Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1974. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0394710426)
Jena Rhys is, like an author I am reading right now, Edith Pope, a somewhat forgotten novelist of the Jazz and Post Great War Age. Her best known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, is considered by many literary types to be a minor classic but it’s her earlier works, including this gem of a slender novel, that really let one peek into the writer’s head and see what drives the creative forces behind the work.
Here, we meet Sasha, an Englishwoman, in the throes of poverty, alcoholism, and despair as she wanders post-WWI Paris in search of fulfillment and love. Rhys writes from the heart here, as if she too experienced the rejections, the slights, the degradations heaped upon Sasha, a once pretty and now fading flower of femininity, whose only weapon, her sexuality, is in late, if not waning, bloom. Penniless, Sasha insists on maintaining airs to the point of using her last franc to buy clothes, to keep up appearances. There is a glimmer of hope in the form of two young Russians who meet and court her but in the end, she falls for a young man whose position in life and society is determined solely by his sexual prowess. Thinking Sasha to be a rich, lonely woman, the gigolo embraces her both physically and emotionally with disastrous consequences for the fallen protagonist of this finely crafted psychological tale.
If you have not read Jean Rhys, I would start here and then go on to her other works. A marvelous introduction into the library of a now forgotten pioneer of introspective writing.
4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
