The Mere Wife + Red Carpet
In which the writer sneaks in the March newsletter *just* before the end of the month
The other day, I was at a bookstore (which in itself is momentous because I live in a city where bookstores started beating a retreat long before the pandemic trapped us inside bubbles and apartments). While wandering around, I pulled out a book mostly because of its title: The Mere Wife. This could go two ways, I decided. It was either an angry satire about marriage or a fluffy romantic comedy.
Idly, I flipped the book open to a spot about halfway in to see how close to the mark my guesses were, and here’s what was on the page:
There’s a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets.
We know everything there is to know, and we keep it rolled into the newel posts, stuffed into the mattresses, smuggled inside our vaginas if it comes to that. Women’s clothing is made without pockets, but we come into the world equipped.
We lean on his file folders, furies dressed in midday luncheon attire.
So, not a romantic comedy.
Did I know who these furies dressed in midday luncheon attire were, or whose file folders they were leaning on, or why? No. Was I going to buy this book? Hell yes.
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley is a retelling of Beowulf that’s set in present-day, in a country that we can assume is America. In the old English epic, the monster has a name — Grendel — but its mother (whom Beowulf also fights) remains nameless. Headley gives the mother a name and makes her the protagonist in this retelling that is all poetic glitter and glistening violence.
The idea of writing this novel came to Headley while she was working on a translation of Beowulf (edited to add: I was wrong about this. The Mere Wife was written first and the translation came afterwards. If you’d like to know more about the translation, which sounds fantastic, hear this delightful conversation between Headley, Circe-author Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson, who did an amazing translation of The Odyssey). One of the details that connect the original text to The Mere Wife are the one-word titles for each section in the book — Listen, So, What, Attend, Hark, Tell, Behold, Ah, Yes, Sing, and Now. These are the words that have been used to translate the first word of Beowulf in different versions. Knowing this adds very little to the novel, but it’s the kind of trivia that makes the geek in me feel giddy with delight.
At the core of The Mere Wife is Headley’s realisation that in the original text, the same root word is used to describe Beowulf (the hero), the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. Only most translations use words that emphasise the difference between the three characters. Headley seeks to correct that mistake by emphasising the sameness, particularly between Grendel’s mother and Beowulf. You don’t need to know the story of Beowulf to appreciate Headley’s take on the epic because it can definitely stand on its own legs, but if you do, The Mere Wife feels a little more interesting.
In The Mere Wife, Beowulf becomes Ben Woolf, a war veteran who now works as a police officer. The ‘monster’ is a young boy named Gren, who seems vaguely feral because he’s lived all his life hiding in a mountain, with his mother, Dana Mills. Dana is a war veteran who is presumed dead. She’s fought and survived the same war as Ben, but under more nightmarish circumstances. Her experiences are quite obviously supposed to remind the reader of the videos showing people being beheaded by ISIS; only Dana is able to escape her captors. She finds her way back to the American army camp, only to learn she’s pregnant. She has no memory of the father. She only knows this child is hers to raise and protect.
With her newborn son Gren, Dana finds refuge in a mountain near her hometown, which has been replaced by an uber-elite, gated community called Herot Hall. When Gren makes friends with a little boy from Herot Hall, all hell breaks loose.
The Mere Wife is at times the story of mothers and sons. At other times, it’s the story of war veterans, who struggle to fit in a civilian world that is untouched by war. The novel is an exploration of what is considered strength, how differently it manifests in men and women, and trauma. It’s also a love story; an impressionist portrait of contemporary America; and an unforgiving look at modern ideals of femininity. Women are at the centre of this novel. Along with Dana, we see Willa, an updated Stepford wife, and a terrifying chorus of the women elders of Herot Hall. They’re the ones holding up the pillars of the patriarchal temple that is Herot Hall.
In case you were wondering, they are indeed “the furies dressed in midday luncheon attire”.
Most people would probably not associate blood and gore with a novel that has a wife and a single mother as its protagonists, but The Mere Wife is soaked in violence. Broken bones, hacked-off body parts, animal carcasses, festering wounds, it’s all in Headley’s novel, described in exquisite prose. The language of this novel is rich, musical and lyrical. I underlined practically every sentence of every other paragraph. The sheer beauty of Headley’s writing style more than makes up for the awkward, clumsy bits of the novel, which towards the end has a few lapses in logic. By that time though, I didn’t care. All I wanted was more of Headley’s prose.
