In the opening of Real Estate, the third and final volume of her “living biography”, Deborah Levy buys a banana plant from a young woman outside Shoreditch High Street station. As she hands over the money, Levy imagines the vendor’s inky false eyelashes stretching “all the way from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of East London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico”. On the train-then-bus journey home with her unwieldy purchase, her thoughts flit from the egg-shaped fireplace she will have in her ideal home to artist Georgia O’Keeffe on flowers.
Approaching 60, there is the sense that Levy is making an inventory of what she has accumulated
It’s quintessential Levy. The languid yet precise prose, the fine mind she allows to wander through a series of ideas and connections before getting to the nub: she is in search of a house. In other hands this could read like a script for afternoon TV’s A Place in the Sun, but Levy’s ideal home is one she constructs and reconstructs in her imagination, what she calls her “unreal estate”.
She is still living in the flat in the “crumbling block on the hill” familiar from the previous volume, The Cost of Living. Approaching 60, there is the sense that Levy is making an inventory of what she has accumulated: her home, material possessions, her family and friends. There are two writing sheds and three electric bikes. Thematically she is picking up where she left off, as many of the same preoccupations are here too: what it is to be a woman, patriarchy and power, and the gendered nature of domestic spaces. Sontag, Wolff and Duras, among others, are enlisted to help her work through these ideas.
In The Cost of Living, Levy alluded to an “unwritten female character”, one with agency and autonomy. Here, “missing” female characters haunt the text, the voiceless women who are seen only from a male point of view.
In a meeting with film executives – a man and two women – Levy proposes an alternative character, “one who ruthlessly pursues her own dreams and desires”, only to be told that such a character would not be likable. It is not lost on Levy that this was delivered by the “cruellest female executive”.
Anyone else would call it internalised misogyny, but Levy interrogates ideas without recourse to such phraseology. In fact, at times the discourse has a playful tone, but is no less rigorous for that. Referring to a novel featuring a woman who has “gifted her life to a man”, she remarks, “This is not something to be tried at home but this is where it usually happens”.
Journeys to Mumbai, New York and Berlin are rendered beautifully, but the joy of this book is the magic Levy finds in the ordinary, or perhaps the magic she makes of it. The banana tree becomes the third child; an avocado is ripened between the ears of a wooden fairground horse from Afghanistan that stands on her windowsill. She pays attention to everything from the spritzes she serves in frozen glasses to “character shoes” spied in a Parisian shop window; new bedlinen triggers an obsession with silk.
In recent years, writers from Rachel Cusk to Annie Ernaux have interrogated similar concerns to Levy’s, but what makes this trilogy unique is, perhaps, her voracious curiosity. Not only does nothing escape her gaze, but there is no hierarchy. Brief conversations with taxi drivers and receptionists are reported with as much relish as those with close friends, and Simone de Beauvoir is discussed in the same breath as Louisa May Alcott. The resulting connections are always fresh and surprising.
Levy’s unreal estate morphs throughout the book. Sometimes there is a curving staircase, a fountain, a mimosa tree, the specifications altering to accommodate a river in which to swim, an extended family of friends and their children. In a reverie she imagines employing a housekeeper to run her imaginary house. She asks them to bring her some Turkish Delight. “May I suggest if you want a sweetmeat you get it your f**king self”, they reply, before flouncing off to listen to Lana del Rey in the bath.
Many of us indulge in fantasies of the lives we would lead if only we had enough money, the right relationship, the perfect house. What is a life, if not the sum of who we love, how we live, the objects with which we surround ourselves? When attention is paid to the details, it can be a life lived well.
Levy doesn’t need to add a house with many rooms and a pomegranate tree to her property portfolio. She is already loaded.
