I very much enjoyed your review!

Interesting little novel, The Two Serious Ladies. I wondered, after I read it just recently, if it is one of those sorts of novels that requires the context of the author’s life to help make sense of it. Jane Bowles was – according to wikipedia – jewish, wiry haired, spoke three languages, traveled broadly and was something of a global citizen, had a physical problem with her knee that made her walk stiffly, was bisexual (she had a passionate affair with a woman while married to her author husband), etc, etc, All of this sounds like so many echoes in the plot and character stylings in The Two Serious Ladies.

I did find myself compelled to look for answers to the oddness in the writing style, in spite of my impatience with novels that require research before one understands them. I found myself comparing the novel to Kafka’s story The Country Doctor for its dreamlike speed-along quality, and because the characters seem so often to speak at one another without seeming to take anything about the other person into account. Also, I felt certain that English was not the author’s mother tongue, given the clipped and somewhat German sounding phrasing, but I was wrong.

One of the most chilling scenes in the novel, for me, was this one:
As they drove past the ice-cream parlor on their way out of town, Miss Goering looked through the window (of the limousine) to see if she could catch a glimpse of Andy. To her surprise, she saw that the store was filled with people, so that they overflowed into the street and quite crowded the sidewalk, and she was unable really to see into the store at all.

You may remember that this was the point at which Miss Goering had just left the hapless, needy and extremely depressed Andy, to hook up with the “massive” Ben, very much in the manner of a prostitute, which is what Ben took her for. We are never told what happened to Andy, but given that there was a big crowd gathered around my first thought was suicide or something similar.

Miss Goering travels through the novel as if she were not made of entirely human stuff, talking at people and plotting her course according to this mysterious inner compulsion she appears to have been born with. I agree with you: she is easily the most fascinating character to take this particular stage, and whoa, is she ever unlikeable. I’d like to see one of the Criminal Minds people do a profile on her. She’d come out a veritable serial killer.

Still and all, something haunting about this writing. Disturbing and desolate. None of the characters ever hook up for real or find any sort of happiness. “Oh Andy,” says Miss Goering, “you make me sound so dreadful! I am merely working out something for myself.” But the author never does make it clear what this something is, or how it turns out. The novel, being thus unfinished, tries endlessly to finish itself in one’s own mind, but the rules are unfathomable, and the humor too dark – for me at least – to take any great pleasure in figuring it out. But I will remember it for a long time, I know it.