Review of Elizabeth Hardwick's "The Simple Truth"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This review contains spoilers.

I originally picked this book up for two reasons: it is a Virago Modern Classics edition which I’ve heard many good things about from several people, and Susan Sontag listed Elizabeth Hardwick as one of her favorite contemporary writers a number of times in interviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t think this novel lived up to either of these recommendations.

It tells the story of two people – Joseph Parks, a well-to-do student from New York who has come to Iowa to study, and Anita Mitchell, the wife of a boring chemistry professor at the same university. These two characters who would otherwise have nothing to do with one another are brought together by the local sensationalized murder trial of Rudy Peck, another local student, who is accused of killing his girlfriend. Even though it seems very clear that Rudy has actually killed her, both Joseph and Anita are rabid partisans in defending him – Joseph for reasons he describes as “Dreiserian” (Peck as a latter-day American Tragedy, a kind of male Jenny Gerhardt) and Anita for more vaguely Freudian reasons which Hardwick never fully fleshes out. 

Much of the novel consists of either courtroom testimony which is all rather uninspired and extended dialogues between Anita and Joseph which try to exculpate him or explain away his possible involvement in the murder. The possibility of riveting testimony could have salvaged this somehow by turning it into a “true crime” kind of novel along the along the lines of “In Cold Blood,” but even these parts fall completely flat and lifeless onto the page. In the end, Rudy is found not guilty, which brings out the most repulsive snobbery in Anita. She wonders how these simple Iowa farmer-hicks could possibly have so much empathy and understanding to see that Rudy might be anything other than guilty. Apparently the whole time she was thinking that they were a band of knuckle-dragging, trident-wielding witch-burners. One person echoes Anita’s bewilderment: “It is really unnerving to live in a world where everyone, just anybody, takes as complicated a view as the most clever people! … There’s no one to uphold common sense.” I finished the novel wondering if people could really be so ignorant. But of course, the unpleasant fact of the matter is they can be – and perhaps that’s Hardwick’s point.

There are fundamental questions that are never answered in the book. For example, why were Anita and Joseph interested in Peck’s trial beyond the simple, flashy headlines? What drew them to him as a person more than anyone else? Something posing as a “novel of ideas,” which this most certainly is, needs to answer these questions but they remain not even tangentially addressed making their dogged attention to the trial seem random and somewhat silly, like impish schoolchildren who have nothing better to occupy their time. Joseph and Anita are badly drawn characters; they never manage to fully become people, but instead remain contrivances to push Hardwick’s plodding, empty story along. 

Ironically, there is remarkably bright and insightful afterward to the novel in this edition written in 1987, some thirty years after it was originally published. It intelligently and clearly explains what she was trying to do with the book. If only she could have written the whole thing as well as she did the afterward!