When Doris Lessing, the British-Zimbabwean novelist 

who died in 2013, sat down to

Then there were more personal crises. In the 1950s, from the tumult of wartime
emerged a new type of woman whom Lessing, in “The Golden Notebook,” terms a
“free woman”: Such a woman could work, raise children on her own, date around. Yet
just as members of today’s Tinder generation can be flummoxed by a surfeit of
options, she often felt depressed by the new freedom, and worried whether her
emotions were “still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists.”

Lessing herself was one of these women. She had married twice in Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe) — where she was an activist against racial segregation — and had
come to London, where she published the best-selling novel “The Grass Is Singing”
and embarked on a series of love affairs. Her sixth novel, “The Golden Notebook,”
was her most heroic reckoning with a “kind of experience women haven’t had before.”
Published in 1962, the book was labeled a feminist classic, though like all labels this
one has the effect of reducing it.

The book is far from a manifesto. It charts a smart, sensitive woman’s exhaustion
with modern gender dynamics, “the men vs. women business.” It is also, to my mind,
the novel that best captures the mood of our own era of political unrest.
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Bombarded on all sides by news and newness, we, too, feel exhausted and don’t know
how to respond. Anna, the protagonist, is, like Lessing, a novelist from Africa. At the
start, she is living with her 10-year-old daughter in a flat in the “wastes of London’s
student-land” and is blocked, unable or unwilling to write for the public after a very
successful first novel set in Africa. “At the moment I sit down to write,” she admits,
“someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me. … It could be
a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the
F.L.N.” Her plight is more than just a form of white liberal guilt or piety. Anna is
hopelessly split among identities: exile, communist, novelist, mother, lover. How to
put all these strands into one book without delicately pickling each in its own
predictable social novel?

As a writer torn between countries and careers, I have often struggled with such
questions, and I have seen few more brilliant solutions to the problem than the
daring form of “The Golden Notebook.” While the novel is framed by a conventional
and delicious third-person story of Anna and her best friend chatting about their
lives, it is broken by Joycean interludes of frightening honesty, the so-called
notebooks in which Anna pours out her guts.
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Each notebook is given a color, corresponding to its theme. In the black notebook,
Anna tracks her memories of being a young and unseeing privileged white activist in
racist Rhodesia during World War II; in the red, her experiences as a reluctant and
then disillusioned member of the British Communist Party. In the yellow, we find
fragments of a novel based on her love life; in the blue, a record of daily events. In
each she pitilessly examines her fear of speaking the truth about her condition.
“People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves,” Lessing writes, adding
elsewhere: “I see that people everywhere are trying not to feel. Cool, cool, cool, that’s
the word.”

Anna quits years of therapy, recognizing it is an evasive way of “rescuing the formless
into form.” Thinking back to her successful first novel, Anna wonders: “Why did I not
write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had
nothing to do with the material that fueled it. … Why a story at all — not that it was a
bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?”

What she wants to do is quit simplifying and pruning, and inhabit the chaos of life —
the breakups, the contradictions, the depressions, the sexual enchantments. At one
point she realizes that her “life has always been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative …
the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it.” She adds
that “sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across,
they’re split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.” She dreams of
generating “a new kind of strength” out of chaos, of wearing words like “insecure” and
“unrooted” as a sort of badge. (How different this is from our current generation of
nationalists, whose desperation for roots drives them back to imagined Edens.) At the
end of the novel she abandons all divisions and sweeps everything into a single
“golden notebook.”
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This sounds fine in theory, but what does chaos look like in a novel? As it turns out, a
lot like the fierce, fast, minutely attuned autobiographical writing of Karl Ove
Knausgaard — whom Lessing predates by 50 years. The form of the notebooks allows
Lessing to pour out the contents of her brilliant mind in lyrical cascades of prose: the
varying moods of a love affair with an ex-communist bipolar American; discussions
with racist and foolish film scouts who want to adapt Anna’s African novel to an
English setting, wiping clean its political content; the cancel culture of the British
Communist Party; what it feels like to wash off your menstrual blood in the toilet
while at a party office.

The novel doesn’t progress so much as thicken, like molasses. Unlike her male
postcolonial contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates V. S. Naipaul or J. M.
Coetzee, Lessing — like Anna — is unafraid to dirty her hands in the quest for truth.
She might write with an acid touch but she doesn’t keep an Olympian distance from
new causes or passionate affairs. Imagine if a woman who had engaged in every
Twitter battle, canvassed for Obama, joined Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and
thrown her lot behind Senator Bernie Sanders before falling out with the sexist Bernie
bros were now writing a book about the experience of being pulled in a thousand
different directions.

Yet, while often blistering in its depiction of political groups, the novel seeks to
transcend what Anna calls her own “critical, balancing little brain.” In the yellow
notebook’s novel-within-a-novel, a married psychiatrist explains the meaning of his
life to his lover: “You and I are the boulder-pushers,” he says. “We spend our lives
fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that
the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to
lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for
thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police
is a slave. … But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is
our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them.”

This is bleak, but not hopeless. It is as moving and cleareyed a defense of activism as I
have read. It is also, perhaps, an author’s self-deprecating observation about her own
novel, which she might have felt was a boulder she was pushing up a mountain of
untruth. But it isn’t a boulder. It is a comet from the 1960s.