A pallet on the floor

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

The opening sentence of Boston Adventure announces the key signatures, so to speak, of the novel: D and P. The novel is Dickensian, beginning as the story of a girlhood spent in poverty, and Proustian, beginning with sleep. Proust: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Or in Lydia Davis’s translation, “For a long time, I went to bed early.”

The moments of involuntary memory in the novel, the miniature essays that universalize the narrator’s experience into a “we” — so Proustian. But Proust’s narrator, unlike Sonie Marburg, never had to sleep on the floor.

Boston Adventure has been reissued by New York Review Books. My only relation to the link is that of a happy reader.