“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money,” Nicola added, “or time.”
Doubt.
The Last Sane Woman is one of those confusing novels that makes my brain fire on all cylinders: format illuminates theme, messy but relatable characters unveil something true about humanity in the moment, and meaning comes as an epiphany in its aftermath. Debut novelist Hannah Regel, primarily known as a poet, writes with an impressionist’s sensibility — POV changes abruptly, long passages read as out-of-place metaphors, close-up details are fuzzy until one stands back and considers the whole — and throughout, she includes so much truth about women: about how they present themselves, their friendships, and their place in the arts. If I had written a review immediately, I might have rounded this down to four stars, but the more I think about it, the more I like it: rounding up to five. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Reading was easy. All she had to do was sit very still and the world would shift; inviting her in as a citizen, liking a tweet because it was true enough she could have written it. Watching, Nicola soon learnt, was also a form of taking part. A form that, sitting at her quiet desk in the Feminist Assembly, she felt impossible to get wrong.
On its surface, this is a story of a young ceramicist, Nicola — newly graduated from art school and feeling directionless — who (more or less on a whim) inquires at a nonprofit archive of women’s work in the arts if they had any material on those women who had had difficulty with “making things”. The archivist gives her a never-before-explored box of letters written by a female potter who had killed herself in the 1980s without making a name for herself, and Nicola is immediately fascinated by the biography revealed by this one-sided correspondence between this unnamed potter (she always signs her name in “XX” kisses) and the mysterious “Susan” to whom she bares all. The further Nicola reads, the more she recognises correspondences with her own life and work, and tension arises as she realises she might be on the brink of uncovering a mystery. But that’s just the surface plot. (I don’t really consider what follows a spoiler, per se, but I enjoyed discovering these things on my own, so, forewarned.)
I always look for the inspiration for a book’s title while reading and the phrase “the last sane woman” doesn’t appear in this one. And when I googled it, the closest I came was an article from The Guardian with AS Byatt’s review of The Last Sane Man by Tanya Harrod. As Byatt explains: “The last sane man" was a phrase used by Angela Carter to describe the potter, Michael Cardew. "Sane" in this context is associated with a simple life, and the ideal of the human as artist, art and life as one continuous work. (Further sleuthing and I learned that Angela Carter coined this phrase in her 1978 review of a monograph written on Cardew by Garth Clark.) Reading Byatt’s review, I could see where Regel took some points of inspiration from the life of this well-known male artist — and especially where it explains that Cardew attempted to shape public perception of his life with the letters he wrote; that makes for interesting speculation on how literally we are to interpret our own potter’s writings — but what I loved about this off-the-page research was that I felt like the character Nicola: acknowledging that art history is predominantly the story of men and trying to understand where our anonymous female potter might fit in.
The format of this novel, as I said above, is not straightforward. POV shifts between Nicola’s life in modern-day London, passages that she reads from the letters — that can then suddenly shift to the potter going about her own life in the London of 30-40 years ago — and scenes from the POV of Susan, and how she reacts to the letters of her freewheeling friend (whom she does name for the reader) as she deals with denying her own artistic aspirations to become a young wife and mother. And frequently, Regel writes in long, confusing metaphors:
The knuckle inside Susan, swelling with what she had failed to understand, turned purple with pride in her throat. The colour grew elbows, firmly in place, unable to interrupt. She had driven for eighteen years in the rain and she’d be damned if she unravelled now. And besides, she thought, it would be beyond absurd to alert a stranger to the black pool of solvents, dyes and fatty acids still bleeding out from under her chair and onto her feet, especially one in the middle of a monologue. She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish.
But as confusing as the POV shifts and the metaphorical passages can be, taken together, they seem to be the prose equivalent of the groundbreaking multimedia art that the potter creates:
Face taut, she begins to arrange the shards. Working urgently with chapped hands she slathers ceramic mortar onto their new joins, following the contours of their freshly broken edges with intuitive speed. This way, the fragments shape themselves. Up, up. She chews her lip in concentration. Spots of blood rise from under the skin to meet the air that flaked them. She stands back to inspect her work. What does it want? Legs. Filling her nails with dirt she quickly folds the form back in on itself, hollowing it out before it sets, and gives the next instruction. Nerves. She hurries through a box of discarded farming tools and bits of machinery, collected on her evening walks through the fields. Without gloves she grabs at a spoke to free it from its wheel, ripping one and then another like screeching hairs, her palms now streaked in scars of rust. Strange fronds. She works them into the form like whiskers. Weirdly delicate. Freshly desperate. Not even pots anymore but innervated beings.
Standing back from The Last Sane Woman, I can see where Regel dirtied her hands with muck and rust; this is art and there is truth at the heart of it, and what more could I want?
A rather grinding autobiography, isn’t it? Same old, same old, but it can’t be helped. Life, when it is happening, doesn’t care to tell you which part is telling and what it tells. That is the frustration. I suppose all this aimless rambling is caught up in feelings of pointlessness and futility and the ever-increasing sense of ageing into an absence where every addition feels like a load, wiping tables, wedging clay.
Most importantly, this is a feminist story of an anonymous woman artist, forgotten to history: the story of what she actually did, how she presented that to her best friend, how that friend interpreted events through her own experiences, and how bringing forward the forgotten stories inspires a new generation. The format does echo the potter’s nontraditional creations, and that’s what makes this art: it may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly was to mine.
