"Two Serious Ladies" was recommended in the Francine Prose book "Reading Like a Writer." It's disturbing in that the flat and freakish characters are highly privileged and extremely neurotic (or, as they prefer to think of themselves, "nervous"), their lives happening on parallel tracks, unable to connect meaningfully even with their closest family and friends.
Anais Nin wrote in Volume 5 of her Diary about the time "... (when) Jane brought out her first book [Two Serious Ladies]. I remember I was so distressed by the tightness, the involuted quality, the constricted, coiling inward (not into an infinite interior but a tight one) that I wrote her a careful, gentle, warm letter warning her of the danger of constriction for a writer, and she took it as a condemnation (a wrong interpretation). She asserted it was that letter which arrested her writing. Knowing how tenderly I handle writers, I knew my letter could not have been harmful. The difficulties were in herself." I must agree with Anais.
This book reminded me of the movie "Breaking the Waves" with Emily Watson, with repressed characters who punish or deny themselves and call it spirituality and sensitivity. The author also refuses to show all of the characters' actions within the story, perhaps to mirror the characters' withholding natures, but one expects more from the author. The book has some rewards, but I was happy to be done with it.
