Putting life away

A sad, if familiar, tale emerged from Bollywood this week. Actor Jiah Khan killed herself in her suburban Mumbai apartment after an alleged altercation with her boyfriend. Speculations about a stalled career and problems in love dominated the media narrative. After making a rather flamboyant debut opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Nishabd, Khan, it was reported, had been struggling to find work in the film industry.

I was in conversation with a young gay man when I heard the news. He was telling me about his need to "conquer the world". "I will be deeply unsatisfied if I did not achieve something groundbreaking," he explained. "There are so many smart people out there, I don't want to be just another person." The discussion turned serious when he added casually: "If nothing works out I can just switch off." We were in a coffee shop and I spent the next hour explaining to him that his life, regardless of the accoutrements it gathers, is precious enough. I wonder if he really understood or just nodded his head in politeness.

What is it about being "just another person" that gets so many young people's knickers in a twist? Khan had been unhappy about the direction her career had taken and, as her mother revealed, was considering a switch to interior designing. Not just she or my gay friend, I know plenty of youngsters who balk at the thought of leading a "regular life". Gay men may still be forgiven for nurturing this particular brand of angst - they, after all, learn to recognise difference early on - but what explains the large-scale presence of this sentiment in the zeitgeist?

John Williams is a little-known writer whose 1965 novel, Stoner, was not the greatest hit at the time but is enjoying a mighty resurgence in Europe this summer. Sales in the Netherlands have propped it to the number-two spot (after the eminently un-literary Inferno by Dan Brown). The novel begins: "William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses."

If one reads the praise coming Stoner's way, it would seem a minor classic never received its due. Everyone from Bret Easton Ellis to Geoff Dyer have sung encomiums to this quiet book about a small-time professor in a small-time college with an equally small-time life filled with, you guessed it, small-time concerns.

Adam Foulds' 2009 novel, The Quickening Maze, is about poet John Clare who battled a lifetime of depression before being incarcerated in a mental asylum. Critics have wondered at various times how much Clare's illness contributed to his creativity and whether, in the end, it enhanced or hampered it. Foulds tries a different, altogether satisfying, tack in his book.

"To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom. A place like this was possible," he says, in relation to another character, Hannah, but it applies as much to Clare. Aware at last that he would never reach the heights of literary success that he aspired to, Clare is a man not drenched in cynicism, as the reader expects him to, but one whose depression has issued a loving acceptance of his fate.

Virginia Woolf made a career out of writing about common people with uncommon desires. Is Mrs Dalloway really suicidal or is she an everywoman? One suspects the former, but the way Woolf's writing claws into you, it does not seem out of place to imagine that indeed, Mrs Dalloway is us. As she walks Bond Street, drenching every occurrence with gravidness, we begin to see with her eyes and realise, to our horror, how normal this gaze is.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham did yeoman's work in re-imagining Woolf's suicide. In his hands, the suicide becomes not an escape route out of untold misery brought on by Woolf's depression, but an act of will aimed at forgoing life because it had brought her all the happiness she had asked for. Woolf is given these shocking but ultimately redeeming words: "To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away."

Jiah Khan put hers away prematurely. One weeps for her, not simply because she had lived so little, but because she imagined that her life had to stand for something for it to have meaning.