Plain Girl by Arthur Miller

Plain Girl is a novella written by Arthur Miller and published in the 90s. More known for his plays, this is my first reading of Miller's fiction in prose.

Janice Sessions is the protagonist of Plain Girl. She did not consider herself beautiful. She wrote in her notebook, "It isn't that I feel positively unattractive - I know better. But that somehow I am being kept from anything miraculous happening to me, ever."  She had some affection for her father, yet she had left his ashes at a bar. She was upset by the loss for only a short time, it seemed.

Janice felt that her first husband, Sam, had never really pursued her. "Sam was beneath her in some indefinite class sense, but that was part of his attraction in the thirties when to have been born to money was shameful, a guarantee of futility". Sam had his political views, is a Marxist, and an anti-Facist, believing that the Soviets would do the right thing. He left their home in New York to fight in the war.  Janice took courses with Professor Oscar Kalkofsky, who pointed out to her, "I think what you are saying is you don't feel you have ever made a choice in life. I know it because I see how much expectation there is in you." When Sam returned from the war, Janice felt that "their spirits had parted", and decided to leave him. When her brother Herman asked her what she wanted out of life, her response was," A good time."

Janice met a a blind musician Charles Buckman. Janice felt that Charles accepted her for what she was. He consoled Janice, "People have to believe in goodness. They're disappointed most of the time but in some part of his beliefs every person is naive. Even the most cynical. And memories of one's naivety are always painful. But so what? Would you rather have had no beliefs at all?"  They were happily married for fifteen years until Charles died in his sleep. "He had turned her inside out so that she looked out at the world instead of holding her breath for the world to look at her and disapprove."

The prose was beautifully written, conveying the ambivalent feelings the characters had of the political and social situation of the time, which is the period of the World Wars when Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt were calling the shots.  "People her age, early twenties then, wanted to signify by doing good, attended emergency meetings a couple of times a week in downtown lofts or sympathizers' West End Avenue living rooms to raise money for organising the new National Maritime Union or ambulances for the Spanish Republicans, and they were moved to genuine outrage at Fascism." All that would be replaced by a newer generation and other ideologies. When Janice, in her sixties, watched the demolition of Hotel Crosby where she first met Charles, she "wondered at her fortune at having lived into beauty."