‘I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes,” muses the narrator of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. ‘There’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.”
In the American writer Sylvia Brownrigg’s Yale-based “cult” novel Pages for You (2001), the love object, Anne Arden, has green eyes. The wild sort, with “that green glitter of mockery”; never in her life has Anne’s paramour, the much younger Flannery, seen “such a heartbreaking colour”. In Brownrigg’s new novel Pages for Her, Anne’s eyes are still a-glitter 20 years on. “Flaxen-haired” Flannery is 38 now, a writer living in San Francisco with her artist husband Charles and their daughter Willa. Yet while dining at a fancy restaurant (“Flannery always endeavoured to keep her palate up to date”) the “deep green” of the olive oil in the dipping saucer reminds her “of the swoon-inducing colour of Anne’s eyes”. When Pages for Her predictably brings Anne and Flannery together after Anne’s long relationship with a cobalt-eyed academic called Jasper, Anne’s “startling celadon eyes still made Flannery gasp”.
And Anne’s hair? Why, it’s red, of course. Oh, pity the poor redheads of fiction! Fairly rare in real life, two-a-penny on the page — where no one ever just happens to have red hair. For children (Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, Disney’s Ariel) ginger signals spunk, the plucky outsider. For adults, the green-eyed redhead is most commonly found between the covers of the slushy romance novel, where she (it’s usually a she) promises hot-headed passion. If she’s auburn, like our Anne, she’s probably “intellectual”, too.
“Frustratingly, there are flashes of good writing
For that’s more or less what these two novels amount to, despite James Wood naming Brownrigg “one of the most exciting new writers of her generation”: cheesy romance, in which Flannery is jealous of Anne’s coffee (“she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips”), and clothes and make-up are given disproportionate airtime (“She … applied slate liner and smoky shadow around her gold-green eyes, a plum shaping on her lips”). The only significant deviation from template is the fact that Anne and Flannery are both women (right-on!) who are into literary criticism (in a very vague way). This, along with Brownrigg’s irritatingly elevated diction (people “author” books and “await” friends at the coffee shop), is apparently enough to convince readers and publishers that they’re looking at the real thing.
Pages for Her is mostly a limp reprise of the earlier novel. Frustratingly, the first third contains flashes of really good writing. The depiction of Flannery’s husband Charles, and specifically of his dangerous temper, is sharp, unflinching, and full of real, mundane menace. “What people come to fiction for,” Brownrigg tells us on the final page of the novel, is “what to expect from their own lives”. In that spirit, she has used these two books as wish fulfilment: what the world would be like if everyone had gemstones for eyes. But as Hilary Mantel recently noted in her third Reith lecture, writing isn’t therapy. The scenes with Charles are a tantalising glimpse of what sort of a novelist Brownrigg might be if she stopped fantasising about what life should look like and focused instead on how it really is.
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Picador £14.99 pp374
