Is it better to be obvious or a cliché? Is there a difference? These are the questions that scream most loudly to me when I consider Heather Lewis and her work, particularly her final novel Notice. Simply, I think being obvious is preferred to being a cliché, and there is a difference but it’s subtle. Subtle would be a great way to describe Notice. Though written in first person, the story unfolds rather than being told. And the unfolding slow pace is almost tortuous because this book takes you to places so empty and so devoid of light that describing them as dark seems trite. Cringe worthy more aptly describes this tale from start to finish.

Victim literature, particularly in modern fiction, has become cliché. Perhaps the only more prevalent cliché is the author serving as subject of such stories. Notice like Lewis’ first novel House Rules, contains elements of her life and interests and struggles. But while other authors fictionalize their own lives with color and flair, Notice’s brilliance come in the quiet and the gray. The author conveys tales of being raped and illicit drug use with such a lack of emotion; it’s hard to believe the reader could form any connection to the work or writer. And yet such concerns are unwarranted because within Notice’s first few pages of the reader is fully invested and coursing with empathy.

Notice was posthumously released. Lewis wrote this book as a follow up to House Rules, a novel also rife with drug use, dysfunction and abuse. Notice carried on in this tradition but where House Rules seemed to ease the reader into the muck, Notice jumped head first into the pool of dirt and shame and pain without pretence or warning. To Lewis fans this progression and logical continuation of what was found in House Rules offered an exciting literary prospect. The publishing world didn’t share this enthusiasm, however, rejecting this darker and even more unapologic work.

In response to this rejection Heather Lewis reworked Notice, transformed her manuscript into a noir crime novel featuring a strong female detective trying to take down a powerful man for rape. The Second Suspect was more acceptable to publishers, as depravity had consequences and there was responsibility for actions including an ending that tied things up into a neat package. Moreover the prospective changed from detached, brutalized survivor, as found in Notice, to that of the objective, professional detective. I wonder though how much of an insult this was to Heather Lewis the writer … the artist.

Heather Lewis ended her life before Notice could be published in its intended form, after nearly ten years and considerable efforts by her supporters. Given her suicide and bent for producing “authentic” art, it is hard to read Notice as anything more than a veiled chronicle of Lewis’ downfall. Maybe that is all the novel needs to be. I guarantee that anyone who reads this book will find it to be more of an experience than a novel. The prose draws you in and you feel as though you are walking along side the main character, albeit in cement shoes, as she details all the depravity in her world and her sizable contribution to it. Like the proverbial train wreck you can’t look away from, Notice mesmerizes the reader and even if you want to stop reading it, you can’t.

The language the author uses is so stripped down it is hard to believe any notion or detail could be conveyed. However in the sparseness of words an even more intense experience develops. There is not a letter wasted and so everything has extraordinary meaning. The way the author describes the unimaginable with such nonchalance and self-awareness could render her words flippant and bare. However this is not the result. Instead each indignity and measure of destructiveness and destruction suffered by the main character resonates with such power you just want it to end. At the same time the contemplation of such a merciful stoppage also leaves the reader panicking because they know they will never have a literary experience like this again.

Notice unfolds around the narrator, a teenager called Nina. She informs us that this is not her real name, just the name she uses. We never find out her real name or where her family is, just that she lives in her parents’ house and they are out of town for awhile. Absent those little missing details we find out plenty about Nina’s life. We learn that she turns tricks in the parking lot of a commuter train station parking lot and that she does it for reasons beyond merely the money. After all Nina also has a real job, though we never learn what that is either.

Her activities progress and she eventually starts hanging around a bar and going home with men. Ultimately she goes home with a sadomasochistic man named Gabriel, who we later learn sexually abused and murdered his own daughter. Nina ends up a player in a twisted game involving Gabriel and his wife Ingrid. Nina forms a strong bond and relationship with the long suffering and equally damaged Ingrid. This sets in motion an even more disturbing series of events including Nina’s arrest and eventual commitment to a psychiatric ward.

In an ordinary story Nina’s commitment would be the climax and set the path to resolution, perhaps even redemption, and the end. This is not an ordinary story however. The reader is instead exposed to endless examples of humanity treating its fellow members with a disturbing disregard. Throughout the unsettling descriptions about her life Nina also has comes to revelations about her life, generally these notions do not lead to some path of improvement just further resignation: “I thought this was always my job-to make people see something ugly inside. Take them to a place in themselves they didn’t want to go, but had to. Let them do this through me and then let them discard me, discount me. Later on making them pay me, never seeing how I paid for this too.”

