Diski’s wonderful story collection, The Vanishing Princess, holds riches for all. Longtime fans will celebrate the very fact of more Diski and thrill to familiar preoccupations in new settings and shapes. Those who know only the self-elegizing Diski will encounter the expansive parameters of her imagination and intellect. Those who read Diski for the first time are in for the delight of discovery ... The three fairy tales that anchor the book speak both to Diski’s timelessness and to her contemporary feminist perspicuity ... The book’s other stories begin in the cold reality of women’s daily lives...What makes these stories quintessentially Diski is the way they balance between the sometimes mundane, sometimes grim, sometimes arresting detail of those lives and the spiraling thoughts of the characters who inhabit them. In so doing, they not infrequently stretch the boundaries of realism .. In all her writing, Diski turned her sharply observant gaze on the stuff of the world — people, places, books, things, oncologist appointments — and then thought hard not only about that stuff, but about the thoughts generated by that stuff and the thoughts further generated by those thoughts. In The Vanishing Princess, her characters are to a degree her avatars, sometimes in their reenactments of scenes and themes detailed elsewhere in memoirs and essays, always in the trenchant thinking that makes their stories — and hers — memorable.
...takes up one aspect of feminine experience and inflates it into a beautiful and monstrous parable ... In retelling folk stories with new female perspectives, The Vanishing Princess’s closest ally is Angela Carter. Like Carter, Diski presents women who are living inside roles. She gives us the internal monologue of the gazed-upon woman ... If many stories in The Vanishing Princess are about tapping into the hidden desire at the heart of the self, others are about its destruction by an outrageous world ... For all the affirmation of female interiority in these stories, therefore, Diski also gives us a low hum of dread and perturbation. There’s a distant wryness to the narrative voice of The Vanishing Princess, one which uses fairytale cutouts to make everyday life seem both ridiculous and frightening. Madness and evil are as omnipresent as they are in fairytales, and they hide just out of our sight—only one thwarted desire, one misunderstanding away—in our own heads.
It’s a sharp, funny, clever selection. But for fans of her work it may feel like a disappointment, a bunch of crumbs when what you wanted is another cake ... There’s much to admire in this book—the energy of the prose, the playfulness with which Diski approaches her stories. In just under two hundred pages, she tries her hand at fairy tales, erotica, and scenes of domestic life. Such inventiveness is typical of Diski’s fiction. Her novels are incredibly varied in their form. But however daring and original, the novels lack the immediacy of Diski’s nonfiction. As a result, the stories in The Vanishing Princess may be something of a letdown ... Reading it, one can see Diski’s later words hovering around the edges. It’s easier to deal with stories that have a beginning and a middle and an end. But minds don’t work that way. Our experience of the past is not linear. It pokes through, it prods, it shapes how we view the world no matter how distant it may feel. What makes Diski’s work so brilliant is that she was able to present her life in all its untidiness.
The Vanishing Princess gives a picture of a singular intelligence still harnessed to more or less conventional forms and starting to push against them. Later, instead of telling stories straight, she would spiral around them, like a virtuoso skater ... Critics typically point out her wryness, her immunity to cant, her inability to flinch. But she could also be enchanting ... There are two more stories as superb as 'Strictempo' and 'Bath Time' in The Vanishing Princess. 'Housewife' is about a woman in Kent’s affair with a professor with whom she trades daily erotic correspondence and who comes around once a week for an afternoon of love-making...'Leaper' is a story about suicide and chance-encounter sex...These are quiet stories with high-voltage wiring about the concealment and disclosure of secrets ... It’s hard for me to imagine a reader exposed to Jenny Diski’s writing who wouldn’t be hooked. However difficult her life may have been, she isn’t a difficult writer. And though her example is likely to inspire or mortify other writers, neither is she a writer’s writer. Her prose conveys the illusion of a spontaneous monologue, a mind mainlined onto the page. Such vivid illusions are always hard-won, the result of hours of solitary toil.
The tales range from legendary to modern: everything from a single mother’s search for the perfect, daylong bath to a young girl’s refuge from her divided family in an asylum. The writer unfolds each with careful awareness of the short story form. Readers new to Diski will find a wide range of topics and styles, but always her singular social critique ... In this age when women are coming forward, claiming #metoo and reclaiming their space in artistic milieux, Diski’s stories of women choosing their own narratives sound a particularly resonant note ... It’s hard not to read these tales and lament the writer’s passing, again. But The Vanishing Princess is another radiant facet of her legacy.
I want to say her stories are ‘brave,’ but that sounds blurby and false; maybe it’s more useful to describe The Vanishing Princess as an artist’s sketchbook, a space where play and adventure are privileged over snoozy competence and sheen, a preference that seems in keeping with the authentically renegade life Diski, as a person, led … Diski calls attention to the ways in which women are taught to doubt their cognitive journeying through quotidian space, while also authentically investigating how personally restricting, in the end, such involuted mental spirallings might be. Diski’s strength is her ability to critique her own critique, but from a position of self-awareness.
Diski’s writing is never less than arresting. Taken together, these stories form a narrative of the plight of women in a certain age ... In effect, then, men define, imprison, commodify and erase women. Not untrue — especially during the Mad Men years when Diski was coming of age. But in Diski’s telling, no alternating currents of any kind mitigate this airless state ... it’s helpful to rememeber that these stories were first published in 1995. While the writing itself is always clean, supple, and capable, it is often also (to me) overlong and belabored, suggesting either that Diski hadn’t yet grown mindful of the writerly peril of 'much of a muchness,' as the English call it — or that she was consciously bashing the famous English discomfort with demonstrative excess.
What has drawn me most to Diski is her disregard of genre lines … Gathering a dozen stories, some of which first appeared in New Statesman and the London Review of Books, it seems to be a book of updated myths or legends before revealing its true, and more subversive, intent … The women Diski evokes in these pages are adrift but not, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they are in a process of becoming.
Diski’s knowledge of philosophy, psychology, and feminism is woven seamlessly into the princess’s transformation from purity and contentment to self- consciousness and insatiable longing, a process that many women can relate to … What makes this collection so special and readable is its versatility. After the heartbreak of the first story, one that seems antiquated and yet timeless, we are plunged into the contemporary urban world of the second story … Diski’s legacy, her gift to the literary world, is imagination pushed to its extremes and insights so deep and probing that the reader actually reconsiders her own views of the world, of sexuality, death, vice, and virtue. This seems to be her intent, and she achieves it.
[The Vanishing Princess] glimmers like found treasure—or a mirage ... In 'Bath Time,' she brings us a woman in determined pursuit of the perfect bath. Yes, only that. But in Diski’s able hands the modest plot yields riches, shedding glinty light on dreams deferred, pleasures denied, the way we can, if we are single-minded enough, take the straw of everyday life and turn it into gold. Regal, raunchy, revealing—the stories in this collection leave a lasting impression.
The dozen stories of this excellent posthumous collection look at isolation, anxiety, sex, the roles women play, and the attempts of men to define those roles, all from a female perspective ... Diski displays hard-edged humor, incisive perceptions, and a lively imagination.
