Recent Reviews
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.
Nichole Bernier’s novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. explores the multi-dimensional facets of personhood. It reminds me of Elizabeth Strout’s collection of stories about her eponymous protagonist Olive Kitteridge. In each story, Kitteridge reveals a different dimension of herself depending on her role and relationship with the other characters. Similarly, Bernier examines, in her novel, the ways one character expresses and represses different aspects of herself. The integration of the different selves into one person can be difficult.
In Bernier’s novel, Elizabeth dies in a plane crash leaving her husband and three young children without a wife and mother. Her will states that her friend Kate should be the recipient of her trunk full of journals. The narrator suggests that Kate and Elizabeth are good friends. But as Kate begins reading Elizabeth’s journals, Kate realizes just how little she knew about Elizabeth. Their friendship begins when Elizabeth and Kate meet at a playgroup for their young kids. The intensity of raising young children is overwhelming and their shared journey of motherhood forges a bond between them. In this dimension of Elizabeth’s self, she is a confident, capable and loving mother.
Yet, as Kate begins reading Elizabeth’s journals, she learns that Kate had a sister who died when Elizabeth was twelve. It becomes clear to Kate that Elizabeth’s sister’s death was the pivotal event of Elizabeth’s life. Filled with guilt, shame and pain for the girl she had been, Elizabeth cannot shake the feeling that she killed her sister. Elizabeth’s parents divorce, her mother starts drinking and Elizabeth carries, like an internal weight, the guilt of the family’s disintegration. Elizabeth does not trust anyone; she learns to only confide in her journals. How can she trust another person when she doesn't even trust herself?
Elizabeth marries Dave Martin who is congenial and caring, but emotionally undemanding. There is good chemistry but she knows little about him and he knows even less about her. At some level she feels unworthy of a deeper connection. In her mind, she had killed her sister. Elizabeth wants to escape the sad, lonely and depressed girl she had become after the accident. She wills herself to be upbeat, cheerful and light. But she wrestles with her darker emotions by writing in her journals. She represses her feelings and makes safe emotional connections with people that don’t probe and push to discover more about her. Thought one could argue it is a gift to have the opportunity to reinvent oneself by omitting formative facts from one’s youth, in Elizabeth’s case, her firm façade was beginning to crack and bigger issues were emerging.
Elizabeth lives with the snowball effect of never processing the trauma of her youth. She keeps the ordeal and its aftermath to herself by hiding her suffering through sins of omission and bravely wearing a happy face.
Kate is stunned about this “other Elizabeth” she finds in the journals and concludes that she (and all people) should act with more empathy since everyone is suffering about something, even those we think we know well. These journals spur Kate to think about her marriage, career and life choices. Elizabeth’s journals also teach Kate to be more honest with herself and those around her. To paraphrase Kate, if you knew all there was to know about another person, you could forgive them anything.
Bernier’s ambitious novel attempts to explore the dimensions of friendship, honesty, repression, guilt, secrets, isolation and the gift of journal writing as the most honest form of self expression. Given the enormity of her task, she mostly succeeds. The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. reminds us of the emotional burdens people carry and encourages us to act with empathy and grace whether we know their burdens or not.
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
After the anguish of last week’s election, I looked for a book with characters that are kind, decent and removed from our current culture of crass and cruel behavior. I was so pleased to be under Kent Haruf‘s spell in his fictitious town of Holt, Colorado. In this beautiful and heartwarming novel, that was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award, Haruf introduces his readers to several characters living in a small town on the eastern plains of Colorado. Haruf’s rich dialogue allows the characters to speak for themselves with little intrusion from the author. It’s not a deep psychological exploration, but Haruf provides sufficient psychological clues about people to make the story rewarding to read.
When high school English teacher Maggie Jones, drives up to the cattle ranch of Harold and Raymond McPherson and asks them to consider letting one of her students live with them, they are startled and shaken. The young girl is pregnant and has been evicted from her single mother’s house. The McPherson brothers have spent decades living their days in a predictable routine organized around the feeding, birthing and selling of cattle. They eat three meals a day and read the local newspaper at night. They tell Maggie they will think about it.
In explaining this option to the 17-year old girl, Victoria Roubideaux, Maggie shares why these two old brothers live together without families of their own. “Both their folks died in a highway truck wreck when these old men were younger than you are now.”
The brothers silently contemplate Maggie’s proposal and then decide to let Victoria live with them. Here is the dialogue leading up to their decision.
“All right,” Harold said. “I know what I think. What do you think we do with her?”