Nina forms another unhealthy relationship with Beth, her counselor in the psychiatric ward. Generally Nina finds herself attracted to older women, perhaps seeking a mother or savior; however these women also seem to be suffering from some form of dysfunction. Additionally Nina’s involvement with these women and their attempts to help her always result in more disaster and chaos in Nina’s life. Beth gets Nina released from the psychiatric ward and it is only a matter of time before Nina returns to that most familiar, turning tricks.

Nina suffers another rape and something that is so soul stealing and dismissive of dignity and physically intrusive, it will haunt the reader long after completing the book. In the end Nina acknowledges that all her misdeeds and mistakes have been about achieving a feeling of nothingness. It is almost incredible to realize that Nina’s life choices have been about such extreme suffering just so she could reach complete emptiness. Throughout the story you feel like you are trying to walk underwater to reach some much needed air, but you are moving against the current and movement proves difficult, yet you continue to try. As you read Nina’s final observation - “with that slumber taking me over, and then taking me under, I knew that leviathan thing slept this same darkness. Lay with me too. Resting, bidding its time” - you realize that resurfacing is impossible.

The afterword to Notice was written by novelist and Heather Lewis’ mentor Allan Gurganus. He writes fondly about the young author he knew and directly about the demons she faced. He confirms the autobiographical elements of Notice: “She made the fall her subject. She choreographed it over and over, both on and off the page.” Gurganus’ afterword also lends credibility to the reading of this novel as a suicide note of sorts, though as earlier stated, Notice was to be Lewis’ second novel. Gurganus writes: “Has a book ever been more convincingly it’s writer’s last? … Its final pages are nearly unendurable in their quiescent acceptance of defeat. Here the void is rampant, flying it’s national banner: Surrender’s white flag. By then there is no law, no posse, no hope, no lasting form of love that can quite save our heroine.” Notice is obvious in its chronicle of someone reaching their end. This novel is obvious notice of Heather Lewis’ sad resignation from her toils in life and art. The brilliance of the delivery of this notice makes it clear, it is far better to be obvious than a cliché.

A few years ago I was at a point in my reading life where I’d become almost impossible to excite. If you had been over to my place you would still have seen books strewn about everywhere: fiction, non-fiction, dog-eared coffee stained paperbacks, short story collections with bookmarks half way through them and pristine hard covers waiting to be cracked. I was still the guy who read through lunch breaks and deep into the night and still carried a book with me wherever I went. But slowly, and terrifyingly, a thought began to impress itself upon me: I had become a jaded reader.

I had always known ecstatic moments and had wild infatuations with books. One summer in high school I read The Catcher in the Rye three times, pouring over the pages again and again completely caught up in Holden Caulfield’s (and my own) teenage angst. Later, a reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment sent me feverishly into a two year Russophilia which I was only cured of by Balzac, who converted me into an almost equally intense Francophile. Yet somewhere on the way to becoming a minor expert of 19th century Russian history, the life of Napoleon and the literary output of the French Existentialists, I seemed to have also acquired something unwanted – a cynic’s cold gaze. I would read, analyze, and consider the relative merits of the work, but, with increasing regularity, the books I read didn’t move me like they once had.

Enter Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. It isn’t possible to have a mild reaction to Hunger; it is far too unnerving and mad of a book for anyone to simply put down and forget. It’s the kind of book that gets under your skin and makes you reevaluate your most comfortable and well entrenched assertions of life. The book opens: “All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania - that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him….” And in much the same way, Hunger is that strange novel which I could not escape until it had left its mark on me.

Hunger is a novel in four parts that take place within the span of a few months in Christiania, later renamed Oslo, Norway, in 1890. Each part follows roughly the same form: the narrator begins destitute and he wanders, curses, exults and frets his way through the streets of Christiania trying to find inspiration for the stories and articles that are his only source of income. “And why shouldn’t the inspiration come over me at any moment?” he asks. And it does come, fantastic inspirations including an article on “Crimes of the Future” (an allegory about a fire in a bookstore in which he explains “the books are brains”) and a play set in the Middle Ages. However, with one exception these writings bring him nothing … and so he suffers humiliation, he starves, he rants and he fights the degradation of mind and body until he finds a reprieve. A story is accepted that pays him ten kroner and sends him “yodeling around the streets, dumfounded with joy.”

