The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've read few books that have as much depth and as many themes as The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing's magnum opus can be viewed as feminist literature, exploration of Communist society, or the tale of one woman's inner journey. It has themes of sex, politics, race, motherhood, infidelity, and the relationship between men and women.

The metafictional elements of the novel bring the thematic components to a new level. In the introduction, Lessing writes that "fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record." The protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Anna, a writer herself, also recognizes this paradox. Unable or unwilling to publish anything after a moderate initial success, she writes in notebooks of different colors. Some of these stories feature Ella, a woman whose biography bears a strong resemblance to Anna's. Is Ella just Anna roman a clef? If so, why the veil of fiction at all? Or are the two characters different? Even Anna struggles with this: "Why a story at all - not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?"

In the titular Golden Notebook, Anna writes the story of an affair between Ella and an American, but when we see the story of Anna's affair outside of the lens of the notebooks, it plays out very differently. Is this a sign that Anna has broken from reality? Is it a sign that she's ready to write again? The layers to the fiction can be read many ways, giving the novel terrific depth.