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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang (view source)
Revision as of 19:37, 5 August 2014
, 19:37, 5 August 2014no edit summary
The third side of this atypical love triangle is Nora, Stephen's best friend from Yale – and Leo's fiancée. Nora, a trained opera singer (thus making her the stand-in for Molly Bloom), is still reeling from her mother's death from cancer one year ago. She's been engaging in self-harming behaviour, and Leo – a literal-minded IT consultant – just wants to fix her. Nora and Stephen, by contrast, are sensitive, artistic souls. Stephen, too, is struggling to find a meaning in death, but also to finish his languishing dissertation (on Virginia Woolf) after seven years.
In her careful portrayal of race and class realities, Lang again rivals [[:Category:Zadie Smith|Zadie Smith's]] talent. Literature is almost as potent a marker of upper-class status as money here: some of the Portmans might not have even read Joyce's masterpiece, but that doesn't stop them name-dropping and maintaining the pretence of being well-read. 'There's something calculated about what my parents do,' Stephen admits uneasily, as if 'they're more interested in what ''Ulysses'' says about them than what it actually says.'
While Lang might not mimic the extremes of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style, she does prioritize interiority over external action by using a close third-person voice that shifts between her main characters' points of view. Their histories and thoughts are revealed mostly through interior monologues, though also via conversations. I especially love Nora's confession to her therapist, and Stephen's thought process while taking a shower in his parents' luxurious new bathroom ('the showerhead...a bright round disk with a thousand black holes like a decapitated sunflower').
