Real Estate by Deborah Levy review – a dialogue between art and life

Deborah Levy’s trilogy of what she calls “living autobiography” – Things I Don’t Want To Know, The Cost of Living and, now, Real Estate – has been an extended experiment with the form. These first-person narratives, “using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself”, are at once memoir, cultural analysis and self-interrogation, attempts to keep past and present simultaneously in view as she pursues the question of how a woman – specifically a woman artist – should live in the second act of her life.

In Real Estate, as in The Cost of Living, Levy is preoccupied with the meaning of home, that “gendered” space that has so long been regarded as the domain of women. What does it cost a woman to make a home or to unmake one? The Cost of Living examined the author’s decision, in her 50s, to leave her marriage of 23 years and the family home that grounded it, and create a different kind of home, in a “crumbling apartment block” with her teenage daughters. In the chaos of this all-female household, she found creative liberation: “My 50s had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming.”

Real Estate charts the next logical step in that process, as Levy turns 60 and her younger daughter goes off to university, unshackling her finally from domestic obligations and forcing her to confront the question of whether the empty nest really offers the freedom for which she has yearned. The magnitude of this psychological upheaval finds a parallel in geographical displacement. Levy is awarded a fellowship in Paris and leaves home at the same time as her daughter, creating for herself a literal empty nest in a barely furnished rental in the 18th arrondissement, while she fantasises about her “unreal estate”: “a grand old house with a pomegranate tree in the garden”.

The book asks more questions than it answers, most of which circle back to the idea of a woman’s desires and how those would look if they could be separated from the expectations of a patriarchal culture: “You never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.” The desire for the security of real estate, long ago embodied in Virginia Woolf’s idea of a room of one’s own, is, for Levy, not merely a matter of property but of staking out territory artistically. At a party in London, she is confronted by a male writer of a similar age who seems determined to diminish her recent success. “The truth was that he viewed every female writer as a sitting tenant on his land.”

In a series of vignettes that cross continents, Levy foregrounds the quotidian – shopping, clothes, incidental conversations – and through it allows the association of ideas to lead her into a dialogue between art and life, mothers and daughters, past and present. In this regard, the trilogy recalls the recent novels of Rachel Cusk or the personal cultural histories of Olivia Laing. Buying a banana plant in Shoreditch segues into reflections on the painter Georgia O’Keeffe; a defunct shower in a Berlin cafe calls up a fleeting thought of her relatives murdered at Auschwitz. She revisits the writers who have influenced her, whose work might offer glimpses of how to live with intellectual freedom – Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Susan Sontag, Louisa May Alcott – but most often she is in dialogue with her past self. Opening a book with an inscription from her ex-husband is “a shock”; she tries to connect with the woman who received the gift of that book. “I knew she would not want to see me (so there you are, nearly 60 and alone) and I did not want to see her either (so there you are, 40 years old, hiding your talent, trying to keep your family together), but she and I haunted each other across time.”

This is the heart of the trilogy: this constant nod to past iterations of self that is necessary to the formation of a writer. Levy is preoccupied not just with how to write new, freer versions of female characters, but how to become one. The narrator of Real Estate is drily funny, irreverent, curious, even wise; she makes the reader want her for a companion. “It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves,” she observes. Each of these books bears several re-readings; together, they offer one version of how a woman might continually rewrite her own story.