That Reardon would wish his wife in pain, ill, penniless—I don’t know what to say, but that one hopes such a meager soul should not take on a writer’s profession (or a wife?).
“Sometimes he opened his Shakespeare, for instance, and dreamed over a page or two.”
Despite my complaint about Reardon, I find this sentence touching, with a real sadness and beauty.
“Do you think I am able to occupy myself with the affairs of imaginary people?”
I may be in an odd and ungenerous mood today, but even when Reardon was working on his fiction, he never really understood the affairs of imaginary people. Perhaps his tragedy is that he has little understanding of much of anything, despite being a man of letters.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
"Carter had begun to think there might be a foundation for Mrs Yule's hypothesis—that the novelist was not altogether in his sound senses. At first he scouted the idea, but as time went on it seemed to him that Reardon's countenance certainly had a gaunt wildness which suggested disagreeable things."
Today we would sooner accept a possibility that Reordon's associates resist--the young man is suffering from mental illness. Gissen's Reordon may be a horrifying portrait of untreated mental illness.
At the very least: Seasonal affective disorder, depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies before those terms may have existed. Gissing clearly and sensitively observed them or felt them himself. Both of his wives struggled. For all Reardon’s annoying self pitying, he does seem to be genuinely suffering.