4.5 stars

In the May/June issue of Poets & Writers [a:Claire Messud|2508|Claire Messud|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384661816p2/2508.jpg] said of her novel [b:The Woman Upstairs|15701217|The Woman Upstairs|Claire Messud|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1345666863s/15701217.jpg|18450578] and its narrator:

"As a reader, I have a favorite canon of ranters that runs from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard to the Philip Roth of Sabbath's Theater ... I love a ranter ... And the girls have not been ranting."

Well, Hustvedt's Harriet, aka Harry, is, like Messud's Nora, a ranter and for similar reasons that boil down -- and Harry does boil -- to her wanting to be heard. She is an exuberant, energetic 'older' woman, "blazing" with ideas, who desperately wants full engagement with others and struggles with the idea that she was complicit with those, especially her now-deceased beloved father and husband, who sought to keep her in her place.

This novel is more complex than the Messud and only one reason for that is that it's not told from just one viewpoint. Though I don't think the overall conceit of these various writings and interviews by different voices is convincing as the "book" edited by Professor I.V. Hess that it purports to be, the different voices are absolutely convincing.

Gender-swapping via cross-dressing, and the freedom it may provide, has been a theme of Hustvedt's since her first novel, [b:The Blindfold|125496|The Blindfold|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317792997s/125496.jpg|1163811] and I couldn't help wondering if Prof. I.V. Hess is also The Blindfold's main character, Iris Vegan (note the anagram of Iris and Siri; Vegan is Hustvedt's mother's maiden name). Fittingly, we don't know the gender of Hess, or much about her/him at all except that she/he seems sympathetic to Harriet, the subject of her/his book.

One of Hustvedt's main themes throughout her body of work is the idea of perception and that along with [b:The Blindfold|125496|The Blindfold|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317792997s/125496.jpg|1163811]'s putting on a man's clothes to change personality are taken further here. Harry uses the 'masks' of three young men (they use her too) not just to front her art but to influence it, though I didn't find the latter idea presented as well as the former was. The dangerous mask-play between the third young man and Harriet, done privately though filmed, further complicates the roles of gender and power.

The ending, which brought tears to my eyes, reminded me of the end of my last read, [b:The Song of the Lark|48214|The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388631383s/48214.jpg|1385675], in that the writers surprisingly veer away from the artist's viewpoint to another character's, who in this novel has an intuitive -- literally -- understanding of Harriet's art, a touching and telling counterpoint to all the philosophy that's go on before.

*

After writing this review, I googled "I.V. Hess" and found this in an interview with Hustvedt:

Jill: I have to interject — I feel like there has to be an anagram or something in the name I. V. Hess that I'm not figuring out. It might be totally obvious.

Hustvedt: No, it's not obvious at all. It's very oblique. But I'll tell you, since you asked. The heroine of my first novel is Iris Vegan. I used those two letters for the initials and all the other letters, H-E-S-S, appear in my last name.

It's a little bit of a Kierkegaardian trick. Kierkegaard had Eremita as his editor for the book that, of course, he wrote, but inside the book, there are A and B. Kierkegaard is referred to throughout The Blazing World. I thought, these are not stolen strategies but strategies that are a kind of homage.

http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/siri-hustvedt-the-powells-com-interview-2-by-jill/