Part two ends when an old acquaintance sees the narrator’s state and lends him enough to get by. In part three a grocer mistakenly gives him change even though he hadn’t paid, and in the abrupt ending of the novel he convinces a somewhat reluctant merchant ship captain to take him on, and he leaves Christiania. While there is a certain pattern of suffering and salvation, the narrator is unmistakably descending towards ruin through the four parts. The accepted article that ends part one and carries him into the night in jubilation is his only real success and we see, or rather the narrator describes, the failure of his mind and body with disturbing lucidity.

Poverty was something that Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was well acquainted with in 1890. Hamsun’s youth was spent as an almost indentured servant with a stern, pietist uncle. As soon as he could, he left, travelling across Norway working variously as a store clerk, a peddler, a schoolmaster, even as a sheriff’s assistant; all while harboring ambitious literary dreams. Like the narrator of Hunger, his early writings met mostly with rejection. Even his idol, the author Bjornstjerne Bjornson, told him he should give up writing and advised him to become an actor. Undeterred, Hamsun kept at it. After a sojourn in Denmark, he made the first of two trips to America which saw him as a farm hand and part time lecturer in Minnesota; but it ended when he was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis. He decided to return to Norway, riding on top of the train to New York with his mouth open to take in the curative effects of the rushing air. The inimitable Hamsun’s self cure improbably worked and he recovered. Again, he kept moving and working, now as a road laborer. Then off again to America, conducting a streetcar in Chicago and serving as a farm hand in the Dakotas. In 1888, Hamsun would be back in Norway; when he showed himself in the editorial office of the Politiken, he was thus described in the words of Edvard Brandes to a friend, “I have never seen anybody so down and out. Not just that his clothes were tattered. But that face! As you know, I’m not sentimental. But the face of that man moved me.” Hardened by suffering, pushed to his limit, the publication of a fragment of Hunger in 1889 would cause a sensation in Norway and give Hamsun his first victory. He paused to publish a satirical book on his time in America and then published the entire novel Hunger in 1890 to universal acclaim.

The sufferings and privations that Hamsun endured over years are distilled into a matter of weeks for the narrator of Hunger, his trans-Atlantic wanderings confined to the city of Christiania. It is, among other things, a book of suffering and its affect on the mind and body. The narrator has no need to tell us about how he lives when he has money and food. As part one ends with his ten kroner story, part two picks up “A couple of weeks later,” with the narrator once again penniless, sitting in a cemetery working on a newspaper article and “terrifically hungry.” The allusion is obvious, he must write or he will die. Images and symbols of death abound, from the wallpaper made from old copies of the Morning Times that adorns his room in part one, and advertises Miss Anderson’s funeral shrouds, to his frequenting of cemeteries and the numerous references to the autumnal cycle of death. He writes and writes, but he goes nowhere. His body is in revolt, he admits that he “can’t starve like he used to,” and by part three we find him physically broken. It is now winter, his thin walled room is cold and “to warm my hands a bit, I pushed my fingers through my hair… small handfuls came loose, tufts came away between my fingers and spread over the pillows.” He is detached from himself, “I didn’t worry about that, it was as if it were not happening to me; I had plenty of hair anyway.” But later he cannot fain detachment. Starving and desperate he chews on wood chips and even rips off one of his coat pockets “chewing on it, not for any purpose particularly,” he is in a stupor but he rallies to ask at a butcher’s stall for a bone, “for my dog.” The butcher obliges and he steals off into a dark spot behind a gate with his prize: “It had no taste at all: a nauseating odor of dried blood rose from the bone, and I started throwing up immediately, I couldn’t help it. I tried again - if I could only keep it down, it would do some good; the problem was to get it to stay there. But I vomited again. I grew angry, bit fiercely into the meat, ripped off a small piece, and swallowed it by force. That did no good either - as soon as the small pieces became warm in the stomach, up they came again. I clenched my fists madly, started crying from sheer helplessness, and gnawed like a man possessed. I cried so much that the bone became wet and messy with tears. I vomited, swore, and chewed again, cried as if my heart would break, and threw up again. Then I swore aloud and consigned all the powers of the universe to hell.”

