Yahoo Finance Real Estate by Deborah Levy review
Deborah Levy
(Penguin)Deborah Levy is in a reflective mood in Real Estate, the third and final part of her living biography series. Her sixtieth birthday is approaching, which is making her wonder what she would like the rest of her life to look like. She feels compelled to think about her legacy but hits a stumbling block; the problem that drives this book is that she can’t work out what she wants.
Her conundrum is summed up in a passage where she imagines Marmee from Little Women coming to a fictional café that Levy and her two daughters have invented called Girls & Women. Levy wonders whether she will serve Marmee the house entree of Vodka & Cigarettes or conjure a healthier dish. She can’t decide and what starts as a fun thought experiment ends up articulating what Real Estate is grappling with: "You never know what a woman really wants because she is always being told what she wants.”
Levy, who is also an award winning writer of fiction, has touched on this idea of exploring female desire in her two previous memoirs. The first, Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) is an autobiographical riposte to George Orwell’s Why I Write.
In it, Levy goes back and forth between her childhood in Johannesburg and her unhappy marriage. She cries on escalators without knowing exactly why and eventually says: "To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish." The second part, The Cost of Living, is about her voicing that wish, leaving her husband at the age of 50 and trying to put her work and her life first.
Real Estate is less dramatic. Levy has already made her break with the life that was dragging her down. But working out what comes next is no less challenging, even if it is a quieter, more interior sort of affair.
We find her in flux, leaving her north London flat and travelling all around the world (which makes for a nostalgic read just now when we can’t hop on planes). She goes to New York to clear out her stepmother’s apartment (which leads her to wonder about the value of possessions, as she carts everything to thrift shops); to a literary festival in Mumbai; swimming in Greece and to do a writers’ residency in Paris. None of the places feel like home, but not because they aren’t enchanting places to be. Levy’s gift is to transport you to wherever she is, giving a rich sense of what it is like through describing the food, smells and landscapes.
The way she talks about the few things she is certain that she wants from a house makes it sound like a romantic idyll - honeysuckle, balconies overlooking the Mediterranean sea and an egg-shaped fireplace like the one she saw at Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in Mexico. But she is harsh on herself, telling herself this will not be hers. She is painfully aware that for centuries, women have been real estate, owned by their husbands, not owning their own property. There are comparisons with Rachel Cusk’s new book, Second Place, which is also about a woman over 40 who has had failed relationships.
Part of Levy’s problem is that she lacked the right role models in life. She loved her mother but doesn’t want her domesticated life, and says not enough has been written about women over 40. All that Levy can do is compare herself to women she knows. Celia, the wife of the late poet Adrian Mitchell, is “one of the few women I knew who was very like herself...she did not try to please anyone and certainly did not fit the patriarchy’s idea of what an old woman should be like”.
There’s an intriguing, gossipy section in Paris about her best male friend’s collapsing marriage and his affair with her other friend, a free spirited seductress called Helena, who Levy can’t help but judge for sleeping with a married man who is betraying his wife. Levy is fixated on the concept of women with desires and whether they come at a cost. In her experience, women who are clear about what they want and act on it are rare and seen as unlikeable.
She tests the waters by pitching the idea of a woman who follows her own desires to film executives - think the father character from Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass Darkly, writing at four in the morning and then being too tired to spend time with his children, making mistakes but still being loved.
Levy paints a picture of a woman who is “ruthless in pursuit of her vocation”, taking up every job at the expense of seeing her children. The film executives don’t get it. They say this woman would be unlikeable. Male leads are allowed to be like, this but a woman? No way. For the film executives, who represent the conventional way of thinking, the audience must be able to immediately sympathise with a woman in an uncomplicated way.
Levy (who is very likeable) has looked at this in her novels Hot Milk and Swimming Home; the women there feel there must be more to life than the deadened existence they have ended up with. Here, Levy talks about women in fiction and myth who have gone missing (like Lila in Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child) and who are missing their own desires and thinks about some unnamed women who have acted on their desires and been cut down.
Her daughters bring humour to the book, stealing her hairbrush and keys when she stops off at home in North London, singing Taylor Swift and teasing her about the attention she gives to her banana plant (a surrogate child now that they are growing up). They lovingly mock her obscure tastes when she wants to make her own guava ice cream (they point out that shop bought chocolate ice cream is just as nice).
But they also understand that Levy is the sort of person who likes the idea of an unusual fruit ice cream, and sees it as a way to bring a new perspective to your life, in the same way that new clothes can. She ponders how a pair of sage green shoes could be a ticket to another life. This is typical Levy - curious about the world and seeing wonder in it. But it isn’t gushing, there is a poise to the writing. Levy makes astute observations about inequality and sexism without getting ranty or self-pitying.
The result is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life. It’s not a satisfying conclusion but endings are always difficult. Hopefully Levy will reconsider this being the final part and write another. This is a generous book - Levy has shared her vulnerabilities and what makes her happy; it is a pleasure to spend time in her company.
Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Penguin, £10.99)
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