Recent Reviews
Away From Her by Alice Munro
Alice Munro, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 2013 for her book Dear Life, is among the greatest of short story writers. In her scores of stories, she offers microscopic observations that reveal larger truths about her characters. While her writing is precise and observant, the motivations of her characters are imprecise and opaque. I recently reread one of my favorite Munro stories, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which was made into a movie in 2007 titled Away From Her.
This heartbreaking story captures the slow painful effects of dementia on a long and complicated marriage. Fiona and Grant have been married for almost 50 years and Fiona, now at 70, is losing her memory. Munro’s narrator lays out the facts of Fiona’s decline without sentiment, “Over a year ago Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house.” After Fiona wonders off at the supermarket, she says to Grant, “You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you? You’re going to have to put me in that place. Shallowlake?” And Grant says, “Meadowlake. We’re not at that stage yet.”
But a paragraph later, on a cold January afternoon, Grant moves Fiona into Meadowlake. The transition is painful, as the rules prohibit Grant from visiting for a month to ease Fiona’s adjustment. Grant suffers. When he starts visiting Fiona, who acts as if she doesn’t know who he is or why he keeps coming to see her, Grant is perplexed. He asks the nurse if Fiona is “putting on an act.” During that month of acclimation, Fiona has become the constant companion to a man named Aubrey who is living at Meadowlake temporarily. The reader wonders if Fiona is retaliating for Grant’s past infidelities, or if Fiona is protecting Grant from her eventual demise.
When Aubrey returns to his home, Fiona is devastated. So Grant visits Aubrey’s wife, Marion, to ask her to let Aubrey visit Meadowlake for the sake of Fiona who has descended into depression. Grant’s primary motivation seems noble. He wants to ease his wife’s pain. That Grant loves Fiona is never in doubt. Grant has exhibited a version of loyalty in their long marriage, but he has not been loyal. So is he also atoning for his guilt? Is he proposing a relationship with Marion in exchange for Aubrey’s return to Meadowlake? When Marion calls Grant to ask him to attend a dance, is he acting on his pattern of infidelity or is he sacrificing himself for his wife? Munro describes their encounter but divulges nothing. Grant probably doesn’t entirely understand his motivations. And - spoiler alert - the reader simply learns that Grant has arranged for Aubrey to visit Fiona.
Munro’s captures the complexity of human emotion with her linguistic agility. Her writing is precise as a pinprick. She never becomes maudlin, nor does she pass judgment on her characters, even though this reader did!
Munro’s genius is that she writes engrossing stories and understands multiple motivations. With plenty of puzzle pieces provided, her readers can put the puzzle together in whatever way they choose. Each conclusion is plausible because there are so many complicated emotions percolating inside her characters. As Fiona says to Grant on the last page, “You could have driven away. Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me, Forsooken me. Forsaken.” Is she speaking of Grant's past betrayals or her present living situation at Meadowlake? Probably both.
This is a tragic story about the effects of dementia on a marriage characterized by steadfast love and constant betrayal. Maybe Munro is saying love, in all its possible permutations, is still love. And due to her exquisite restraint, she leaves her readers reaching for their own conclusions.
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.
