What Maisie Knew in layers and riddles - deficient in something that would meet the general desire

After the opening rush of the opening chapters of What Maisie Knew, the novel settles into something more conventional yet also unusual.  We have the little girl’s divorced parents, for whom Maisie is just a weapon used to harm each other.  Each parent quickly remarries, so there are two step-parents who like Maisie so use her not as a weapon but a tool in a separate little drama.

Then there is the great Mrs. Wix, Maisie’s nurse, with her “sad and strange appearance…  a kind of greasy greyness,” hair of “a turbid, sallow, unvenerable white” and an attire that “reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet of a horrid beetle” (all from Ch. 4).  Maisie has a little bit of a cruel streak, although not anything incommensurate with her age.  Mrs. Wix loves Maisie, but is not above making use of her when necessary, too.

So the structure of the novel has the parents and their, hmm, active, romantic lives off at a distance, and a triangle of the two attractive, friendly step-parents and the unvenerable widowed nurse in the middle, politely working to further or prevent schemes that would by themselves make a dull novel.

Then in the foreground, constantly, with a great conceptual purity, there are Maisie and James.  Everything in the story of the adults is seen through the thick screen of Maisie’s perception and James’s prose.  Maisie knows a lot, as the title suggests, but she knows as a child knows, while the narrator writes in a prose that obfuscates as a matter of artistic principle.

And then there is me, trying to solve the riddle of the plot using Maisie’s clues.  Early on, for example, she is happy that her step-parents seem so friendly with each other, while a corrupt, cynical – I mean adult – reader is likely to ask “Hey, wait, exactly how friendly are they?”

As Emma writes in the comments to her post at Book Around The Corner about What Maisie Knew, “There’s a distance between the text and the violence of the words and the compassion the reader (and the author) feel for Maisie.”

So another layer for me.  While I cynically read the novel over Maisie’s head, I simultaneously read her pitiful novel head on.

These multiple layers completely solve the sex problem.  Maisie is too young and innocent to ever understand certain primary motives of the adults.  There is a hilarious scene near the end where the proper nurse tries to impart a “moral sense” in Maisie about her step-parents, who may be you-know-what, but is completely incapable of giving Maisie the slightest hint about what might be immoral about her step-parents living together while both are still married to Maisie’s original parents.  So Maisie of course has no idea what Mrs. Wix means.  They both want to live with her, which could hardly be immoral, right?

Thus the cryptic James style actually matches the way the novel almost has to be read.  James includes actual riddles in the story.  Maisie’s father’s vicious friends pinch her legs, which are like “toothpicks”; Maisie feels that “she was deficient in something that would meet the general desire” (she is probably six years old here), and realizes that she lacked “a congenital tendency to the production of a substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she didn't like” (Ch. 1).  What a distance to go for the word “fat.”  Which, I remind myself, is what Maisie lacks.  The entire passage is an inside-out riddle, one that James does not solve for me.  This is by no means the only such passage.

James makes me solve riddles while simultaneously reading on two stories, one told through a highly distorted perspective.  Maybe this is as impressive than doing without scenes.