It is extraordinarily difficult to enter books as pervasive and popular as The Bell Jar without a few preconceived notions of it. I think the best reader experience of this novel would’ve been the initial British readers, preferably unaware of the pseudonym and the authors life. The linking of Plath’s life to the text is what I think has complicated i’s legacy and interpretation. The extremely casual racism (and general bigotry) that Esther lays on us is an understandable stopping point for a lot of people, even more so if you take this entirely too much as an autobiographical work. I do think there is a point to this admittedly cruel string of insults and observations from Esther; who is not simply just Plath but rather an observation (or obfuscation) of herself through her own increasingly distraught mind, in that Esther’s teetering spot in the upper middle class largely helps shape her view of the people around her. This is a relatively well off white family in 1950’s New England, centered around academia, publishing and psychiatry; all places you’d expect to meet bigotry in pre-Civil Rights Bill. It directly contributes to (as well as is a symptom of) Esther’s isolation and total disconnect from the people around her. Mental illness is an illness even in morally disagreeable people. The novel really does take off after the first portion and does not let up. There was an unshakable chill that accompanies the return to Boston in the summer that I think really challenges modern readers to reconcile the sympathy they have for an unwell young woman and the discomfort that her thoughts and actions brought them in the chapters before.

Vuong curiously buries his strongest material behind the first section of this book which contains all of the worst poems in the collection. Readers would be better served by skipping straight to Rise & Shine and going from there. Some of the bullet imagery grows tiresome by the end but plenty of the latter stuff is great enough to survive beyond that.