I’m in a crowd and we are all walking together, my mother and my grandmother, my husband and my heart, my son and his beloved, my ghosts, the soldiers I fought beside, the people we killed, and the people who killed us. My saint with her breasts on fire, and my strangers with their hands out, telling me to listen.
The sun is setting, and the town is a skyline, black as the back of a whale coming up out of the ocean. My skin is cold, but the last rays heat me, making this soul into steam.
It is possible that the last bit of that excerpt feels particularly resonant because temperatures have crossed 40ºC in various parts of India. It was 37ºC in Kolkata a few days ago. In March. But climate change must be environmentalists overreacting, amirite?
In case you’re interested, this is a fantastic interview with Icelandic author and documentary filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason. Among the many things he talks about is how the words “climate change” have basically become “white noise”. (Net result: heat wave in March. Thankyouverymuch.)
While we’re talking podcasts, there’s a new episode of The Lit Pickers, which is the podcast on books and reading that Supriya Nair and I have been doing over the past couple of years. If you look up The Lit Pickers on Spotify or whatever platform you use to listen to podcasts, you’ll find a special episode in which we answer questions that listeners had sent. As always, we had a lot of fun recording the episode.
For those of you haven’t heard The Lit Pickers, there’s two seasons worth of episodes in which Supriya and I talk about books and authors that have sparked Thoughts in us.
Back to my March reads. Pretty much every person I’ve met in the last couple of weeks has had to listen to me yammer on about Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel, who reports on the film industry for the Wall Street Journal. The book is about the relationship between Hollywood and China, as well as the coy normalisation of censorship and self-censorship. It’s written well, carefully researched and I live in hope that an Indian reporter will collaborate with a good editor to write a similar book on the Indian film industry’s tryst with the West over the past couple of decades.
Most people who are interested in Hollywood know that in the past couple of decades, American studios have been on a mission to woo Chinese audiences. One of the silver linings of that campaign has been Asian characters getting promoted from caricaturish stereotypes in the supporting cast to being central roles. The less shiny side-effect has been film studios towing the line laid down by the Chinese government. Schwartzel is more interested in the latter and he gives examples of films that were buried, plots that were tweaked and actors who were blacklisted by American studios that wanted to keep Chinese officials happy.
China became important not only because of the box office earnings Hollywood made from that country, but also because the studios and their parent companies have other business interests in China. For instance, Disney’s real investment in China are the amusement parks and stores selling Disney products. The earnings from a film are puny in comparison and consequently, it will do whatever is necessary to ensure the Chinese government grants the permissions necessary to set up the amusement parks and make the toys, action figures etc.
By systematically charting the earnings made by different films over the years, Schwartzel shows how box office earnings from China peaked at one point and then started dipping, despite Hollywood’s attempts to pander to Chinese audiences. Meanwhile, the Chinese commercial film industry learnt from Hollywood and increasingly, it seems Chinese audiences prefer local productions to those from the West.
According to Schwarzel, China wants its film industry to do what Hollywood has done: exert its soft power across borders. I can’t help wondering whether the popularity of mainstream Korean culture (K-pop, K-dramas, K-beauty) makes Chinese officials grind their teeth. Surely that puny neighbour was not supposed to become so influential?
Schwartzel doesn’t let his gaze wander to other Asian countries, but he does take one detour to Kenya, where Chinese entertainment is growing in popularity with both audiences and government authorities. “We don’t want to keep imbibing Western culture, homosexual films, violent films, as a way of life,” the head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board tells Schwartzel. He prefers Chinese content. “I never have to worry about bad content, obscenity, whatever. They have taken care of that, naturally.”
There’s a wealth of information and thought-provoking material in Red Carpet. It’s also full of fascinating stories. For instance, did you know Henry Kissinger was roped in by Disney to help negotiate with the Chinese government, when the Chinese got miffed that Disney was producing a film about the Dalai Lama? Well, he did. Also, the film in question was directed by Martin Scorcese, and titled Kundun. If you’ve never heard of the film, it may be because Kundun opened on two screens in America. “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Disney CEO Michael Eisner told a Chinese official.
If Hollywood ever does break free from China, maybe someone will adapt Red Carpet into a film the way director Adam McKay did with The Big Short.
And with that, I’ll sign off so that I can pat myself on the back for having managed to send this newsletter out before March ended.
Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.