about the Frederica Quartet

These books did exactly what I needed them to do, exactly when I needed it. In the last gasp of this awful year-plus of covid, these four novels of A.S. Byatt's engrossed me, helped me think, helped me feel.

As a whole, the group of novels remind me of a looser, more capacious and many-layered, dare I say laminated, version of the same sort of creative project as The Children's Book. The latter makes sense as a refinement and compaction of the former, crushing all of the creativity and intellectual angst and family drama and period detail into a single long novel, instead of breaking the portrait down into four discrete, shorter works. I like the baggier version very well, although I also admire the streamlined punch of The Children's Book.

But these novels are so inclusive, with so much interpolated material, such long discursions presented embedded into the text! Huge chunks of novels, reviews, essays, newspaper pieces, research notes, legal transcripts, reproduced as a part of the narrative. What a rich, impressive, mentally varied style! There's so very much to eat.

Byatt directly thematicizes this very concept, giving her central character Frederica an experimental interest in the idea of creative and personal "laminations." Frederica imagines that if she can seal off separate layers off her thought and person, she can have more of the various identities available to her as a midcentury modern woman. Sometimes, she succeeds in this. But it's the same thing Byatt does with the multimedia multivocality, putting one thing against another to set up resonances, arraying a diverse archive about life and academia and creativity and being female.

( The Virgin in the Garden )

( Babel Tower )