A Feminist Parable

...His revival is due entirely to the scholar Jane succeeds at the University of Wisconsin, Otto Sigelman...

...Then, bringing Maisie home early from a swimming lesson, she catches Billy having sex with one of her graduate students...

...They are clever, ambitious, and bent on not settling for theordinary...

...Wickedness, too, is evinced not only by Sigelman and Karkov but by the author’s minor characters...

...Jane leaves Billy at once, though she has nowhere to go except Sigelman’s...

...It contains long scenes about haying, odes to peasant life, and a man who, like Tolstoy’s Levin, watches his wife bravely minister to his dying brother...

...Simon in This Side of Married: “You like zoos, do you...

...She was determined that the summer would be different: easier, happier, with more time for each other and for Maisie...

...Sigelman’s hysteria here is not quite plausible...

...Karkova will be awarded her rightful place in the canon, and Karkov, whom history regards as a great artist, will be bared for who he truly was, a plagiarizing pederast whose illicit assignations caused his wife’s nervous breakdown...

...Reviewed by Benjamin Hedin Adjunct professor of writing, The New School Rachel Pastan is a young old-fashioned novelist...

...Lady of the Snakes would like to be an exhaustive, poignant look at modern motherhood, but it merely equates motherhood with victimhood...

...It sounds more like the stock lamentation of old white men who can no longer keep the dangerous multicultural Other out of the academy...

...It is at this point, just as she has found information that could make her a luminary in her field that Jane’s life begins to break apart...

...In any case, it is telling that one is inclined not to register Jane and Billy’s reunion as a narrative event of its own, but in terms of how it amplifies the book’s doctrine...

...The book begins as Jane is finishing graduate school...

...And what are we to make of Jane forgiving Billy, and asking to be forgiven for being so distant and focused on her career...

...A great writer in a great tradition, but is there a place for that tradition anymore...

...But they are also more fragile—waylaid by professional disappointment, attending to teething babies, and performing daily domestic chores in the absence of servants and governesses...

...Sigelman: “Rumors flying, are they...

...Billy in Lady of the Snakes: “Sitting on top of the world, are you...

...His most respected and widely read novel, Dmitri Arkadyevich, plagianzed Anna Karenina in various ways...

...a man and woman who begin as rivals but end as lovers...

...Pastan’s main virtue is an ability to portray the cyclical nature of married life, as dullness turns into spite and recrimination, then back to tenderness and longing...

...He wants to destroy them and thereby preserve the myth he created of a male (and straight) genius who produced immortal works of literature despite having to reside with his dim, sentimental diarist of a housewife...

...Changing diapers, changing her own milk-soured shirts . . . exhausted and hungry, the baby curled against her chest or latched on to her nipple, which had been stretched so much it looked like a caterpillar...

...Karkov was largely forgotten after his death...

...Pastan’s story is quintessentially allegoric both for its presumed universality—“What depths would men sink to in order to fur ther their own careers,” Jane wonders, as if women are inherently immune to venality and careerism—and its neatness...

...An almost identical episode is the central event in This Side of Married and ends in a divorce...

...The whole superwoman thing...

...She first takes Sigelman’s university position and, having usurped him there, will now correct his scholarship, which was little more, anyway, than chauvinistic invention...

...Sigelman, who disdains Karkova and women writers generally, offers to buy the papers...

...That her characters cease to be seen as characters, and loom instead as embodiments, shows how much command of her medium Pastan has forfeited...

...Allegory may be suited to fantasy, to the futuristic, to tales of political despotism—but it can have no purchase on the domestic, where moral essence is elusive...

...Billy’s friend, Vince: “You like cartoons, do you...

...I can see you want everything,” Jane Levitsky, the protagonist of Pastan’s new novel, Lady of the Snakes, is told...

...For even though Jane’s relationship with Billy is increasingly strained she can still think of “the summer...

...Karkova, it develops, wanted her husband to publish Lady of the Snakes under his own name...

...One senses that Pastan knew her book had turned into a feminist parable, for in the end she does attempt, with scant success, to blunt its rigidity and steer it back toward the realm of realism...

...Predictably, however, the eventual outcome the second time around is different, if only for the sake of variation...

...Twice in Lady of the Snakes Jane visits other homes and observes overworked mothers, each of whom has sacrificed the passion of her life to raise a family and endures a husband who is an indifferent or hostile father...

...Then the author demonstrates how that inevitably entails a great deal of both the tragic and the ridiculous...

...Kids, husband career...

...Eschewing contemporary fiction’s habitual license and eclecticism, she writes instead about courtship, marriage and infidelity...

...All of her men speak with the same tropes, the same verbal mannerisms...

...a rake who proposes to an ingénue only to abandon her before the wedding...

...Apparently Karkov was a kind of junior Tolstoy...

...In some respects Pastan’s heroines evoke the paradigmatic female of the Romantic era...

...Marriage is presented as a series of perpetual deferments...

...Jane’s specialty is the fiction of Grigory Karkov and the diaries of his wife, Maria Petrovna Karkova...

...THUS Lady of the Snakes curdles, at last, into allegory...

...There she confirms her suspicion that he stole the letter, and learns he is concealing two others that not only corroborate Karkova’s story about the snakes but reveal that her husband was bisexual...

...Although that may lessen the iniquity of his act, it is still something no one of conscience would do...

...In the hands of any competent realist this pattern would be a recurring mark of individual personality...

...Her debut work, This Side of Married (2004), is a classic romance featuring all of the genre’s regulars: an officious, matchmaking mother...

...But while studying the diaries she discovers that Karkov stole sentences, images, whole scenes from his wife...

...Since a woman blaming herself for her husband’s affair betrays every ideal espoused by Pastan’s fiction, maybe this is meant to indicate that despite Jane’s triumphing over Sigelman, and ameliorating an injustice, such victories are rare...

...When she returns to the library to examine the letter in detail, it is gone...

...Sigelman and Jane wrestle as well over yet another more valuable document: a manuscript of Lady of the Snakes in Karkova’s own hand, proving she is in fact the novel’s author and not simply its source...

...One’s plans to atone and become a better spouse or parent are seldom actualized and lead rather to further resolutions...

...Prior to completing her dissertation, she gives birth to a daughter, Maisie...

...It is curious that Pastan, so committed to exposing misogyny, fails to include a single male character of any virtue in her book...

...Jane is actually more interested in Karkova, and hopes to bring her the same sort of recognition Sigelman won for Karkov...

...One must ask whether she believes in such a thing as male rectitude...

...You and your kind make your livelihood scratching away, nibbling away at all that like termites at work on a great house...

...To Jane, Sigelman says, “And you—people like you—you would give anything to tear [Karkov] down...

...This recalls the plot of Lady of the Snakes, the title of Karkov’s final novel and in Sigelman’s words, “almost an anticipation of modernism, if you look at it in a certain light...

...She also finds a letter in which Karkova describes undergoing a spell, a period of dementia, when she wandered through the countryside collecting snakes...

...She finds herself spending more time with the baby than with Billy, her husband and thinks, “now this was her life: nursing and walking, eating cheese and crackers with a free hand...

...In Pastan, whose dialogue is generally flat and wooden, it signals a preference for generic type over authentic characterization...