It's a beautifully crafted novel, seamlessly incorporating both lucid, straightforward prose, and startling, jewel-like language. It's a novel about many things: what it means to be talented and ambitious, what it means to be a woman before the feminist movement, depression, and the nature of relationships between women and men. Largely an autobiographical work, the book traces Plath's descent into depression, her attempted suicide in 1953 (she committed suicide in 1963, ten years afterwards), and her recovery. Primarily a poet (her most famous work is Ariel), this was her first, last, and only novel. It's good reading; it treats depression seriously. You don't read The Bell Jar with any sort of distance from Plath's depression; it feels inevitable given the time. For Plath, her ambition and talent define her, but it must be repressed in face of social expectations: that is, it is the Fifties in America and she is supposed to marry a nice, Ivy-League boy, cook his scrambled eggs, and raise his children—not try to become a successful writer. Wouldn't you go crazy too? Her depression seems much more a symptom of the time rather than Plath's personal problem. There are moments of dark humor to balance out the seriousness, comedy that verges on the grotesque: girls throwing up in a theatre from food-poisoning, a boy wondering if he actually drives women crazy, Plath's refusal to bathe or sleep. There is a refreshing quality to reading Plath; she has none of the bitterness that is so typical of people who expose the fallacies of their time. She suffers, but she is not jaded; she places the blame on herself rather than her culture. It is an amusing book, but a deeply unhappy one.
