Amy is becoming more and more interesting. She reads Balzac instead of the silly novels with unrealistic love stories; she thinks about literature and its future; she gathers information from all sorts of channels. She is ahead of her time. I always imagine her as an agent or a publisher in our contemporary life.
“Love is the most insignificant thing in most women’s lives.”
Amy is not wrong. In a sense, she is Shakespeare’s Rosalind in the 1880s: levelheaded, sharp-eyed, and yet much less willing to dream than Rosalind.
“Of course I have no choice really. And I ought to have a choice.”
That’s a major key statement from Amy. One has to admire her, however unwillingly.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
Amy is stealing this novel. Love her exchanges with Edith and Milvain. This is great: "He promised, and with exchange of smiles which were something like a challenge they took leave of each other." She is irresistibly charming kind of like Satan in Paradise Lost.
I did not expect New Grub Street to be so soapy. It's a page turner.
The poet Tracy K. Smith once said something about the "jealous feeling" — and I fear that I feel it toward the Reardons. Their inherited wealth gives them haughty airs (treatment toward servants, for example), which can be fun to read, in small doses. Was it in today's daily reading which talked about reading in order to escape reality? Was it Amy who claims people read outside of themselves... "Why do poor people care only for stories about the rich? The same principle.’" There's scorn and some condescension in the tone, which is deliciously evocative. Does Amy speak from direct or indirect experience? Does she speak for a class of readers? Does she speak for the reader? Does she even care about her audience? Does my jealousy matter to her?