The Golden Notebook

Atwood gave a dead sister a novel. Lessing gives a living woman four notebooks and a fifth in which the four come apart.

The black book is Africa, already written, already a lie she cannot stop telling. The red is the Party, which is another story that will not stay true. The yellow is fiction, including a novel that is Anna with the names changed. The blue is the diary, which is supposed to be the unshaped remainder and becomes another shape. The golden notebook is the attempt to stop dividing. Breakdown, briefly, looks like wholeness. Then Free Women resumes, as if a conventional novel could still be the container. It can’t. That is why it is there.

This is the opposite of Casaubon’s pigeon-holes. Casaubon divided the world so that he would not have to think. Anna divides so that she can go on thinking at all. The Key is a system. The notebooks are a refusal of system that still has to be written down somewhere. A catalogue of imagined books that skipped this one would have skipped the century in which women were told they could write, and then told in what kind of book.

On the readability rating. The notebooks are the novel. You can read them. You cannot take the golden one off a separate shelf. Lessing bound it in.