RaveAstraPassion and revulsion, tenderness and cruelty, worldly sophistication and schoolgirl naïveté — outside of the classic will-they-won’t-they set-up of an unlikely romantic pairing, it’s Tonks’s embrace of oppositional forces that provides the source of the novel’s tension, as well as its levity ... The compulsive, madcap momentum of the novel might also have something to do with the speed at which Tonks wrote it, over four weeks in the autumn of 1967 ... One senses that for all The Bloater’s undesirable affectations, it’s his lack of humor, especially about himself, that is the true turn-off for a woman like Min, whose canny observations and strong opinions about love and romance are a large part of her charm for her many admirers, and for the reader ... The joy of reading The Bloater is in the vitality of Tonks’s sentences, which are teeming with sensory particulars and surprising, delightful connections ... But for all the subversive elements of The Bloater — its playful embrace of promiscuity, the originality of its language — it’s the way it resists the conventional morality of classic literature, refusing to reduce its wayward heroine to a cautionary tale, that strikes me as most radical. Apart from a brief episode of gout, Min is never punished for her transgressions or her vanity or her freedom, and the novel concludes with a swerve towards a romance founded on friendship—a coming together of intellectual equals, as in a Shakespearean play. In this way, Tonks allowed her fictional counterpart to joyfully escape the misfortune and anguish that would plague the writer throughout the rest of her life, giving Min the kind of resolution that can only ever be achieved in fiction: a happy ending ... stands as one of the few remaining testaments of a woman who, like her heroine, once lived life on her own terms. In this light, its republication seems a small miracle.
