I'm hard to please when it comes to literary characters. Specifically, I'm thinking now of romantic heroes. I seem to have gotten on a track of reading novels with romantic plot lines this summer, so several leading men are jostling against one another in my mind's eye. I was reading a book last week about a woman who had a summer affair with a man she met in Europe. The book was insightful about many things, but the main character, a relatively young woman, related the story as if all good things in life were behind her, all because the guy she tooled around with wouldn't leave his loveless marriage for her.
This guy actually asked her, at the end of their affair, if she expected him to ruin his life for her. Ding-ding-ding! Fire! Disaster! Help! Shouldn't that have told her what she needed to know? Would you believe that someone who'd say such a thing was the best thing that ever happened to you? She didn't seem to see it the same way I did, though, and at story's end was in deep mourning over the one who got away. I don't get it.
She did say he was good-looking, easy-going, companionable, and funny, but isn't that beside the point? To me, nothing kills the credibility of a hero like unreliability.
Well, Mary, you might say, what heroes do you find credible? Of course, you probably think I'm going to put Rochester from Jane Eyre at the top of my list because I was once an English major and he's in my dissertation. Actually, though, I have a problem with his lack of truthfulness about the madwoman in the attic. He should have told Jane the truth. That would have been a different book, but after all, a preexisting wife is not a small thing.
Some of Jane Austen's men stand up pretty well, although some are a bit milquetoast, even if you otherwise like them (Edward Ferrars, I'm talking to you). I blame some of this on the mores of the world Austen was depicting. You really don't expect a sturdy character like Aragorn son of Arathorn to wander into the genteel precints of Emma or Pride and Prejudice, even though it's fun to imagine it. I think Emma's Mr. Knightley comes off well, since he always gives Emma good advice and remains steadfast in his concern for her welfare. He's intelligent, kind, and consistent, though of course he can afford to be. He doesn't have someone breathing down his neck about making an unsuitable match.
I've already mentioned Tolkien's Aragorn, a rough-and-ready character who cleans up well, is brave and honorable, and doesn't scare easily. He turns out to be a king, but I don't know that I don't like him better as Strider, the wandering Ranger who doesn't look like anyone special, but is. One of my other favorite heroes is Mary Stewart's Simon Lester, who appears in the novel My Brother Michael. The heroine runs into some truly hard-nosed villains in this story of murky dealings in and around Delphi some years after World War II, and Simon, a Classics teacher investigating his brother's wartime death, is a true rock.
I read this book as a teenager and barely registered Simon, who is not a flashy character, but when I re-read it several years ago, he seemed to leap out of the page with his courage, resourcefulness, and good sense, like a quieter version of MacGyver. I guess you need a few decades before you can appreciate a staunch, trustworthy character over the moody, tortured types that make such an impression on a teenager, but there you have it.
It all goes back to something my grandmother used to say when I was growing up: "Handsome is as handsome does." It used to irritate me, because I thought she was saying you couldn't trust good-looking men, which seemed like a sweeping statement (and not one I wanted to hear). Now that I understand what she meant, I've been known to say it myself.
I'm reading yet another book about a divorcée who is swept off her feet by a good-looking, sophisticated man and was ready to throw the book across the room last night when he showed up in a well-tailored jacket and crisp shirt that set off his tan but seemed too insecure to weather his date's nervousness. I'm deferring judgment for the moment, though, because the heroine is just as annoying, and I haven't gotten to the end of the story yet. I'm trying to be open-minded here and not a snob. Even a wealthy, good-looking man may have redeeming qualities, and I'll be the first to admit it.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
A Path, a Compass, a Map
I guess it isn't surprising how often I end up writing about walking, since I do a lot of walking. It's even sort of a professional interest, because of labyrinths. But I read a book this week that doesn't seem to be about either labyrinths or walking, in the everyday sense of walking. I meant to read Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail last year, when it came out, but I got sidetracked. It's probably just as well, since it means more to me now than it would have a year ago.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and the events of an actual life a thousand times more compelling than the best-crafted novel ever written. Such is Wild, a memoir of a woman's solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in sort of a desperate, intuitive belief that something good would come out of it. As Miss Strayed tells it, she was in a Midwestern outdoor store buying a shovel when she picked up a guidebook for walkers of the PCT. She glanced at the book, then put it back, but something about the cover image of mountains and sky spoke to her mysteriously, and while driving to her home in Minneapolis, she was captured by the idea of hiking the trail herself.
