Human Blues

Abstract

Human Blues Miriam Jaffe (bio) and Lluvia de Segovia de Kraker (bio) Elisa Albert. Human Blues. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2022. 401 pp. $28.00 hardback. Elisa albert gained her foothold as a jewish american fiction writer when she closed her short story collection with a letter to Philip Roth in which she offered to have his baby (How This Night Is Different, Free Press, 2006). That “baby” is Albert’s creative output, including The Book of Dahlia (Free Press, 2008), which automortographically renders Jewish American family dynamics, and Afterbirth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), in which Albert explores the metaphorical connection between motherhood and authorship. In both of these novels, and in her work as an essayist, Albert channels the spirit of Philip Roth. Her latest novel, Human Blues, displays an array of Rothian attributes in contemplation of motherhood and creativity. The protagonist, Aviva, is a singer-songwriter fanning her emerging fame with controversy: imagine young Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer (1979) and his obsession with E. I. Lonoff—but female and obsessed with Amy Winehouse. And imagine this same Zuckerman, in The Human Stain (2008) and Exit Ghost (2007), incontinent and impotent, grieving the loss of virility at the center of his gender identity. Such is Aviva, but her problem of womanhood is that she is unable to conceive without medical intervention, or perhaps even with it. The novel is written during nine menstrual cycles of Aviva’s ruminations on infertility and motherhood as she faces off with social media posts and other forms of technology directed at women’s (re)productivity. Aviva performs these ruminations. The “performance” associated with celebrity is a metaphor for the roles assigned in various stages of gender and sexual identity: humans experience disappointment and shame when they cannot perform according to societal expectations. Perhaps with a nod to Simon Axler, a Rothian Jewish stage performer, Aviva’s inability to become naturally pregnant is her “humbling” (26). Axler is humbled by the loss of his sexual relevance, and Aviva is humbled by barrenness, which challenges her sense of womanhood. She encounters the fertility industry, which entices women to pay with their savings and minds and bodies for drugs and regulation and mostly harmful therapies. And like many of Roth’s pontificating narrators, who serve to [End Page 108] explore each novel’s polemic, Albert’s narrator scrutinizes the societal assumption that womanhood requires childbearing. Yet Aviva grieves the dispossession of these expectations with a cantankerous bereavement akin to the complex mourning process of another performer: Mickey Sabbath. An early review of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) describes the writing as “anti-moral,” with “plenty of nastiness” and “a narrative that moves, as its emotional temperature dictates” into “perverse confession” (Pritchard). The same could be said of Human Blues, whose female protagonist rages back at the expectations for womanhood and dedicates her artistry to the fight for autonomy over her own body. In a US political culture that values babies’ lives over their mother’s lives, Aviva opposes social media advertisements that promote the miracle of hormone therapy, and those that celebrate the dream of global adoptions through surrogates in developing countries. Albert takes on the woman’s right to choose not to bear a child in a country cruelly divided on the issue. At the same time, she puts forward this question, as she looks at how people speak of the babies that are conceived through reproductive technology: Why is it that the value of human life only counts when people want it? Aviva also has in common with Sabbath the inescapable experience of grief, as with every cycle, instead of life, she encounters death: “Every godforsaken period, every cycle, every fractal season: awakening, hope, decay, death, around and around, again and again, to death, death, death” (2). Similarly, Sabbath is haunted by the ghosts of his past, and he suffers the loss of the promise of life and fertility embodied by his lover Drenka, as she becomes ill with ovarian cancer and dies. While Roth progressively builds up this theme with an oppressive effect, each paragraph revealing a new change in the character’s thoughts, Albert draws on his style, but she...