After All My Puny Sorrows, we’re pivoting into something stranger but no less emotionally charged with Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles—a short, uncanny novel from 1943 that feels far more contemporary than one might expect.
For the short story pairing, we will read “The School,” by Donald Barthelme, which was first published in the New Yorker in 1974. Read it in the NYer here, or download a PDF here.
Bowles’s book follows two women—one wealthy and adrift, the other married and unraveling—as they move, often inexplicably, toward versions of freedom that look a lot like self-destruction. It’s less a conventional narrative than a series of dislocations: social, moral, and psychological. Motivations are slippery, dialogue is oddly precise, and the emotional logic operates just off-center.
Tennessee Williams called it, “My favorite book,” saying “I can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic.”
If you’ve been game for the tonal and structural play of The Sellout, the moral and spiritual interiority of Gilead, or the global disquiet of The Inheritance of Loss, this lands somewhere adjacent—though Bowles is arguably stranger than all of them.
Expect:
- minimal exposition
- characters who resist interpretation
- moments of real dark comedy
- a lingering sense that something important has happened, even if you can’t quite name it
It’s a classic novel that invites strong, divergent readings—and does not offer a lot of certainty.