The Unpossessed Book

I can see how Tess Slesinger was brilliant and all that, but the bottom line is that her experimental narrative technique, the fragmentary recreation of raucous, self-absorbed 1930's New Yorkers, is just plain tedious to get through at times. Although I tend toward character-driven, impressionistic, non-linear narrative myself most of the time, when the style becomes so obvious that it bogs down the pacing (as opposed to the more polished, masterfully organic way it's done by a Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, say), then it starts to annoy me, regardless of its merits.

Still, this book is worth the read. Slesinger has some spot-on psychoanalytic observations about intellectual pursuits, political involvement, and how achievement, celebrity, and personal motivation make interesting bedfellows, especially among those drawn to the special neuroses-nurturing circles of New York (something I suspect hasn't changed much since 1934), but probably applicable to many. Case in point: "He saw them...coming together less from their belief in revolution...than from some terrible need in each of them to lay out his own personal conflicts in terms of something higher, to solve his private ends camouflaged as world-problems, secretly in public." As a professor of mine once said, everything is autobiographical.