It was a somewhat unexpected decision for someone who had never gone backpacking. But at the age of 26, battered by the loss of her mother to cancer, the breakup of her family, a marriage that had come unglued, an unexpected pregnancy, and a mounting sense of turmoil and emptiness, Strayed undertook the journey in a bid to find answers or least have a chance to think things through. As frequently happens, the reality was very different than what she had imagined.
As a novice hiker, Strayed had little idea of how to properly pack and ended up carrying a load that felt like "a Volkswagen Beetle" on her back. Men she met on the trail had trouble even picking up her pack, much less understanding how she managed to walk with it. Her hiking boots blistered her feet and rubbed them raw, a problem that persisted throughout the trip. She had little money, and despite the carefully chosen protein bars and dehydrated food, was always hungry. She learned to use a compass along the way, crossed rockslides and ice fields, edged around rattlesnakes, encountered bears, mastered the intricacies of a wayward water purifier, slept alone in a tent, worried about mountain lions, and occasionally sang to herself.
She had imagined walking along in soothing solitude, breathing in deeply and letting the beauty of the passing scenery heal the broken places. What actually happened was that pushing through the difficulties -- the skin lacerations, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the fears, the dangers, and the mistakes -- healed her. She discovered that she could stand on her own two feet by continuing to put one in front of the other, and the beauty of the wilderness, experienced at unexpected moments in bursts of clarity, was that much sweeter for being attained so dearly.
There are many ways to interpret the story. In one way, it's a tale about learning to mother (and father) oneself. It's also a hero's journey, one that ends with the book itself, the author's "boon" to the rest of us. While it might not be apparent, the PCT, though linear on a map, is experienced as a maze in which choices must often be made. No two hikers ever experience the trail the same way. As Miss Strayed herself seems to invoke Dante early on when she speaks of feeling lost in the woods of her life, I have to tell you that I thought of The Divine Comedy often while reading this story. Like Dante the pilgrim, Miss Strayed found that, paradoxically, the only way out of the woods was the long way, the via dolorosa, through the Inferno.
The author is candid about her struggles and shortcomings and the naivete with which she began her journey. It's borne in upon the reader that it was sheer determination (and luck) that saw her through. There was every possibility for things to end in disaster. Still, events demonstrate that her intuition to undertake a difficult task to find her measure was a good one. I'm tempted to report that, like Ginger Rogers, Miss Strayed did everything a man could do, except backwards and in heels, but that's not really true, except that it is, sort of. Unlike Dante, she didn't have a Virgil constantly beside her in the tough bits, unless you count the guidebooks she carried. She found mentors along the way, but it was up to her to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide for herself what kind of trip it would be.
I doubt that I would ever hike the PCT on my own, but I recognize the impulse that led the author to do it, and I admire it. There are some things you just have to figure out for yourself. I started the book with tears at the descriptions of Miss Strayed's early sorrows and losses and ended it with tears of a different kind, and that's never a bad way to end a story.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and the events of an actual life a thousand times more compelling than the best-crafted novel ever written. Such is Wild, a memoir of a woman's solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in sort of a desperate, intuitive belief that something good would come out of it. As Miss Strayed tells it, she was in a Midwestern outdoor store buying a shovel when she picked up a guidebook for walkers of the PCT. She glanced at the book, then put it back, but something about the cover image of mountains and sky spoke to her mysteriously, and while driving to her home in Minneapolis, she was captured by the idea of hiking the trail herself.
It was a somewhat unexpected decision for someone who had never gone backpacking. But at the age of 26, battered by the loss of her mother to cancer, the breakup of her family, a marriage that had come unglued, an unexpected pregnancy, and a mounting sense of turmoil and emptiness, Strayed undertook the journey in a bid to find answers or least have a chance to think things through. As frequently happens, the reality was very different than what she had imagined.
As a novice hiker, Strayed had little idea of how to properly pack and ended up carrying a load that felt like "a Volkswagen Beetle" on her back. Men she met on the trail had trouble even picking up her pack, much less understanding how she managed to walk with it. Her hiking boots blistered her feet and rubbed them raw, a problem that persisted throughout the trip. She had little money, and despite the carefully chosen protein bars and dehydrated food, was always hungry. She learned to use a compass along the way, crossed rockslides and ice fields, edged around rattlesnakes, encountered bears, mastered the intricacies of a wayward water purifier, slept alone in a tent, worried about mountain lions, and occasionally sang to herself.
She had imagined walking along in soothing solitude, breathing in deeply and letting the beauty of the passing scenery heal the broken places. What actually happened was that pushing through the difficulties -- the skin lacerations, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the fears, the dangers, and the mistakes -- healed her. She discovered that she could stand on her own two feet by continuing to put one in front of the other, and the beauty of the wilderness, experienced at unexpected moments in bursts of clarity, was that much sweeter for being attained so dearly.
