change? What about my male upbringing in 21st century America relates so fiercely to a mid-20th century British woman? Is it that our societies are so similar, or that we as unique flavors of human are similar?

- Gender -

Gender roles in Excellent Women and purportedly 1950s London are *very* explicit and thoroughly entrenched. I think, and I feel like this is a weird thought, that this book did more for me to illuminate the power of traditional gender roles in the modern west than The Handmaid's Tale did, by far. Perhaps it was my inability to suspend disbelief in the premise (we're actively living in a society where a military coup is the least effective option for instituting massive social change derived from a narrow sect of society, see: Project 2025), my distaste for the main character on a human level (infidelity sucks), or the fact that I was reading the book hoping for explorations of managing sexual trauama (where I was sorely disappointed), but finding little value in a novel so lauded for its commentary made me feel quite inadequate. Being raised male (and having an identity aligning to it, to an extent) has felt very exclusionary at times, not having had the opportunities to experience the wounds that are inflicted upon women. I certainly want to understand and empathize, so it was refreshing to find that Pym's novel could provide that for me so unassumingly. The intimacy in which Mildred shares her objectively benign story was so much more effective a tool for me to learn and process how her being labeled and perceived an 'excellent woman' molded her. She showed, rather than told.

It feels a bit moot to readress the numerous ways in which she was hammered into her societal niche; you can read as well as I can. I already reject the label of 'man' and the book provides no small amount of ammunition. I feel like the book respects men even so, in a manner truthful to the uniqueness of individuals who happen to share common characteristics and roles. A 1950s British man might read the novel and find little fault in the men, for example. It's just an honest representation of the era (I'm no historian, admittedly). It's not about men versus women, it's about the social web itself and the creepy crawlies who populate it. It makes me feel comfortable exploring my own identity, as somebody with my own history and mannerisms and desires and humanity.

There's no small amount of (admittedly valid) misandry in the circles I've found myself in over the years, and it always hurts a little to feel lumped in. I cannot change my physical characteristics or the gender in which I was raised, that defines vast swaths of my upbringing and experiences. I'm in no way trans. I feel no more desire to be feminine than I do to be masculine. Neither label works to describe me, only in the ways that certain things I do would have that label anyways. I find women generally more attractive, but often in a way that I would prefer to mimic rather than be a counterpart to. So I am like, socially agender/innocuous but physically totally ok as male. or something. I'm just me, man.

It's a bit silly how even among the parts of our society that are so into the exploration of identity, we find the desire for labels. To fit into identifiable boxes, opting for a different color of the same size shirt (it still isn't tailor-made). I'm spending so much energy trying to come up with several disparate words to describe me poorly, rather than just explaining in many more words a truer version of myself. To hammer myself into my own societal niche, more than any other individual can be accused of doing to me. That's where I find the most fault with the system, that the compulsion gets so internalized that conformity becomes more natural than natural expression. That we can often resent ourselves for meeting the expectations that others set for us, to be what we are seen as and not what we are.

- Marriagability -

Among Mildred's many labels, spinster is a primary one. A woman of marriagable age who, for whatever reason, *gasp* is not married. As much as she engenders her other labels - Catholic, woman, neighbor, etc. - none seem to cause her as much personal distress as does being a spinster or excellent woman.

'I was never in love with you, if that's what you mean,' I said, thinking it was time to be blunt. 'I never expected that you would marry me.'

'Dear Mildred,' he smiled, 'you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.'

No other passage in the book for me so supremely displayed the power that others held over Mildred. Father Malory, one of her dearest friends and a respectable, romanceable character, rather than ever try to change the way she viewed herself, allowed Mildred to live in a world where he was a man uninterested in marriage. He could not have been ignorant to the fact that it was how the excellent women viewed him. He obviously was not ignorant to the fact that it was how Mildred viewed him. He outright claims that they might have been married themselves if not for the view Mildred held of him, that he knew to be incorrect and did not amend. He let it lie between them, then fell for a woman whose adept manipulations were so much more easily digestible. Why go through the effort of forming a good partnership when you can just wait for a bad one to fall into your lap?

With the newfound availability of Julian Malory, we finally get to see the beginnings of the spell breaking in Mildred. Observing the chaotic back and forth of the Napiers, so open and unrestrained amongst themselves and with others, also surely let in the idea that a marriage need not be perfect to be true. We see her set up what amounted to a date with Everard Bone, though that concluded in a somewhat resigned fashion to the role she would have to play if she were to be his wife. But she tried, where she had for so long been hesitant to even do that. A small step to write her own label.

The tendency of people to let untruths about themselves be perpetuated is another so very complex habit of humans. I can see, from Mildred's point of view, how harmful it was of Julian to withhold his interest for so long. What cause did he have to do so? We can't really know. It's not his story. I can think of as many valid reasons as invalid ones. I certainly have my own 'lies', things I don't correct, that still do have important implications and negative effects. Correcting them is risk, where shouldering the burden of being improperly perceived is just a thing that I've done for so long that I have the muscles built to do it. I let my grandpa believe he's the only one who votes left, because I know how my parents view that and I find greater value in taking advantage of their obligation to me as their child to provide material support than I do in expressing myself to them and being vulnerable. I can disappoint my grandpa if it means saving for a house. Once I'm materially free, maybe then I can be emotionally free as well.

While it's unfair for Julian's choices to so profoundly affect Mildred, people do have the responsibility to advocate for themselves. It is a brutally difficult lesson to learn when society is constantly making choices for you, that you feel you have so little influence in your story. Especially when the choices you make for yourself end up having negative consequences that outweigh the freedom you might have gained. I have so much more implicit freedom than Mildred due to my circumstances, and I still feel so keenly restrained in my own life. I know there are people in far worse situations than Mildred even, and that is hard to abide (he says, knowing he will do nothing about it).

The right to self-determination is my most strongly held belief. Perhaps it is the thing I most desire for myself and for those I choose to be close to. I'm afraid that I'm weak and a poor advocate even for myself, however. It's a tad ironic that I can admit that Mildred's meekness has been a product of society's forging and forgive her for it, but can't quite forgive the same in myself. That feels like giving up, I suppose. Letting society win. It already wins quite enough. As the Arizona State Lottery motto goes, 'you can't win if you don't play'. I hate the games, the many vapid contrivances that define the norm, but learning how to play is the only way to know how to break the rules and get away with it. Whether it's marriage or capitalism, the systems exist already. We all deserve a place in this world, and deserve the right to fight for it.

- Social Media -

Honestly the book makes me want to send postcards and letters and never text again. Really thinking about the alignment of correspondence and friendship in the modern era, how accessibility to people at all times drives unsustainable expectations. I know there's a balance to be found, and I'm certainly on the swing of the pendulum that is rejecting easy social wins, but I must meet that truth where it is.