"The Summer Without Men" (by Siri Hustvedt)

Mia Fredrickson is a prize-winning poet in her 50s, a university lecturer, and mother to a budding actress. For 30 years she has also been wife to Boris, an established neuroscientist and "rat-man" who one fine day announces that he wants a pause in their relations. The pause is French, has significant breasts and an excellent mind. Mia tumbles into madness and a hospital that diagnoses brief psychotic disorder. It is an "ugly disintegration".

When she emerges, she takes herself away from the family home in Brooklyn to the Minnesota prairies where she grew up. Her mother still lives here, now in sheltered accommodation, and shares her days with four other octogenarian widows – tough-minded, energetic if variously ailing crones. Mia nicknames this group "the five swans". Next door to the house Mia has rented, a young mother and her two tots eke out a life punctuated by a largely absent husband's bullying screams.

Together with the seven pubescent girls who make up her poetry class, these are the characters who people Mia's summer without men. She reads and chats to her mother and her friends. She rages. She travels into the past. She writes, and not only poetry: in a pristine notebook she evokes a sexual life prior to marriage with the rat-man. And once a week she talks to her benign therapist, whose voice is low and musical. Through it all, and through her confrontations with women at all stages of life, Mia slowly reconstitutes a self that is separate from the one merged with Boris.

Siri Hustvedt is a novelist of great intelligence. She knows the ways of the world and of the heart. She also knows a great deal about literature, art, philosophy, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. She has woven this knowledge into her fiction, particularly in the mesmerising What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American, to great dramatic effect. In her recent memoir, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, she took us on a dazzling journey through the mind-doctoring sciences as she sought an answer to the mystery of the wild shaking fits that took her over while speaking at her father's memorial.

The Summer Without Men is a new departure. Despite its painful subject matter – marital rupture, encroaching death, the tormenting antics of malice-ridden girls – the novel is a mordant comedy. And unlike Hustvedt's earlier, carefully woven fictions, this one wears its seams on the outside. It plays with fictionality, invoking the "dear readers" that we are, and making a mockery of sequential time on the page. It gives us shards of memory, poetry, the verse and stories that emerge from a writing class, philosophical text messages from a Mr Nobody, as well as a reading group's response to Austen's Persuasion, that template of delayed gratification.

In its effervescent speed, the novel brings to mind one of those fast-talking 1930s Hollywood comedies, in particular George Cukor's The Women, where men are ever-present in thought, but never in shot. The philosopher Stanley Cavell's brilliant disquisition on what he calls the "comedy of remarriage" hovers in the background. Cavell sees these chattering, seemingly escapist films, such as His Girl Friday or The Awful Truth, as spiritual parables in which disintegration, death and rebirth are engaged with beneath the surface clamour of the sexes wittily doing battle.

Hustvedt cites Cavell and, for the novel's epigraph, also quotes from the final scene of The Awful Truth. Here, after a period of estrangement, philandering Cary Grant has inadvertently locked himself into the room of his one-time wife, Irene Dunne, while she lies languorously in bed. In some confusion, and admitting he's been a fool, he says: "So, as long as I'm different, don't you think things could be the same again? Only a little different."

The happy end of remarriage is poised on the question of whether people can change. Mia does. By doing little more than caring about and connecting with the women around her, by leading a life bathed in the ordinary, she becomes both more herself and different. The distance from a husband whom she admits she experiences as overbearing allows her to reconstitute her own independent boundaries.

Several steps mark her haphazard and unlinear journey. Mia garners an appreciation of her mother and a womanly sense of what, to the child, is ever a mysterious parental duo. Reimmersed in the past, she also reawakens her own early mothering days through contact with her neighbour's small children. She deals with the cruel coven of adolescents in her class, bravely bringing into the open their witchy bullying of one of their members: writing here becomes a way of therapeutically reconfiguring identity.

With the ancient "Swans", the proximity of death takes on a new reality. One of the ancients initiates her into the secrets of her intricate embroideries. These are brightly conventional and pleasing on the outside, but on closer inspection reveal "female monsters with oozing eyes" or wild self-pleasuring women. Even stooped old crones, on death's precipice, have rampant imaginations and hidden histories.

