Between “I” and “you”

For it was not simply Dickens’s genius as a storyteller that hooked her. After taking a degree in history at Columbia University, she went on to do a PhD there — her doctoral dissertation was on language and identity in Dickens’s work, mapping the distance, the blur, between the pronouns “I” and “you”. Hustvedt perceived the way in which “literature, linguistics, philosophy, developmental psychology and neurology merged in Dickens’s use of pronouns as signs of cohesive and disintegrating selves”. This fascination with how we locate ourselves in the world, how we create and define a self, is the engine behind a body of work that has extraordinary breadth and depth. It would lead her to the study of linguistics and neurology, making her that rare creature, an intellectual equally at home in the sciences as in the arts.

Dynamic reality

Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota and moved to New York in her early 20s. Her parents met in Oslo, Norway, where her Norwegian mother was studying at the university; a Fulbright scholarship had taken her father there. Her first language, the language of her childhood, was Norwegian: bilingualism too can offer a version of an alternative self. As Hustvedt wrote in her essay “Translation Stories”: “Translation, more and less literal, is a form of intimate reading that calls for interpretation at the deepest level, which subsequently becomes a dynamic reality of ongoing choices.” The reader feels that dynamic reality in all Hustvedt’s work, as she plays with what we understand about the nature of narrative and the nature of self. “The best novels have a polyphony of voices which do not agree with one another,” she has said. “Wuthering Heights, The Brothers Karamazov and To the Lighthouse are sublime examples of polyphony, of multiple perspectives that dance and crash inside a single work.”

Memory is shot through with fiction

Those multiple perspectives have always permeated her creations. The Blindfold, her first novel, was published in 1992; in it, Iris arrives in New York from the Midwest with little to sustain her. She becomes entangled with four powerful figures who shape her life in different ways. The novel resists standard chronology, instead moulding its protagonist’s identity by the influences under which she falls. Her most recent novel, Memories of the Future — published in 2019 — resonates against her first. Its heroine, SH, also comes from the Midwest to make a new life in Manhattan: the novel’s first line has a little echo of David Copperfield, too: “Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel.” Iris, of course, is Siri backwards; SH shares her creator’s initials — in both novels, as in other of Hustvedt’s fictions, characters share background details with the author. Yet the reader must not be drawn to direct comparison. In the first place, Hustvedt is at pains to stress that recollection is never reliable: “Memory itself is shot through with fiction,” she reminded me when we spoke a few years ago. “Although any number of journalists and some reviewers have assumed that my novels are thinly veiled autobiographies, this is not the case,” Hustvedt wrote in an essay entitled “The Future of Literature”. “My books often surprise me while I am writing them. Characters rise up from unknown regions and begin to speak.”

Where do ideas come from?

To allow these figures to rise up within her, she gets up early to work at her desk in the Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband of over 40 years, the writer Paul Auster. The afternoon is devoted to reading, often scientific literature on neurology and psychology; since 2015 she has taught Narrative Psychiatry to psychiatric residents and junior faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine College in New York City. She never ceases to interrogate the wellspring of her creativity — and by extension, human creativity as a whole. The source of our stories is an issue so profound it is easily ignored: but Hustvedt will not turn away. “Where do ideas come from?” she writes. “The mind-body question appears as soon as the person in the back of the room asks me or any other writer on tour where our ideas come from. Are ideas in brain tissue? I have discovered that even when presented in highly lucid language, readers have difficulty grasping the problem. In my book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves I pose the question again and again from multiple perspectives, and yet I was amazed to find that in interviews about the book, my interlocutors ignored it entirely.”

Inhabiting the mind and body

The Shaking Woman, published in 2010, is a fascinating, interdisciplinary memoir which has as its centre the uncontrollable tremors and jerks which afflicted Hustvedt in the aftermath of her father’s death, her first convulsion coming as she gave a talk in his memory at the Minnesota college where he had been a professor for almost forty years. The book makes it clear that for Hustvedt — who has also been afflicted with debilitating migraines — the mind-body problem is far from abstract. She lives it, in her physical self: as we all do, if we are paying attention. “It is Hustvedt’s gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear,” wrote the late Dame Hilary Mantel in responding to this book; the same could be said, in essence, of much of Hustvedt’s work.

A woman’s authority

This sense of the body as determinant is closely linked to her feminism. A character in Memories of the Future lays it out plain: “Remember this: the world loves powerful men and hates powerful women. I know. Believe me, I know. The world will punish you, but you must hold fast.” Her novel The Blazing World centres on about a female artist, Harriet Burden, who uses male avatars to send her work out into the world; the book shares its title with a 17th-century novel by the pioneering scholar Margaret Cavendish, which some have called the first work of science fiction. This powerful book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014. Hustvedt has recalled an exchange with one of her European publishers who insisted that the novel had obviously “been written for women,” and that he would market it as such. “I wrote back and explained that this was not the case. I did, after all, know my own intentions. I wasn’t angry at him. I just wanted to clarify my position and explain the ironic meanings and structure of the book. But as we wrote back and forth, he grew more and more irritated until he finally exploded at me. ‘I refuse to be treated as a schoolboy’ were his exact and revealing words.” She continues in the plainest of language: “The elevation and recognition of a woman’s authority is often interpreted as the denigration and erasure of the man and his authority.”

Art, science, belief

Her work is a rebuke to lazy assumptions about what belongs to women or men; about what may be called art or science. She is a boundary-strider, a pathbreaker, as well as a writer whose work is always stylish and engrossing. And she has hope for the future and for change. I once had the chance to ask her whether she was an optimist. “I don’t have Utopian fantasies,” she told me, “And I don’t think, for example, that women are better than men, and that if women get power they will lead us into a wonderfully cuddly world of goodness. But I have to believe, as Virginia Woolf did when she wrote about Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own, that we can bring her to fruition in some way. I have to believe that.”