“The Life of the Mind” (A Novel) by Christine Smallwood: Narrator May be Alternate Personality of Dorothy, the Protagonist

During the first half of this novel, Dorothy—an adjunct professor of English, meaning poorly paid and ineligible for tenure—is often preoccupied with her recent miscarriage, which, privately, to herself, she sometimes jokes about, as she often does about things that are serious to her.

She currently has two separate psychotherapists, the significance of which in the novel seems mainly to be as a joke about doubling. In a similar vein, “Dorothy read half a page of Rebecca. It was odd that no one in this book had children. Perhaps that was the meaning of the double. By reproducing the individual, the double interfered with the reproduction of a generation” (1, p. 74). Is she is joking about her own doubling’s having caused her miscarriage? In any case, the double is a metaphor for multiple personality (whether or not the author was thinking of it in those terms).

When Dorothy is reading, a book converses with her, like a critical and conceited, alternate personality:

“Look at me! the book said.

“What? said Dorothy…

“I have read all of Stendhal in French, the book informed her nonchalantly…

“That’s not my field, Dorothy started to say, but the book talked over her.

“Greater minds than yours, it said, minds more serious, more synthetic, with better recall, more command of foreign languages…You…are a dilettante, a prosaic clog in the pipes of discourse…Don’t you know anything, you joke of a humanist, you walking fatberg of consumer debt?” (1, pp. 112-113).

But the main doubling, or talkative alternate personality, in the first half of this novel may be the narration. The third-person narrator has had almost nothing to say from the perspective of any other character than Dorothy’s. Indeed, the perspective has been so much Dorothy’s, I have had to keep reminding myself that Dorothy is not a first-person narrator.

Why wasn’t Dorothy made the first-person narrator? My tentative conclusion is that the narrator in this novel is a narrative alternate personality of Dorothy, the protagonist, which would be the first time, that I recall, seeing that in a novel. Does the author, herself, have a narrative alternate personality? I don’t know.

1. Christine Smallwood. The Life of the Mind: A Novel. New York, Hogarth, 2021.

Added March 21: The second half of the novel has nothing of relevance here.

Added March 22: Does the triple exposure of the image of the woman on the novel's cover imply that the publisher thought the novel had something to do with multiple personality?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/books/review-life-of-mind-christine-smallwood.html