The Woman Destroyed (1967)

I've never been remotely up for Simone de Beauvoir's magnum opus, The Second Sex, a mid-20th-century touchstone of French feminist literature that runs to some 800 pages. But following up on a leftfield recommendation of this suite of three stories, I was happy to find myself encountering a favorite approach to fiction, introspective meditations that often work like Chekhov in examining concrete surface details closely until an interior world is sufficiently disclosed. All three stories are told in the first person, one of them essentially a series of diary entries, and all find the woman telling it reaching an emotionally decisive point in her life. The women are past middle age, and thus virtually invisible by most lights, a complicating factor in their situations and arguably the most significant point that any of these stories or all three together may have to make. In the first, "The Age of Discretion," the narrator is an otherwise accomplished and contented woman in a happy marriage who is attempting to deal with the fact that her grown son has a life of his own and does not necessarily share all her values. Some of his choices, as exemplified most acutely by his wife, are not the ones she would make. In "The Monologue" a woman of means who takes her privilege for granted finds herself alone on a New Year's Eve and erupts in a protracted howl of resentment. The language spills out of her in long paragraphs; as riveting as it is, she will never know any comfort that we could give her. In the last, the title story, the narrator gradually comes to realize that her husband is having an affair and attempts to come to terms with what it means in terms of his devastating indifference to her. It's as likely as not that these stories were written and published separately from one another—I can't find anything about that. But they seem to me to work so well together that I can't be sure they weren't intended to be taken that way. "The woman destroyed" covers them all thematically, even as it approaches the theme from different angles: aging and empty-nest repercussions, loneliness and its resentments, the familiarity verging on void of the long-term relationship as it goes through a "bad patch." De Beauvoir's language (in translation by Patrick O'Brian) is straightforward, luminous, and unique to each circumstance, capable of bending artfully to the voices of its protagonists. This is a very nice one.

In case it's not at the library.