by Jessica Schneider

Created on: April 15, 2009

There is an old joke among writers, poets mainly, about how one of the worst types of poems is that which involves a speaker talking about sitting in a caf writing a poem about writing a poem. The Golden Notebook is essentially the novel equivalent of that; only this is about a writer trying to write a novel. Although Lessing is a much more skilled writer than many of those young poets who write poems about writing poems, The Golden Notebook is a novel which takes risks yet fails at them. Ironically, Lessing really is a great writer, and I'm not just saying that simply because now she's got the Nobel to her name. She's written some terrific short stories, and although I'm not very familiar with her long fiction, one can tell just by reading this book that she has a skill with words and a natural insight. The problems that reside with this book isn't that she plays it safe or lacks insight, but that structurally the book is just a mess. First off, it is way too long; finishing at 635 pages it was one of those reads that felt that long. Just upon first read, I felt like at least half could have been cut.

The novel is centered around these four notebooks, and in them we have different things going on. The writer and main character in the tale is Anna Wulf, who is gathering her memoirs. Each notebook carries a different slantsuch as the black one where she speaks of her early years in Africa, the red one where she speaks of her positions on Communism, a yellow one where she has a "novel within a novel" a character that is Anna Wulf's alter ego, named Ella (also a writer), and finally the blue one where she has a personal diary. The thrust of the entire book then, is dependent upon gathering these four books together into a "Golden Notebook."

As a writer myself, I admit to finding many of Anna Wulf's thoughts on writing interesting, such as where she digresses on art and philosophy and a woman's place within society's guided strictures. Yet despite this, the character's observations tend to get banal as she rambles a bit too much, and here is where the story begins to lack coherence. That is not to say that parts don't cohere wellbecause certainly there are sections that flow smoothly. As a whole, however, reading all the character's digressions felt more like an artistic experiment, as her tangents began to outweigh the focus of the tale. This, however, does not mean I think the work is lacking due to a straightforward "plot" but because the work itself is so embroidered

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