A Spy in the House of Love

I can’t really tell if this book by Anaïs Nin is good or bad, so I’ll forget all that and just say I liked it. It’s a novella, about a hundred pages, and it’s about a woman who goes from man to man, always guilty, always hiding, always suspicious, waiting to be found out (hence the title). She accidentally phones a lie detector (are we supposed to know what that means?) who becomes curious about her and follows her around for a few day and finally they meet and talk about things.

Right from the first line it has a real 1950’s feel about it – she doesn’t even describe the setting but you can see it all, or at least what I know of it from watching movies. Just the formation of each sentence really feels like that time. There’s some really beautiful turns of phrase, and some really clunky didactic paragraphs, and some interesting characters and more than a few stereotypical characters. It starts off well, ends off weirdly, has some interesting stuff in between.

As to what it’s trying to say – I’m not so sure. Was it shocking, would it have been a shocking book in 1954, to read about a woman having a string of casual affairs while she’s married? It’s certainly not explicit, and it’s not touting free love as a model lifestyle. At the end, the lie detector suggests that Sabina’s problem is not that she loves too much, but that she has never loved enough – has never loved anyone really because she’s never allowed herself to know anyone properly, as ugly, as sick, as boring, as who the person really is. She hasn’t really engaged with anyone, and Nin doesn’t entirely engage with the reader, either, but that’s all right – it’s a pretty good read anyway.