The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I hadn't had any time to read during the school-week, but I started it last weekend and basically could not put it down. It's only 229 pages long, but I don't think that is particularly easy literature. Plus, I'm planning on reading more books this quarter. This weekend I hope to finish it.

So basically I'm halfway through the book as of Saturday morning. It starts out with the heroine Esther Greenwood in New York as a summer guest-editor to Ladie's Day, a magazine. She starts out the book being a slightly cold and removed person. She's fascinated with one of the other winners, the sensual and cynical Doreen, but she is somehow disgusted with Doreen's amoral behavior at the same time. Flashbacks to her earlier college life also show how her adoration for a smart, good-looking, athletic boy Buddy Willard turns into revulsion for his hypocracy. It turns out that his good-boy image is only a mirage as he had an affair with a random waitress. Her disgust for the world isn't emphasized very much, but I picked up on every grain of it because it's certainly something that I feel these days.

Her behavior becomes stranger and stranger as the book progresses. She starts to refuse human company, and when she does go out with Doreen, her vision of the night is somehow feverished and unfocused. Her boss at the magazine tries to get her to appreciate the wonderful opportunity that she is getting, but she seems to be losing her vison of what she wants to do with her life. She tells us of all the years before that she labored at her work to get perfect grades, to get every scholarship, and to win every competition. She knows that those are her skills and strong points, but she fears she won't be able to do anything once she gets out of college.

By the time she returns home to Boston, she's completely lost. She has chronic insomnia. She refuses to wash because of its futility. She decides she will write a novel and spends a whole day sitting in her nightgown staring into nothingness. She can't read anything (as in, she's unable to piece together words out of letters) besides headlines, and becomes fascinated with morbid stories. She makes one feeble attempt at suicide, but ends up only cutting at her legs because she can't bring herself to slash her wrists. At the same time, I feel myself reading this book with the very same morbid fascination that the character has. Watching this girl self-destruct is painful, but I can't look away.