The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Full disclosure: I very much get on with Sylvia Plath. Back when I was still reading a poem a day, she was my first port of call. And unsurprisingly I loved The Bell Jar.

You have probably seen the bit about the fig tree before:

I saw my life branching out before me like the fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, ...

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.

It probably resonates with your life. It certainly resonates with mine, but I firmly believe that insightful comments about life have their place in a novel only when kept to a sentence, and that really what do novelists know about the world anyway? But Plath swoops down and saves The Bell Jar from pretentiousness when a page later she states:

It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree ... might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

This is when I began to feel that the novel was a true reflection of life, or at the very least depression. Life is, in my experience, rarely profound, and often impinged upon by such ridiculous and irrelevant things as your own digestive system. Everything is pointless, life is pain, until you make a sandwich.

However, this is not the only marvellous thing about this novel. When Esther Greenwood finally found the stash of pills by which she could take her life, I laughed. Perhaps I'm just odd, or perhaps the reader is made to identify with Esther so well that we feel her frustration in not being able to commit suicide, and her amusement and relief when she finds the answer was right under her nose all along.

There are, of course, problems with the novel. I find the appearance of Joan in the asylum too much of a co-incidence, and the meandering pace is frustrating at times. But I suspect these are artefacts of the semi-autobiographical nature of the tale, and so I can't hold them against the book too much.

In the end, The Bell Jar opened my eyes and enlivened a four-hour train journey, and what more can you ask for?