It is that last line that I see the essence of the novel, for ultimately it is a novel of revolt. Time and again the narrator does battle with the forces that press upon him. Policemen and clocks abound in Hunger: the law and time. He pays both very little mind even as he is subject to them. He revolts against the rational self interest of bourgeois society and he usually gives what little money he manages to get his hands on away. And of course he is in revolt against his body as it revolts against him. After meeting with an editor in part three he feels ashamed for wanting to ask for aid and when he gets back on the street he runs. “I began running so as to punish myself, left street after street behind me, pushed myself on with inward jeers, and screeched silently and furiously at myself whenever I felt like stopping. When I finally did stop, almost weeping with anger that I couldn’t run any farther, my whole body trembled, and I threw myself down on a house stoop. And to torture myself right, I stood up again and forced myself to stand there, laughing at myself, and gloating over my own fatigue.” Finally he assents to his body, he lets himself sit, but on the “most uncomfortable stoop.” It is the battle of the spirit and the flesh. The spirit can conceive of perfect sublimity, but the body has its limiting demands, as does society - and time erases all. Hamsun’s revolt is profoundly humanistic and it offers us Americans in particular, raised on the droll surety of Poor Richard’s Almanac and later Ayn Rand’s objectivism, a valuable insight into the deep, irrational instincts which we try so hard to suppress in the name of efficiency, but which give us our humanity.

The success of Hunger would propel Hamsun out of obscurity and make him one of the luminaries of European literature, culminating in his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920. Unfortunately, Hamsun’s unique brilliance would be cast in shadow when his zealous nationalism brought him into alliance with Nazi Germany during the occupation of Norway. His legacy remains equivocal in his homeland and his works remain little read in English, but Hunger, as well as his other novels are still breathtakingly relevant. Enough to jar even the most jaded reader out of his apathy.

The novel ends aboard the merchant ship where the he takes one last glance backward, “I straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looked in toward land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiania, where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness.” The narrator had fought with all of his strength against the city, his failing body and society and had lost … for now.

As someone who slaved away many years in corporate America while yearning to write for a living, W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence stood out for me as a symbolic work, representing the life I wanted and knew I would eventually lead; in a more practical way, I held it up as a primer on how to achieve the writer’s life. This is despite the fact that I hadn’t, at that point, even read the book.

But who hadn’t heard basis of Maugham’s book: the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his job to live a life dedicated to art, going so far as to move to Tahiti to get away from a European culture he thought artificial and conventional. Who is there amongst us that came to appreciate our artistic inclinations later in life that hasn’t thought of Gauguin with a feeling of hope and inspiration, a clarion call for life’s second act?

Well I did, and it was with great anticipation that I finally read The Moon and Sixpence after being laid off and thrown headfirst into the writing life that I told myself I wanted so badly. I needed to read The Moon and Sixpence to teach me to swim. And after finally reading it, I can say that this novel has taught me a few strokes, just not the ones I imagined.

The Gauguin of The Moon and Sixpence is Charles Strickland, a fortyish investment banker who leaves his comfortable job, cruelly abandoning his wife and two children in London to be a painter. He moves to Paris where he believes a more authentic existence is possible, living in squalor but still behaving callously, only now to another painter, Dirk Stroeve. Dirk is Strickland’s opposite in every way: he is kind and considerate and a terrible painter. But Dirk is also the only person who spots Strickland’s talent, and, because of this keen eye, ceaselessly assists Strickland’s career by giving him money and singing his praises throughout the painting community. Despite this, Strickland looks on Stroeve with hatred, lashing him with verbal barbs whenever he can. He takes Stroeve’s money with anger, has no intention of paying it back, and, if that is not enough, eventually steals Stroeve’s wife, Blanche; dropping her once he’s finished with her, precipitating her suicide. Strickland eventually ends up in Tahiti through Marseilles, and, finding the paternalistic social construct of the island to his liking, settles down with another wife and child. He eventually dies of leprosy after painting his magnum opus on the walls of his hut, which is duly burnt down on his dying instructions by his wife. It is only after his death that Strickland’s work is appreciated.

Such is the life inspired by Gauguin as outlined by Maugham. Was this the character I wanted to serve as my role model?

Maugham isn’t concerned here with telling Gauguin’s life, of which he only knew a rough outline anyway (and whether or not Gauguin’s real life was an inspirational thing itself is a very subjective enterprise anyway when you look at the details) as he is in exploring the nature of someone who could be driven to leave the comfort of society by an obsession to create art. This is not an inspirational story, but a character study.

