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‘So we’re both going to be integrated with British life at its roots.’
‘I was carefully avoiding that tone.’
‘You’re right - it’s just the idea of you doing matrimonial welfare work.’
‘I’m very good at other people’s marriages.’
‘Oh, quite so. Well perhaps you’ll find me in that chair opposite you one of these days.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Me too. There’s nothing like knowing the exact dimensions of the bed you’re going to fit yourself into.’ Annoyed with herself, Molly’s hands made an irritated gesture, and she grimaced and said: ‘You’re a bad influence on me, Anna. I was perfectly resigned to it all until you came in. Actually I think we’ll get on very well.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Anna.
A small silence. ‘It’s all very odd, isn’t it, Anna?’
‘Very.’
Shortly after, Anna said she had to get back to Janet, who would have returned by now from the cinema, where she had been with a friend.
The two women kissed and separated.
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Page 503
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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Philippa Levine December 29th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
For me this was a deeply depressing ending. Molly’s marrying (never a good thing in this novel) and moving to where else but Hampstead; Marion and Tommy are joining the business world; and Anna’s going to teach night classes. Integrating into “British life at its roots” indeed — but is this where we would have expected these characters to be at the end of a harrowing 600 pages? Is this the fate of ex-communists in middle-class 1950s London? Or of women who have defied the status quo too long by exploring (if not always succeeding at) a measure of independence? Of course there’s no reason why “ordinariness” should not be a perfectly good resolution to all sorts of problems, but somehow here, it feels just like the resignation that Molly expresses (admits to?) here. I don’t think I was assuming, hoping for or expecting great feats of heroism, but I just don’t quite see this “return to the fold” as a necessary resolution.
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Laura Kipnis December 31st, 2008 at 9:14 am
I was stunned to read in the after-matter section (in the UK edition) that she wrote this book in not much more than a year (in a “white heat” she says). It may be that the notebooks were things she’d already written and it was the frame sections she was writing during that period, but it’s an extraordinary number of pages to churn out, you’d have to be in a sort of altered state. (When would you eat or go to the bathroom!) I imagine it’s why a lot of the ideas don’t seem to cohere–it was more of a gut-spilling than something pondered and worked out.
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Philippa Levine December 31st, 2008 at 11:54 am
I suspect you’re right about this, Laura. It’s an incredible achievement to have written something that coheres this much and this well in such an incredibly short space of time, no doubt about that. But it did make me think, I’m realising, about how often novels disappoint me right at the end, how often they seem to fizzle, going out with a whimper rather than a bang. I’ve a hunch this is a modern novel problem. Maybe those “truly” realist novels of the 19th century had more options for resolution than the late 20th and early 21st century can muster. Anomie, anyone?
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Nona Willis Aronowitz January 2nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Maybe it’s just me, but this ending seemed almost satirical. When Anna goes a bit crazy and then the pendulum seems to swing back to a boring, safe existence–I picture Anna/Doris with a smirk on her face. Either role is expected of women–madness or submission–and both times, it seems caricatured. Anna must, deep down, have a bitterly ironic moment of self-reflection about this last chunk of her life. And maybe, since the novel was written in less than a year (crazy!), these two parts reflect Doris’s delirium, her own sense of exhaustion or apathy, in the last stages of TGN writing.
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