And I'll never be as strong as my mother

I have wanted to write about Helen Eustis' The Horizontal Man (1946) since I read it in the four-novel collection Women Crime Writers of the 1940s (2015) at the end of last year. It is beautifully written and intensely frustrating. As I am awake on an hour's sleep and waiting with rushthatspeaks for the cleaners to arrive sometime this afternoon, I might as well use this time to complain. [edit] The cleaners arrived before I finished writing. But they were here for some time, so I kept at it. The house looks great.

I am not surprised that The Horizontal Man won its author an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947. It's an ambitiously plotted, stylistically striking murder mystery set at the fictional women's college of Hollymount, a mordant case of write-what-you-know influenced by Eustis' experiences as a student and then a faculty wife at Smith College; she began it during the breakup of her marriage and would later claim dryly that "she wrote it because she knew so many people in college she would like to murder." When the dazzlingly brilliant, devastatingly romantic—male—star of the English department turns up bludgeoned, the Hollymount campus becomes a vortex of feverish speculation, especially after a high-strung misfit—female—student blurts out a confession and then collapses, confined to the college infirmary while a psychiatrist is called in to evaluate the authenticity of her guilt, the off-campus police push for an arrest, and the local news has a field day. The style is acute, vivid, and ironic, the author's eye on her characters almost always a little satirical. I have never actually seen anything like the initial structure, which assembles its cast of characters in a contagious round-robin, shifting perspective each chapter to someone with a link, however oblique or temporary, to the actions of the previous section. One point of view is held in reserve until late in the novel when it comes satisfyingly off the wall, exploding an assumption heretofore taken as accepted fact; another turns out to be a red herring in that it never becomes accessible to the reader despite the apparent literary inevitability that it should be the final reveal. The last word belongs to a peripheral stranger. The very first belongs to the murder victim. The effect is intimate and deliberately disorienting, so that the reader's understanding of Hollymount as a community spirals out from the death at its center, pulling in outsiders like the reporter and the psychiatrist alongside insiders like the housemother, the college president, and the professors; it catches the reader up in the whirl of gossip and only later bothers to distinguish how much of the barrage of information with which we were hit from the violent start was signal and how much was noise. The setting is an instantly recognizable rural New England, especially if read at the right time of year: "The winter sun was nearing the horizon, salmon colored among violet clouds, promising snow . . . The white frame houses took on a luminousness in the evening light, standing on their dead drab lawns among the skeletons of trees." I quite like several of the characters, including the romantic heroine and the psychiatrist.¹

I don't even want to say that the denouement is where The Horizontal Man falls apart, because it's carefully foreshadowed, as psychologically underpinned as the author could make it, and above all thematically consistent with the novel's exploration of gender as assigned, performed, and interpreted in the environment of a women's college just after WWII. ( It just doesn't sound reasonable. )

As it is, I am honestly not sure I can recommend it to anyone who isn't willing to get stung by the last ten pages out of two hundred. Rush proffered the alternative suggestion that I recommend the novel to readers who are willing to cut out the last ten pages "and replace them with a cheese sandwich." Personally it annoys me because there is otherwise a dearth of good mysteries set at women's colleges and I like so many other aspects of the story, but that one just blows the whole thing up. I would love to know if Robert Bloch ever read this novel.

I am off to make dinner with gaudior. Maybe I should just embrace the metaphor and make grilled cheese. [edit] Rush came home and we ate the metaphor.

1. His name is Julian Forstmann and he resents the expectation that he can magically divine the secrets of the human heart by his profession, like a great detective in a crime novel: "The girl is undoubtedly neurotic from what has been said of her, but so are most of the people you know; I can probably tell you whether or not she is psychotic, but that still won't prove her a murderess. As for the Rorschach test, there isn't nearly enough statistical material to support its absolute validity." He gets stuck with explaining the mystery at the end and resents that, too. I really feel for him.