This Week in Books: Sylvia Plath Continues to Fascinate

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Sylvia Plath lived only to the age of 30—this year marks the 60th anniversary of her death. When you consider all that has been written about her, and the writers still thinking of her, the shortness of her existence is shocking. Like the condensed imagery in her poetry—that unforgettable black shoe—her life, unpacked, reveals so much about the times in which she lived, about the forces working against her ambitions. We have an essay this week by the Brazilian writer Rafaela Bassili about Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, which also turns 60 this year, and how it helped form Bassili’s perceptions of the United States as a place of both promise and peril. The essay reminded me of my own recent encounter with Plath.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

In her article, Bassili references Heather Clark’s voluminous 2020 biography, Red Comet. Every reviewer of this book admitted to having the same preconception: How could there be anything new to say? The outlines of Plath’s life have been sketched out over and over again, from her years as a prodigy to her mental illness to her tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes to that final, famous suicide. So many Plath biographies have been published that Janet Malcolm even wrote what can only be called a metabiography, The Silent Woman, which explores the fights among those who have tried to interpret Plath’s life. But Clark, despite these odds, delivers something fresh.

Her approach is granular, in a word. I actually listened to Red Comet as an audiobook (45 hours and 27 minutes!) and heartily recommend Laura Jennings’s narration. Innumerable dirty dishes were washed while I took it in. What Clark has done is provide a nearly day-by-day account of Plath’s activities—and instead of being boring, it’s riveting. The dawning of Plath’s creative powers happens in slo-mo, and readers see the way she refined her writing and found her subject and style, moving from the melodramatic teenage love stories she wrote for Seventeen magazine to the swift slap in the face that is the poem “Daddy.” Clark also scrutinizes how Plath was molded by her era—the 1950s conformity, the distorted treatment of depression, the Cold War, the British literary scene, the limited freedom available to women. These societal and cultural factors aren’t just offered by Clark as thesis statements; we find them pressed into the hundreds of diary entries and letters and poems that she makes full use of in her reconstruction. Clark draws, for example, on letters Plath wrote to her friend Eddie Cohen during her stay at McLean Hospital following her 1953 suicide attempt, revealing the liberal use of electroshock therapy at the time and her growing terror of the treatment: “I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room.”

Biography matters here, because part of Plath’s legacy, in addition to her writing, is her life story—her attempt to become an artist during an era when this felt nearly impossible for a woman. Bassili, growing up in São Paulo, responded to this while reading The Bell Jar, which opened her up to the “sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.” That Plath was able to tap into this feeling—to struggle and then describe so evocatively that struggle (the image of the bell jar alone …)—is why she remains endlessly interesting. As Bassili puts it, Plath’s work was born “of a thorny, damaging relationship with an environment that could be as cruel as it was rewarding.” You can’t understand Plath without understanding that cruelty, which Red Comet reveals in all of its minutiae.

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

What to Read

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, by Hisaye Yamamoto

Yamamoto’s 1988 collection captures the dignity and disillusionment of the Japanese community in America during and after World War II. Together, the stories create a snapshot of a group during a transitory phase in the United States. But reading them separately, as singular narratives, allows for a greater appreciation of the ordinary people who lived through this sweeping and weighty moment in history. The title story, “Seventeen Syllables,” highlights how the realities of immigration—such as a language barrier and shifting cultural norms—contribute to the divide between a mother and a daughter. Despite being written in the second half of the 20th century, Yamamoto’s stories about anti-Asian racism, sexual harassment, and generational estrangement transcend their period; they could easily be transplanted to the current day, thanks to her ability to make the mess of daily life resonate across the decades. — Morgan Ome

From our list: five books that will fit right into your busy schedule

Out Next Week

📚 The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

Her turn away from hip-hop is also rooted in pain and frustration. She and Biggie were so close that she asked him to be her daughter’s godfather; he gave his daughter the middle name Dream. She brought him to her film classes at NYU; he gave feedback on her writing. Hampton also hassled Biggie about the sexism of his lyrics while he, out of her view, abused his girlfriend and protégé Lil’ Kim. Maybe he would have evolved; maybe he wouldn’t have—hampton will never know. A drive-by shooter killed him when he was 24, likely because of a rap beef. “I watched someone get killed who would still be alive if it wasn’t for hip-hop,” hampton told me.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.