Immersed in the ungovernable emotions of others, Mia becomes more hospitable to herself and to her estranged husband. Time moves on. As Hustvedt reminds us, the difference between comedy and tragedy is simply where the writer (or director) decides to cut.

...

The story is, our heroine admits, banal. When Mia's husband of 30 years demands a pause in their relationship – the Pause in question being clever, French, shiny-haired and "young, of course, twenty years younger than I was" – she is well aware that this dynamic is repeated "everyday ad nauseam" all over the world. Nonetheless it propels her into a brief but spectacular breakdown in a psychiatric unit, and thence to the Minnesota town of her childhood for a summer of recuperation. There she plans to spend time with her elderly mother, teach poetry to a group of pubescent girls, and see if the pause will become a full stop.

At 55 Mia is still "just a child" to the residents of her mother's sheltered apartments, women who have outlived their spouses and are now navigating a long winter without men. As she looks ahead to old age, Mia relives stages of her life through the girls and women she comes across: memories of childhood, when the boundaries between real and unreal tremble, are awoken by Flora, the toddler next door with the imaginary friend; while Flora's mother Lola and baby brother bring back the sensuous bliss of the newborn. Navigating "the preposterous but poignant realities of girls on the cusp" as she uncovers a case of bullying in the poetry group, she is sent back to her own ostracism by poisonous friends at the same age. After the self-absorption of breakdown, Mia is waking up to the world again, and to the fullness of her own interior life. Even summer storms bring back the "great winds" of her childhood, seen through a child's unjaded eyes: "I remembered the immensity of the world."

All the characters are in the grip of change: the girls, becoming women; Lola, learning to be a mother; Mia, experiencing that Change we euphemise with a capital letter; and her mother and friends, facing the final inevitable transformation. Selfhood – the limits and lineaments of identity – is Siri Hustvedt's great subject: the way it changes over time, the extent to which it is subject to the force of others, and the influence it brings to bear on the outside world. Was Mia still herself in the hospital, when, as she puts it, "my inside had touched the outside"? How can one disengage from a long marriage in which thoughts, emotions, even memories mingle? "Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I." Again Hustvedt is exploring projection and hysteria, as she did in her magnificent novel about art and personality, What I Loved, and brought closer to home in the quizzical memoir-cum-scientific history-cum-philosophical investigation The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves. Mia is a hypersensitive poet – she apprehends metaphors literally – but also a cool, well-trained intelligence, taking us from fifth-century Athens to animals to the Amish when considering the scapegoating played out among her poetry students.

Hustvedt makes it all seem effortless. For a novel concerned in greater part with pain, rejection, madness and encroaching death, it's an astoundingly joyful read, an apparently artless jumble of scenes, memories, letters and emails, scraps of poetry, rhetorical riffs. Mia rages and repents, but she never loses her mordant sense of humour. "I took it like a woman," she writes of her husband's decision to move in with the Pause. "I wept."

The book contains many useful things, including a short course on creative writing, highlights of Socratic thought, a history of ideas of sexual difference, a reading group guide to Jane Austen and a demolition of evolutionary biology. (Those superior verbal skills Edward O Wilson ascribes to women must explain, Mia sarcastically notes, "why women have dominated the literary arts for so long".) Particular pleasure is to be found in the "secret amusements" of Mia's mother's friend Abigail, a queen of appliqué and embroidery who for decades has concealed her real artwork within apparently conventional craft objects: a tea cosy lined with monsters, a table runner festooned with Christmas trees that hides a tableau of masturbating women on its zipped-up reverse. Hustvedt describes these subversive images with the same panache she brought to the many artworks invented in What I Loved. In that novel, too, the art was often hidden, by boxes or doors or layers of other images, allowing it to bear the weight of the secret, authentic self. It's an audacious device: using words to construct something outside the medium of words.

Unlike her invented artworks, however, the poems Hustvedt puts into Mia's mouth do not come alive. But this is a rare false note in a book that shines with intellectual curiosity and emotional integrity. Dignified yet playful, cutting yet tender, every page reminds us that, as Mia's doctor tells her, "tolerating cracks is part of being alive".