memories of the future by siri hustvedt

evening standard 21 march 2019

Siri Hustvedt has never been afraid to go against the grain, and her seventh novel, Memories of the Future, confirms it. She has important things to say about sexual politics, capitalism and art but enjoying this book as a reader means relinquishing the desire for the plot to make linear, logical sense. 

Those of us who love her work will consider it worth the mental switch, and there is a great deal of transformative joy to be found in this story of a young woman arriving in New York to find her voice as a writer. The 23-year-old in question is later known by the initials “SH” and is nicknamed “Minnesota”, the state Hustvedt herself is from. 

The similarities between the author and her fictional heroine don’t end there: as a student, Hustvedt looked pale enough with hunger for a university professor to encourage her to ask for an emergency loan. In the novel, SH rescues a cheese sandwich from a garbage bin so that she will have something to eat. 

The most interesting passages of the novel, however, concern incidents which we can’t know the provenance of. SH is approached in a pastry shop one day by a man who lectures her about anthropology but cannot look her in the eye. The narrator wryly notes that he “is adamant that my breasts should know about this all-important sex-death connection”.

It is also worth noting that this is a more sex-soaked novel than Hustvedt has written before. There are “twists in the sheets and the gasps and the moisture of being lost in two bodies” but the narrator also records in her journal how often she “hits the foam” (her euphemism for masturbation).  

There is a scene of attempted date rape and Hustvedt brilliantly pinpoints how a woman might appear to willingly acquiesce to a man’s demands (“Why did I speak in a quiet voice?”) to avoid a worse fate. She also skewers the guilt a woman might feel when she has escaped an assault: “Just think of all the suffering in the world. Who does she think she is? Not a single broken bone.” 

This is a novel about the rapacity of men in many different forms: Trump, of course, features when the narrator’s elderly mother asks: “Can that man be President?” Marcel Duchamp’s erasure of the woman from whom he allegedly stole the idea for Fountain — his artwork consisting of a urinal — is also referenced. And there is no escaping the “brute force” of money. 

There is much to admire here even if Hustvedt’s earlier readers might regret the absence of a thrilling plot — which made her bestseller What I Loved such electric reading. Hustvedt has said: “There is an aspect of the culture that continually caters to 14-year-old boys. Show me some explosions! Show me some breasts! This is human, but there are many other pleasures.” We should all be grateful that she continues to explore these more esoteric pleasures in her work.

This article first appeared in the Evening Standard