I'm so glad I missed the 70s

The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974

I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.

This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?

Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.

I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.