The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties

by Tess Slesinger

Book Overview

Tess Slesinger's 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590170148
• ISBN13: 9781590170144
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

A Stunning Portrait of the Time

I knew within the first five pages of this book that I was going to love it. This is because Tess Slesinger's writing is beautiful and atmospheric. The narrator is third person omniscient, so we get a range of character's points of view in a flowing fashion. In this way it is similar to narrative like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The basic premise is that there are these Greenwich Village leftists who want to start up a communist newsletter. This, however, is merely the basis for the larger group interactions. There are also deep dysfunctional relationships between the couples that make up the larger group and the shiftiing dynamic between man and woman. This novel looks hard at the mind of a woman of the time and what it is that she wants and whether or not she even knows what she wants anymore. It also looks at the men around them and how they percieve these "new" and "independant" women. It is a fascinating look at the relationship between the sexes. I recommend getting not this verison, but the Feminist Press version because the Feminist Press edition has a very interesting forward.

More complex and intelligent that many other novels of the 1930s

With her keen ability to delve into human psychology, Tess Slesinger is a worthy successor to Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Oops! I hope I haven't ruined this book for the general reader because--once you get beyond the first fifteen pages or so and catch on to what Slesinger is up to--you won't put the book down. In terms of literary Modernism and the writing craft, Slesinger builds on the accomplishments of Woolf and James, two of the acknowledged masters of interior psychological processes: Tess Slesinger adds wit, irony, and charm. And, she is thoroughly American in the pace and comedic timing of her work--the very *sound* of this novel is American. To the general reader, I would say that The Unpossessed is not a consciously arty, literary novel. I'm convinced that there was no other way to write this work, no way to say what had to be said in any technique or structure other than the one in which Tess Slesinger wrote it. The author wanted to approximate reality, modern 1930's life (Depression Era, intellectual activism), and to exactly recreate each character's thoughts. To do that, Slesinger, like Woolf, had to master the use of parentheses and italics in order to show simultaneous thoughts, to show what characters are thinking when another character is speaking. Italics and parenthetical statements are necessary to give the reader the feeling of real life--as lived in the moment. And because every person is so mentally active, each has an interior consciousness which they bring to bear on the social predicament. In Bruno Leonard, Slesinger has given us a university professor who is as idiosyncratic and witty as they come--the type of erudite, gentleman intellectual who has been largely killed off by mass delivery of education in the new diploma factories. And, in Elizabeth Leonard, Bruno's cousin, we have a young woman who is as engaging as she is sexy and mixed up. The "Black Sheep"--Emmett Middleton, and Cornelia and Firman--are as timeless as any intelligent, active college students frustrated with the times in which they live (with the poverty of the Depression Era, and the unequal sharing of wealth in the U.S.). They are genuinely hoping that the work of Karl Marx can show Americans a way toward a more just society. Emmett Middleton seems to be the stable, moral center of The Unpossessed. In terms of language and style, The Unpossessed approaches poetry. In Slesinger's characteristically poignant and biting prose, she writes from inside Emmett's conflicted consciousness, "Emmett had hated the word 'business' since he was three years old; it came out of his father's mouth tobacco-stained and dry, slightly nasal; the combination of the zz sound with the n went the wrong way up his nostrils like burning sulphur off a kitchen match. 'He s-says I look too much like a girl scout for his racket anyway.' He thought with relief how since knowing Bruno he had relinquished the vain attempt to gain his father's approbation" (

Sharp, Sensitive -- and What Writing!

Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed (1934), her only novel, published when she was only 29, is so bright, so playfully and angrily intellectual, so intelligently experimental, so sharp and sensitive, satirical and forgiving, and unforgiving. It is a condemnation of the generation older than her, although it seems written by someone much older, and it is certainly not sympathetic to the younger. It is dark, and gets darker and darker, especially in terms of intellectuals and the wealthy they depend on, their isolation mentally, physically, and emotionally, even from themselves. It's such a tragedy that so wise a woman, who could write such incredible sentences,turned instead to screenplays, and then died young.

Energetic and Refractory

Try this passage, not quite at random: "`I'm the Bruno Leonard all-purpose one-man three-ring self-kidding self-perpetuating exhibitionistic circus divided like all Gaul into partes tres. One part sour grapes, one part wish-fulfillment, nine parts subconscious. And the greatest of these, according to the antediluvian Chinese, is the subconscious. This way, ladies and pessimistic gents, for the J. J. stream-line crooner, for old Doc Leonard the campaigning fool, watch hin frisk, watch him scamper, watch him catch his fleas in public. Don't feed him peanuts feed him opiates, buy your tablets at the gate from Miss Diamond who has given many years of service, who sacrificed her vacations, her virtue, that this firm might go on.' He subsided, to his own relief; collapsed into the chair that Nora drew up for him. `To sex and its many ramifications,' he said, and raised his glass."Okay, it is out of context. But in context or out, I defy anyone to catch all the layers of meaning there, at least not on first reading. It's not precisely obscure (although I don't think I catch everything), not Joycean or Kafkaesque. It's more like a James Wood movie monologue: the narrator has no skin at all and she process on six channels at once, certainly the quickest-witted observer you could want to imagine. Or a "Simpsons" tape, where you know you will catch something new at second look, and some of the music gags will still go clean on past you.Try it again for the rhythm. Can you get it? I cannot quite, but I am pretty sure it is there: all gnarly and snarky, all elbows and knees, a mind and a sensibility all its own. Just to get in the swing of things, I found I had to read it out loud, but no matter: it was better that way, and it lasted longer.Tess Slesinger subtitles it "A Novel of the Thirties," and that it is: an attempt at clear-eyed observation of her cronies and adversaries among leftwing New York intellectuals at the bottom of the Depression. She dedicated it "to my contemporaries." Elizabeth Hardwick, in her introduction to the NYRB edition, calls it "a kindly act of intellectual friendship," and that it is not-indeed Hardwick's is one of the wildest misjudgments I can possibly imagine. It may be "friendship" in that she cares enough about these people that she wishes she could save them. But it is not in the least way kindly. Rather, this is an act of prophecy: a calling down of God's (if there is a God) wrath upon a wayward Greenwich Village by one who loved it a great deal but understood it - to her dismay - even better. It's rich, it's full of life and it is tainted with the acrid aroma of doom. What a talent. What a sensibility. What an experience, as energetic and refractory as any novel you will read for a long time. Tess Slesinger died in 1945 at the age of 39. She never wrote another.

Once you get through the first half...it's a rollicking ride

We read this book for our book club. The first half is tough--it was challenging to get into the rhythm of the glib repartee, double meanings and quirky jargon, much less get all the characters straight. Then, at about the halfway point, the group convenes for a meeting, and it's off to the races!! Slesinger has (OK, had) a remarkable flair for capturing the times, a remarkable ear for dialog, and a grand ability to skewer different "types" with deadly accuracy. The climax of the book is a party scene you'll never forget--picturing the shabbily dressed baby-communist collegians rubbing elbows with wealthy society mavens who are ignorant of the cause they find themselves supporting still cracks me up--a very rich and VERY funny novel.