I gave my copy of this book away.

This novel, by Jane Bowles, is one of the most immediately weird books I've ever read. It's striking: the characters weren't memorable because they remind me of someone I know; rather, they're memorable because I'll never meet anyone like them. Within the first few pages, one of the 'serious ladies,' as of yet just a girl, undresses one of her friends, puts her in a burlap sack, covers her in mud, and insists that she go into a stream to "purify herself." Miss Goering, as the central lady is called, plays versions of this game--called "I forgive you of all your sins"--throughout the novel, with "an active inner voice that curtailed her observation of whatever went around outside her."
In the book's final pages, having finished another such a game with a series of spurned, obsessed, and comical lovers, she asks herself, in a lost moment of insight, "is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin?" It's a terrifying moment--in it, I asked myself the same. Maybe I have no idea. I can't even answer this question. If, perhaps, something is hidden from myself, I wouldn't even know. Not even right now, as I consider it.
The novel, described by Millicent Dillon, Bowles' biographer, is "a series of repetitions, variations on a theme." It offers me yet another character with a fate to fear: the other "serious lady", Mrs Copperfield. She's not Miss Goering's diametrically opposed foil, but rather an alter-ego, a reverberation. Where the pattern of Miss Goering's behavior follows the scene of a young girl forcing another into the water; Mrs Copperfield will not approach the ocean until taken by the hand. She is "interested only in a bearable life" and guards her happiness "life a wolf." Like Miss Goering, Mrs Copperfield is oblivious to her repetitive behavior. She ignores the path of destruction she leaves behind as easily as Miss Goering fails to notice herself burning the path before her.
And I wonder--would I even know if the world around me were in shambles? Maybe someone would tell me. The other characters in Two Serious Ladies, however, only serve to highlight the tendencies of the two women. They are simply too absurd to mean much in their own right. Peggy Gladys, for example, is a rich, eloquent seventeen year old half-Irish, half-Javanese Panamanian girl who chases after Mrs Copperfield. Her 'point' is not so much that Mrs Copperfield is irresistible, or that there was a plethora of women with unexpected backgrounds around Panama at the time; instead, she illustrates Mrs Copperfield's tastes. Peggy is too young, too dependent for her. Mrs Copperfield avoids the beautiful young girl because she needs someone to lead her into the water. There's something pathetic about the drunk child waiting, sitting on a barstool as Mrs Copperfield runs off to find Pacifica. At the same time, the sheer ridiculousness of an rich, well-spoken, beautiful, Irish-Javanese-Panamanian girl chasing after a middle-aged woman, an “old hen”, who is chasing after an old hen Spanish whore, is just silly. Similarly, Miss Goering's two housemates Arnold and Miss Gamelon, move in with her after only just meeting her. The characters are ludacris--Arnold unexpectedly nicknames Miss Gamelon "Bubbles" in the middle of the text--


Blah, I've been working on this for days and can't figure out where to go with this. I should probably write it without such an awful academic tone.
Either way, read the book. Give me your copy when you finish.