The Weight of Estrangement

Grace Linden reviews Deborah Levy’s “The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies.”

By Grace LindenOctober 3, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Literary Criticism

“I FELL IN LOVE with her before I read any of her books,” Deborah Levy writes in an essay obliquely dedicated to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the French author better known as Colette. It was 1973. Levy, then a teenager, had come across a photograph of Colette, though she no longer can recollect how. Without knowing of the love affairs, transgressive publications, or eccentricity, Levy “intuited” that Colette had led “an experimental life,” and this photograph served as a manifesto of sorts for the adolescent. “What is the point of having any other sort of life, I thought to myself,” Levy writes, marooned as she was in the suburbs outside of London where everyone appeared to be the same, down to the names they selected for their pets. As the opening to Levy’s latest book The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies (2024), a collection of 35 observations, the short text announces what is to come, both for the publication and for her life. Not quite an autobiography or cultural critique, The Position of Spoons instead considers the various people, ideas, places—in short, the stuff of the world—that made Levy, well, Levy.

So what exactly makes up a life? Léon Marchand might say championship medals and laps swum. J. Alfred Prufrock, whom Levy winks at occasionally here, turned to coffee spoons. The measurable components of Levy’s life began in South Africa in 1959 with her birth, though perhaps the first notable entry into her record was the arrest of her father, Norman Levy, which occurred when she was five. Both her parents were anti-apartheid activists. During the four years he was imprisoned (there’s another dataset to quantify), Levy mostly stopped speaking outside the family home. At school, a teacher encouraged her to write down her thoughts, a revelatory act for the child. “I discovered,” Levy reflected later, “that my thoughts were quite loud.”

Shortly after her father’s release, the family moved to England. Initially, Levy had planned to study literature at university, but following a chance encounter with the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, whom she met while working as an usher at a cinema in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, Levy applied instead to Dartington College of Arts. Her first published works were plays. And thank god for that, because her writing is one radiant mise-en-scène after another.

In some ways, The Position of Spoons, too, unfolds like a play, with Levy operating as the interlocutor. Characters speak both through and to her, and she in turn refracts their questions and controversies. Unlike a play, however, space here is given over to introspection and the thoughts not said. We are glimpsing an interiority, however amorphous or fragmentary it may be. Certainly, just because that interiority is unveiled does not mean we truly know a person, in this case Levy, no matter how generous or exacting the prose may be.

I could wax enthusiastic about Levy’s writing, which is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll. Thoughts “roam like syphilis.” Eggs have the “uncanny allure of being an artwork that is made inside the body of a hen.” Lemon rind is “deep, flamboyant, serene.” Or her impressions of Russell Square, the large, public garden in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood: “To stand in the centre of Russell Square Gardens, London, WC1, in the November rain is to summon all your losses in life. It will remind you of every time you have been abandoned, felt desolate, been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Levy does not do complication for complication’s sake. Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling, and with such economy: “I began to think about how she had removed her eyes in the name of whatever it was she stood for.” Or: “To not wear socks is to not pretend that love is for ever.” And: “All the same, I would give anything to hear my mother tell me again about the pleasures of red peppers and anchovies and to hear her laugh loudly (or softly), and to mean it.” She is straightforward to devastating effect.

It is evident to everyone who reads Levy that language is her plaything. As such, her writing is fun; you get the feeling that she finds pleasure in writing. This is hardly universal. Some writing, even some great writing, has the consistency of grout. Plus, Levy is funny. Take the sentence “Like the ignition, the id is always turned on.” Or this explanation about driving on the left side of the road:

About a quarter of the world drives on the left-hand side, mostly the old British colonies. It was believed by the ancients that evil spirits lived on the left side of man and the gods lived on the right side. For the Romans, left meant sinister and corrupt—which is probably what the colonized thought of the British.

It is easy to picture Levy in the garden shed where she works chuckling over a scene or foible or a set of teeth. That doesn’t mean that she finds writing effortless or that her sentences are frivolous—far from it—only that her words are lit from within.

In fact, owing to her own exile from South Africa, Levy’s writing often carries the weight of estrangement. She and, by turns, her characters seem to want to find themselves. It is no surprise, therefore, that psychoanalysis and surrealism, two schools of thought that suggest the past is never really gone, remain enduring influences. Her novels are populated by doubles and doppelgängers, torturous nightmares, previous lives. She tends to privilege small narratives over large, totalizing narrators. Time can be quicksand fast or primordial, and these written worlds possess the same aching tension as a Giorgio de Chirico painting, with all its vast unknowns.

When working on her first novel, Beautiful Mutants (1989), as she related to The White Review in 2013, Levy was interested in how to “write a coherent character” and whether she even should. More than 30 years later, in The Position of Spoons, she notes: “If coherence is achieved at the expense of complexity, it is not really coherent.”

Like all of us, Levy is far from coherent or fixed, and if the goal were to emerge from this book with a cohesive portrait of its author—a gestalt exercise unto itself—then the reader would fail. Certainly, this reader did, and happily so. Yes, we find out that her touchstones include Marguerite Duras, Méret Oppenheim, and Lee Miller, but Levy has mentioned them before. Ditto her aesthetic affiliation with J. G. Ballard and the aforementioned writing shed. What it means to be a female artist occupies Levy as do hysteria, various aromas, and the potency of certain colors. We learn that the idea for Swimming Home, her 2011 novel that was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, came about while swimming in the Bay of Angels in Nice, France. The Position of Spoons invites the reader into Levy’s literary imagination, and taken together, these facts and moments form a portrait, but it is far from photographic or even accurate.

“Like all good storytellers,” writes Levy, “the artist leaves it to the viewer to step into the image and improvise with its meanings.” And all those meanings? The story, character, beauty, form—the risk and adventure? That is what transforms the general into the intimate, what makes this life different from that life. As Levy observes, “So long as we do not pluck out the heart of our mystery (to misquote Shakespeare), there will always be something interesting to do with language.”