Rhys’s novel, published in 1939, when she was forty-eight, rounded out a burst of genius and industry that had produced the novels “ Quartet” (1928), “ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” (1931), and “ Voyage in the Dark” (1934). It’s the opening of “ Good Morning, Midnight,” the fourth novel by the Dominica-born British writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979), the subject of Miranda Seymour’s enthralling new biography, “ I Used to Live Here Once” (Norton). The narrator, as yet ungendered, seems almost obsessive about fixing a routine, in order that this “little life” won’t burst into anarchy fixing a drink-better still, having it fixed for you-is evidently central to this containment. There’s the fraught psychological intensity. Which old times? Why “madame” and “monsieur”? Why does madame get a bigger bed? The writing has a strictness-modern, minimalist-that feels at odds with its theatrical expressionism: a world in which rooms, gloomily alive, talk back to you, and where an impasse seems more than just topographical. Who wouldn’t want to keep reading? The spiked enigma of the details is unsettling and enticing.
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