Indelicacy; or, Questions About Historical Fiction

by Amina Cain

I decided recently that I need to stop trying to read historical fiction. I finished a book a few weeks ago and kept thinking that it’s a good historical novel and a lot of people liked it, but I just didn’t. It was fine? It was okay, but kind of boring? I didn’t think it was a bad book or even significantly flawed — good readers and smart people genuinely loved it — but it was just not for me. It’s time for me to stop trying to make that genre work.

I don’t think I realized that Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is historical when I picked it up. If I’d known, I probably would still have read it, to be honest, because Cain comes up in Kate Zambreno’s writing and Zambreno is mentioned in Cain’s acknowledgments, along with Renee Gladman and Bhanu Kapil, and that’s a circle of writers I’ll follow anywhere. But I would have approached it with some suspicion.

But, as it turns out, Indelicacy is historical fiction, but not that kind of historical fiction. And by that I mean it doesn’t have many period details. It’s clearly set a long time ago, probably in the Victorian era or early twentieth century, but it doesn’t have enough details to locate it in a specific time or place. It just has an old-fashioned feeling to it, and the characters talk about horses and dresses and longing for unattainable consumer goods in a way that feels old.

Does this mean it’s not actually historical fiction? Do you have to be able to identify a time period for it to count? I don’t know, but I do know that I loved the book, so perhaps I need to rethink my dislike of the genre.

Indelicacy is narrated by Vitória, a woman who wants to be a writer. She works as a cleaner for an art museum and spends her free time writing: she knows she’s not very good yet, but she also knows she dearly loves to write, and that she is slowly getting better. She has a friend, Antoinette, who also cleans at the museum; the two of them don’t have much in common, although they understand each other and get along well. But otherwise, Vitória is poor, isolated, estranged from her family, and living on her own in a sparsely-furnished apartment.

But we have already learned from occasional chapters that take place in a later timeline that Vitória eventually gets married to a rich man and then leaves her husband to live once again on her own. The alternating timelines describe how Vitória’s marriage happens, how she decides to leave it, and how she is changed by it.

The real pleasure of this book comes from Vitória’s calm, sharp, self-aware, no-nonsense voice. We don’t know exactly why she is estranged from her family, but it was a large, noisy group that made her long for quiet and solitude. She treasures her independence to the extent that she is guarded and slow to trust others and make friends. She knows quiet writing time is rare and precious, and she does what she has to to protect it.

There’s something beguiling in her self-confidence, and it’s here that the historical context begins to feel significant. After all, why set this in the past? Why write historical fiction if the details of life in a specific historical period aren’t part of the project? But Vitória’s confidence seems sharply at odds with her setting, so the setting highlights what a strange person she is, or maybe it is the thing that makes her strange.

As I write this, I keep thinking about how similar she feels to Jhumpa Lahiri’s protagonist in Whereabouts: the characters share a similar self-possession and clear-eyed view of themselves and other people. Both seem a little sad about their isolation, but they also see it as a fair price to pay for independence and solitude. But Vitória is at odds with her environment in a way Lahiri’s protagonist isn’t: she isn’t supposed to be independent, isn’t supposed to care about her writing above all else, isn’t supposed to not want children. Her husband doesn’t know what to make of her — no one knows what to make of her, really, except the friend she makes during her marriage, Dana, who recognizes that Vitória’s freedom is rare and that she should seize it and make the most of it.

In the end, I don’t think the historical setting is what makes Vitória strange, because she’s pretty strange even without it. In one of my favorite passages, she is very excited to attend her first literary reading from a favorite author, but ends up hating both the author and the man who interviews him:

I wanted to lock them in the room after the reading was over and make them listen to each other forever. Let them look at the sky when they got tired, or at the wastebasket. I thought they deserved that. I wanted to tell them how terrible the reading had been, that it had ruined the writing, how shallow the interview was, how much I had hated all of it.

When I walked out of the room, I said simply, “You’re both worms,” and they looked at me, not knowing how to respond to a statement like that. “Of the worst kind. When you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.”

This rude (but also delightful) behavior is odd no matter when one lives. But the old-fashioned feel of Vitória’s time — and maybe also the fact that she sort of exists outside of time — makes this behavior even more outrageous. She does not conform to gender expectations, with a vengeance. Maybe there’s something about a more strictly-defined gender role that makes this strangeness possible: if the rules are strict, deciding to ignore them leaves a whole lot of room for freedom and experimentation.

As for historical fiction, perhaps I need to avoid the long novels, the kinds that are full of period detail (except for Sarah Waters — okay, she is good!), but remain open to the strange novellas (Indelicacy is a quick 160 pages) that use the past in some conceptual way that doesn’t make me feel bogged down when I read them. If there are other novellas like this, I don’t know. Maybe really gripping historical fiction is just very hard to write. Maybe the problem is that I don’t lose myself in stories easily and attempts to evoke atmosphere through accumulated detail are lost on me.

Maybe it’s that Amina Cain is a really great writer and can make me want to read any genre.

Publishing This Week

• Moon and the Mars by Kia Corthron (Seven Stories Press): so after all my doubts and questions about historical fiction above, the main interesting-sounding, small-press book I can find that’s new this week is historical! It may not be the book for me, but you might want to check it out: “An exploration of NYC and America in the burgeoning moments before the start of the Civil War through the eyes of a young, biracial girl.”

  

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury, 2021): the third installment of Levy’s autobiographical trilogy. I loved the first two and snapped this up at the bookstore last week.

  

Currently Reading

• Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021): I’m loving this book! Barton writes about her fascination with the Japanese language and her experience moving to Japan and being plunged into a new language and culture at the age of 21. Unfortunately, I don’t think it comes out in the U.S. until next March when Liveright will publish it in a hardcover version. The Fitzcarraldo edition seemed to be available here for awhile, but not anymore. The Liveright version adds a subtitle: “A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing,” which I hate. Publishing is weird.

  

The Cormac Report

Cormac started third grade this week! He is now in a new school building, one for grades 3-5, and he’s nervous about it, but by the end of the week I’m sure he will feel settled in. I’m excited to see how his reading changes this year. He grew a lot as a reader last year — I’d say it was a year of gaining confidence in his ability to understand books independently. We now read to him less and he reads by himself more. The books are longer and more complex.

At the same time, I wonder whether school is the thing that changes his reading habits, or if what happens at home matters more. It’s possible that a summer with reading built into most days is more influential than any reading he does for school. The school day leaves kids with less free reading time, after all. I don’t know. I just know he won’t be exactly the same kid by the end of the school year, and I’m so curious to see what happens.

Have a good week everyone!