Divorcing

psychic brutalities of Sophie’s conjugal life, add the deforming legacy of family. It already seeps into the early part of the book, including in the burial scene in which, at the graveside, Ezra says to Sophie’s father, “At her funeral at least she is decent,” and her father does not demur. But about a third of the way into Divorcing, Sophie the unreliable narrator of the breakup of her marriage gives way to Sophie the entirely trustworthy narrator of her childhood as part of the extended high-bourgeois Jewish Landsmann family (another telling name) in pre–World War II Budapest and later Vienna. Taubes is deftly savage in her portrait of both her overbearing psychoanalyst father (modeled, as Ezra was on Jacob Taubes, on her own father, a distinguished psychiatrist of the period in Europe and later in the United States) and her mother who is sedulously and unapologetically unfaithful to him, and eventually divorces him and marries a much younger man. All of this takes place just before the union of Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938. It is followed by an equally straightforward section that takes up the story of Sophie and her father after they have emigrated to America. After that, though, the realistic narrative once more gives way to a phantasmagoric one.

As in the early parts of Divorcing, Sophie is dead; at least presumed to be: intentionally, it is not entirely made clear. Ezra, Sophie’s father and mother, and eventually Sophie herself speaking from her coffin appear before a Hungarian rabbinic court. Sophie’s entire life, from early childhood to wretched marriage, is debated in increasingly hysterical terms. In the end, the court grants Sophie her divorce, after which Taubes wrenches her narrative back toward realism of structure and tone, though not of chronology. Sophie is with Ezra during their marriage, she is in America in the years after she and her father emigrated, she is back in Budapest, then in America once again. Toward the end of this section, Sophie has a kind of reckoning with her mother, but it is without reconciliation or even understanding. After that, the book tails off: Sophie with her children, Sophie writing her novel in New York, Sophie headed back to Europe again. This is unquestionably the weakest section of Divorcing. To me, it reads as if Taubes had not quite known how to gather all those interiorities and externalities, and lay them out once more with the same force and inventiveness that she musters again and again in the novel. Or perhaps she was bowing to an editorial desideratum for an ending that at least left open the possibility of redemption. Both explanations are the purest of speculation on my part. It may simply be instead that because Divorcing is neither fully a realistic novel nor exactly an experimental one, no ending would have been entirely satisfactory. Instead, the reader is left with what Taubes in the penultimate sentence of the novel calls “the anguish of abandoned dream places.”

It is tempting to take refuge in the observation that had she lived Taubes would of course have gone on to write better books. But then about what writer can that not be said? I do like to think that she would have found a way to harness the ecstatic qualities of her writing which are so striking in her truly remarkable letters to Jacob during 1951 and 1952, when she was largely in Europe and he was studying in Jerusalem with the great scholar of Kabbalistic Judaism Gershom Scholem, and of which there are a few intimations in her university thesis on Weil (the letters were published in Germany in 2014). But despite its limitations, Taubes’s novel has stood the test of time. There were many interesting experimental novels written during the same period in which she was composing Divorcing. It hardly seems controversial to say that today very few are worth reading. Divorcing is one of these rare exceptions.

David Hume is supposed to have said of Rousseau that he was like a man walking around without his skin on. The same, I think, can be said of Susan Taubes, which is what caused her such terrible suffering in life and which also makes Divorcing, whose deepest subject is anguish, at once so relentless and so remarkable. This is a novel that bleeds.

—DAVID RIEFF

DIVORCING

to

ELSA FIRST,

who knew this book before it was a book

ONE

SHE OPENS her eyes with enormous effort but it’s in another room; then she is hurrying down a busy street past fine shops, the window displays on Place Vendôme attract her, watches flat as coins; but she knows this is wrong, she knows she must open her eyes as she lies in bed in a room. Repeatedly she closes and opens her eyes, now she is in bed; she recognizes the room; the light on a high floor by the Hudson River. But she can’t keep her eyes open long enough; each time she blinks the room changes, the window is on a different side, or a dark mass blocks the view. Now she discerns a man’s shape, she recalls the pain that rent her, for which her body was not prepared—is it her lover?—he stands in his coat beside her bed, she wonders if she screamed like a savage, if he heard her wild ravings and blasphemies burst on vaulting blood. If he has heard he pretends he hasn’t, from kindness or indifference, because he prefers not to believe what he has heard or seen. Beautiful and dignified he wants to remember her.

She begins to speak, she is far away now, her own voice remote, surprisingly rapid and fluent. She is laughing. She has never laughed like this before. The man’s shape has blurred, a dark inert mass, it swings slightly, now she sees the white of his bare soles—he’s hanged himself!

Sophie Blind doesn’t believe this, of course, she knows just because something gives you a fright you don’t have to believe