Art After Sexual Assault
Siri Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future, is a self-conscious exercise in juvenilia. “This book is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery,” S.H. announces, lest there be any doubt that the novel is a Künstlerroman. It proceeds to shift awkwardly between S.H.’s present-day narration and a clutter of found texts: S.H.’s journal entries from 1978 and 1979, a draft of a novel she wrote but has never finished, and delicate, undated caricatures of people ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Donald Trump.
