To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One: To Room Nineteen v. 1 (Flamingo Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Doris Lessing's excellent short-story "To Room Nineteen" is doubtless an extraordinary piece of literature. It is a story about a failure in intelligence, about depression, suffering, disintegration, alienatation and finally - about suicide. There are many approaches to this text: For example, one can read it as a psychological case study especially by using Freud's ideas about the "id" and the "super-ego". The super-ego is obviously the ethically aware element, restricted by morality principles, whereas the id, which stands in direct contradiction, represents the source of all our psychic energies. It is the source of our aggressions and desires. The protagonist, Susan Rawlings, is kind of torn between these psychic zones: her entire life is marked by doing things intelligent and sensible, but later on, when she is in her early forties, she gets to understand that she is ruined by the very achievement of her goals - goals that are determined by society. Therefore, the message of the text is that it is irreperably wrong to do everything right by society standards and means. Susan has everything she wanted: a good-looking husband, lovely children and a house in the suburbs, but some day, when her husbands confesses an affair, her orderly planned world collapsed. Slowly but surely she comprehens that her rational world was only a fake and not much more than a big misconception. Henceforth she tries to develop different strategies to cope with that new insight. All she needs is a space, or a state of affairs where it would not be necessary to keep reminding herself on all the boring bits that life demanded from her. Since she can't find solitude in her own house she looks for a hotel room, in which she sits, thinks and stares into empty space. Here she finds complete isolation that helps her regenerating. Unfortunately, one day the room loses its revitalising effect, because her husband suspected that she is having an affair and engages a detective to keep a watch on her. Susan goes a last time to the hotel, turns the gas on and drifts off into the dark river.

When I say that Doris Lessing is one of the top published fiction writers still living, you will know to a) take it to the bank, yet b) also go out and get a copy of her stories- preferably her 1980 collection from Vintage Books, simply called Stories, wherein thirty-five of her best tales are housed. Lessing, who was born Doris May Taylor, of British parents, in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919, and grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is simply one of the best short story writers of the last century. Having recently read the overrated oeuvres of William Trevor and Frank O'Connor, it was a relief to avail myself of the comparatively low-keyed works of Lessing. Of course, she deals with many of the same topics that Trevor, especially (as far more of his tales than O'Connor's are set in England than Ireland), deals with: the bourgeoisie's sloth, the ins and outs of romance, yet she does so in far more daring and experimental forms, even as she does so. And her ear for the upper crust's patois is far more realistic and variegated than Trevor's. Consequently, her tales are more lively and engaging with the characters within. Another area she excels in is with the little details. She understands that `realism' consists not merely of a boring recitation of the diurnal, but a poetic focus on aspects of the real that have been overlooked by most people. Overall, I'd have liked a bit more diversity in her tales, but she has more than most writers, and this helps with the overall quality of her work. Not all her stories succeed, but her body of work is far more `experimental' than that of PoMo poseurs such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, or Rick Moody. Still, even as her stories stretch form, they all share a very clinical and calculating eye. Lessing really digs underneath the expected, in the best ways of such psychologically based writers as Richard Ford, while also exploring emotion in convincing character portraits that are reminiscent of the best of Russell Banks and Reynolds Price....The final sort of tales are the experiments, such as Not A Very Nice Story, which heavily plays with form and points of view as it details a pair of intertwined marriages, which ends on a very despairing note. This truly postmodern tale (as opposed to the slop that usually has that label applied to it) opens in this provocative and well written way:

This story is difficult to tell. Where to put the emphasis? Whose perspective to use? For to tell it from the point of view of the lovers (but that was certainly not their word for themselves- from the viewpoint, then, of the guilty couple) is as if a life were to be described through the eyes of some person who scarcely appeared in it; as if a cousin from Canada had visited, let's say, a farmer in Cornwall half a dozen unimportant times, and then wrote as if these meetings had been the history of the farm and the family. Or it is as if a stretch of years were to be understood in terms of the extra day in Leap Year.
Report On The Threatened City is Lessing's only science fiction tale in the collection, and has a very Twilight Zone like appeal. England Versus England and Two Potters are two minor, and mediocre tales that also fall into this last category. Through all her tales, though, Lessing never relents from the basic existential crisis that is at the heart of most literary stories of quality: who am I and how did I get here (to where the story starts)?, or its subtle variants She is very much a literary writer, in the best sense of that term, and, at least in her short fiction, I've found none of the specious and frequent comparisons made between her and Virginia Woolf to hold up. Woolf was a horrendous short fictionist (and her longer fiction was not much better, if at all), while Lessing is a premier talent and accomplished wordsmith. Her best tales read almost like emotionally charged psychological chess matches between antagonists, or a protagonist and the cosmos, and she has a good ear for real conversational tones, inflections, and offhanded poesy. She is a short story writer of a cut or three above even more acclaimed landsmen like William Trevor, yet has never quite gotten her due. Read her anyway, and help reverse the tide of deliteracy wrought by the vandals of literature: the bad writers, agents, editors, publishers, and critics, who try to snow you from what your gut tells you, but you just cannot finger. Doris Lessing is a terrific writer- stick that in your Cliffs Notes, and think about it!