“We take her in,” Raymond said.
“Harold looked out into the gathering darkness. I’m talking about-why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town, which don’t amount to much of a good goddam even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?”
“I can’t say”, Raymond said. “But I’m going to. That’s what I know.”
Reading Harufs’s book is like traveling to a simpler time. People’s lives seem clearer and more contained. Without cell phones and constant stimulation, many of the characters say very little. They spend time thinking and pondering; they spend time alone with their thoughts. When they do speak, the reader listens. The characters are constrained by many factors including their own personalities and the small town milieu where they live. The novel is not without violence and dysfunction; there are plenty of mental health issues, a teen pregnancy, bullying and a painful divorce. But it is not the gratuitous violence and dysfunction that seems to permeate our culture today.
Since Holt is a small town, most of the characters’ behaviors and comments are restrained. They have the discipline not to say everything that comes to their mind. Each of the characters struggles and makes mistakes. But they do the best they can with who they are and what they have. By the end of the novel, the characters have grown and stretched. By spending time with these kind and decent people, I feel like I have grown and stretched with them.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Some divorces feel like a tsunami. The resulting tidal wave hits the whole coastline, but some communities get hit harder than others. Ann Patchett’s impressive new novel, Commonwealth, explores the effects of divorce on two families. Spanning decades, this novel is like a longitudinal study of the psychological effects of divorce on the six children whose lives were altered by the dismantling of their families.
Set in Los Angeles, the novel opens when thirty-year-old Bert Cousins kisses Beverly Keating at a christening party. A drunken mistake? End of story? No, because within a couple of years Beverly divorces her husband Fix, marries Bert, and moves across the country with her two little girls to live near Bert’s family in Virginia. Fix Keating is left alone in Los Angles. Bert Cousins leaves his wife Theresa and their four small children in Los Angeles. Though I wished that Patchett had explored Bert and Beverly's decisions to abandon their two young families, it seems that Patchett is more focused on the fallout for the kids.
Every summer, the Keating kids visit their dad in L.A. and the Cousins kids visit their dad in Virginia. And there are several weeks when all six kids become a version of the “Brady Bunch” sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom at Bert and Beverly’s house in Virginia. Beverly’s daughters welcome the visit of the four Cousin children. Patchett writes “Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: They did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.”
And for good reason: these adults create havoc in their children’s’ lives. Bert and Beverly are self-involved and not present even during these summer visits. Taking care of six young kids is exhausting and so Bert and Beverly abdicate their responsibilities and the older kids fill the void. On a family road trip, Bert and Beverly leave a note under the kids’ motel room door; “Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late.” The narrator offers, “One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.” When the kids sneak down to the lake with a bottle of gin and a gun they find in Bert Cousins’ car, it becomes clear just how ignored they are.
During one of the summers, Cal, the oldest son of Bert and Theresa, dies. No clear picture emerges of the minute-by-minute specifics of what occurred that day. Caroline, now the oldest, instructs the other kids on what to say to the parents. The adults think that Cal died alone. But the other five kids were there and bear some responsibility for his death. In their guilt and youth, the stepkids adhere to the agreed-upon story. Even thirty years later, it is unclear it the parents know what transpired that summer afternoon.
Patchett keeps the emotion on an even keel in describing Cal’s death – almost too even. There must have been crying and chaos, grief and guilt. Moving deftly in time between the stepkids and parents, Patchett allows the characters to share their perceptions of what happened that summer day. Their adult recollections have been shaped and altered by the passing of time. The surviving five kids are haunted by guilt about Cal’s death. They struggle with relationships, employment, and addiction. The most capable of the clan ends up in a meditation center in Switzerland, breathing in and out the troubling memories of her childhood. In adulthood, each of the Keating/Cousins children flees to their own psychic corner. None of the grown kids live in the same town as each other or any of the four parents. Yet they are still a collection of citizens belonging to the commonwealth of their blended family.
One of the stepkids, Franny Keating, shares the story of her childhood with her boyfriend who is an author. The resulting book is a catalyst for the blended family to move their PTSD to the forefront. Patchett’s engaging writing lets the reader witness the complicated dynamics of the blended and extended family members. Only a writer with Patchett’s skill could capture the feelings and development of so many characters over such a long period of time.
For the Keating/Cousins kids, the complicated trajectory of their future lives was set in motion the day Bert Cousins kissed Beverly Keating. I won’t spoil the ending, but Patchett finds some redemption in the connection of the children to each other amidst the detritus of the parents’ poor decisions.