Strickland is a sociopath. He cares for no one or nothing other than painting, including, it seems, his own physical well-being. He lives with hunger and illness to achieve this end, which is painting what he sees around him. He despises anyone who tries to help him out of kindness, thinking them part of the false life he left behind. (He accepts a meal from the narrator only after the narrator makes clear he doesn’t care about Strickland one bit, and is only inviting him for his own entertainment.) All of these conventions that humans live with - charity, earning money to live, responsibility for anyone other than themselves - he sees as impediments to his goal of creating ‘true’ art.

But this theory that humans can truly live alone, outside social constructs, reveals its flaws in Strickland's relationship with Blanche and the resulting suicide. Strickland is directly responsible for the woman's collapse, though he feels no responsibility for it. He tells the narrator: "I told her that when I'd had enough of her she'd have to go, and she said she'd risk that." Maugham has created something akin to a monster to show us the detachment required to live the artistic life. This is not a study in inspiration, but madness.

The inspiration here is in the writing.

The Moon and Sixpence has no proper plot, but is a gripping psychological work. Maugham uses a writer/narrator (with a bio suspiciously similar to Maugham’s, something he is known for in most of his work and readily admitted to) who tells us he’s writing a posthumous character study of the now famous artist. The narrator had originally met Strickland through Strickland’s wife, who, unaware of the creative spark lying latent in her husband, sought the friendship of artists. When Strickland flees to Paris, it is this narrator that Strickland’s wife sent to Paris to convince him to return. The narrator failed, but comes across Strickland again five years later when he moves to Paris himself. Thus the narrator is an interested party, someone who can give us a firsthand account in the dissection of a genius.

And Maugham’s use of this narrator is precisely that: genius. It adds a deep contrast underlying all the other conflicts and tensions in the work. Like us, the narrator is at times conflicted about Strickland. He is disgusted by the man but can’t pull himself away, just as we can’t stop reading, because of his interest in the creation of art. He’s intrigued as we are in the mind of a true artist living outside the bounds of society, something the narrator knows he himself doesn’t have the courage for. The narrator mentions more than once that Strickland is an artist who creates his own path while we know the narrator is one who follows the path of others in his own artistic endeavor. Maugham nicely underscores this in a bit in which the narrator tells us how he would write a novel of Strickland’s life. In his conventional and sterile take, we see his failure to be the genius Strickland is and we know the narrator craves to be.

As one considers this novel, it becomes clear it’s not Gauguin’s biography that is most instructive in understanding the work, but Maugham’s. Though one of the most famous writers in the first half of the twentieth century with a still-growing fan base, Maugham’s critical recognition pales in comparison to other writers of the era such as Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf. This is because, while his contemporaries were experimenting and creating their own paths, Maugham was all business, writing meticulously and prodigiously but without any frills. Edmund Wilson called Maugham’s simple prose style “such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way." Maugham wrote great stories in a plain style. This brought him popularity among the masses, but also put him closer in artistic realm to the novel’s narrator than Strickland.

Yet, to the question the novel asks us - do we shoot for the artistic moon and ignore (or, as Strickland does, stomp upon) the sixpence of relationships and life’s little pleasures at our feet?- Maugham seems to be leaning towards the moon.

First, he favorably contrasts Strickland as an artist - the London banker who leaves the social compact so far as to become almost a wild beast, but creates transcendent art - against the narrator - a popular but common writer well-connected in society following the trails of others rather than blazing them himself. He also portrays London’s social scene as stuffy and creatively dead. Its inability to understand Strickland’s art (his wife goes so far as to call his paintings ‘decorative art’ even after his genius has been acknowledged) is a humorous and not too subtle dig at the society of his time. In his own life at the time he wrote the book, we see Maugham eschewing many of the bonds that tie. Even a cursory look at his work suggests he thought the presence of a woman a burden in a man’s life. And he also traveled constantly. (His homosexuality probably played a role in his portrayal of women. And he probably traveled constantly to avoid his wife.) He seems afraid to settle down, afraid to turn out like the London Strickland. Yet when he quite consciously wrote plainly, he seemed to know he was following a path already laid for him.

So, The Moon and Sixpence is inspirational, just not in the way I imagined. It doesn’t tell me how to push a conventional life aside to create art. (In fact, it makes me NOT want to push life aside; it makes me appreciate the sixpence) But it does show me how to write a great and enduring novel. Write a good story well. Have intriguing characters. And ask questions with no easy answers.

Whichever side you come out on with this particular question, The Moon and Sixpence is worth reading more than once just to make sure. And if you’re in a profession you don’t love but feel the fire to create, read it before you quit your job, leave your family and move to Paris.