Claire Messud: Life Among the Animals

“In these relentlessly dark and riven times, I find myself beset by a new, ravenous hunger for beauty,” Claire Messud writes in her essay “The Time for Art is Now,” which appears in her first essay collection, this fall’s Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. I accept this thesis without question, but when I read it in September, I found myself thinking back to the early days of the pandemic—a crawling and fleeting three months when I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy art, or to read, let alone write (I, for one, cannot write unless I’m constantly reading). This was a wholly unnatural state to me, as an obsessive reader who began wearing soda-bottle glasses as a babe of six thanks to long hours squinting in the bad light of my childhood home in Poona. I was entirely captured by the news, unable to do anything but watch the many different ways the world seemed to be crumbling around me. I was emotionally spent, the sacred fortress I’ve built over the years—the one where I store the sentiment I need to write—in ruins. For pieces assigned, I turned in embarrassing first drafts. I was besieged, as well, by immigrant panic: when would I hold my parents close again, wake up to the smell of my grandmother’s’ cooking, listen to music with my brother?

And then there was the literal isolation, another wholly unnatural state for me, having been raised in a country one billion people strong, and having built my adult life in a city of many millions. After years of pressing up against people with no sense of personal space or boundaries on the subway, in restaurants and bars, I realized with a jolt that my husband was the only person I could touch, kiss. A blessing, and yet we were quarantined in a teeming, thronging city plunged into a silence so eerie I could have slept with my windows open if it were not punctuated by the wail of ambulance sirens.

As spring thawed into summer, the sirens were replaced by the chants and shouts of curfew-defying protestors and the near-constant mechanical whir of police choppers, taking a chainsaw to the semblance of internal peace and solitude I’d been trying—in vain—to cultivate. Half-read novels were coasters for half-drunk cups of coffee. And I wept, almost daily, to my husband, terrified that I’d never be able to read again. He assured me a hundred times, sometimes patiently and sometimes not: the books, they’re always there. Waiting. Whenever you’re ready. Needless to say, I didn’t believe him.

I don’t remember how or why I picked a copy of Messud’s off my bookcase. It was a novel I’d read almost, then, is like spending a few sumptuous hours walking through the beloved novelist’s library of life, a timeline in books. At once intimate and illuminating, this delightful memoir-in-essays offers us a glimpse into her inner world, the characters who populate it (both people and dogs), the places, and—crucially—the artists who inspire Messud’s unshakeable faith in the life-altering power of stories and the transformative power of language. I, too, find myself “beset by a ravenous hunger for beauty.” And I thank the artists who have given me beauty to feast my senses on. It is they who will carry me through any time, however dark, however torn.