There are many ways to interpret the story. In one way, it's a tale about learning to mother (and father) oneself. It's also a hero's journey, one that ends with the book itself, the author's "boon" to the rest of us. While it might not be apparent, the PCT, though linear on a map, is experienced as a maze in which choices must often be made. No two hikers ever experience the trail the same way. As Miss Strayed herself seems to invoke Dante early on when she speaks of feeling lost in the woods of her life, I have to tell you that I thought of The Divine Comedy often while reading this story. Like Dante the pilgrim, Miss Strayed found that, paradoxically, the only way out of the woods was the long way, the via dolorosa, through the Inferno.
The author is candid about her struggles and shortcomings and the naivete with which she began her journey. It's borne in upon the reader that it was sheer determination (and luck) that saw her through. There was every possibility for things to end in disaster. Still, events demonstrate that her intuition to undertake a difficult task to find her measure was a good one. I'm tempted to report that, like Ginger Rogers, Miss Strayed did everything a man could do, except backwards and in heels, but that's not really true, except that it is, sort of. Unlike Dante, she didn't have a Virgil constantly beside her in the tough bits, unless you count the guidebooks she carried. She found mentors along the way, but it was up to her to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide for herself what kind of trip it would be.
I doubt that I would ever hike the PCT on my own, but I recognize the impulse that led the author to do it, and I admire it. There are some things you just have to figure out for yourself. I started the book with tears at the descriptions of Miss Strayed's early sorrows and losses and ended it with tears of a different kind, and that's never a bad way to end a story.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Portrait of a Summer Night
Walking tonight in the Arboretum, I was thinking about summers past. It was a lovely June evening, and the hilltop views of the big orange sun going down were almost panoramic: I felt I was on top of a mountain and could see for miles. There was a grandeur about the sunset, with dramatic rays of sunlight streaming out from behind gorgeous clouds in a clean blue sky. But I was thinking back to my childhood, when the archetypal summer night was contained within the modest yard of my grandparents' frame house in a small Kentucky town.
I wonder if most people don't have a similar image that conjures up everything a summer night consists of. For me, it goes like this: a backyard of green grass, tilted slightly uphill, big enough for croquet wickets near the top and a gathering of lawn chairs under a big maple at the bottom. Under the tree was where the grownups sat. The kids didn't sit anywhere for long, but there were several options: a picnic table, a swing-set, and a glider on the back porch. If you sat on the glider, you'd share it with my grandfather, who favored it, and who always had his tobacco can and cane nearby.
The house itself smelled like pipe tobacco, the soap my grandmother used in her bathroom, biscuits, and fried chicken. It had a smell all its own, somehow old-fashioned and Southern, and it will never be duplicated. I remember also the damp, musty smell of the basement with its gravel floor and rough-hewn posts, usually visited when Mason jars were needed for fireflies. It was full of Daddy-long-legs, was lit by a bare bulb, and was somewhat of a novelty in my eyes. In Florida, where I lived with my parents and siblings, I hadn't seen many houses with basements.
There was always something to eat at the house, since family gatherings inevitably involved food: my grandmother's fried chicken, salty and tender, especially the little piece with the wishbone that I liked; her rib-sticking biscuits (I later imagined Tolkien's lembas as being a bit like those savory morsels of shortening, flour, and salt); potato salad; corn on the cob, baked beans with onions, ambrosia salad, green beans with ham; cucumbers in vinegar; cornbread (salty, not sweet); sliced cantaloupe; watermelon; and brownies. Sometimes, we'd make ice cream, and the kids would all take turns with the crank. That ice cream was both sweet and salty, due to the rock salt we used.
There were only four rooms in the small square house besides the bathroom. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, was the heart of the enterprise, the repository of all the food, and the place where as many as ten people were sometimes crowded around the table if it was raining. (Typically, everybody picked a spot outside, picnic-style, paper plates full and balanced precariously.) There were African violets in the kitchen window, countertops full of food-containing Tupperware, and (always) a plate of biscuits on top of the stove.
There were also two bedrooms and a living room. When we visited our grandparents from Florida, my brother and sister and I would sleep on fold-out cots in the living room. Otherwise, that room was mainly known as the way out to the front porch.
I remember the front porch as being the domain of kids; there was another glider there, the perfect spot for drinking sweet iced tea and rocking slowly. There was a maple tree in the front yard that we liked to climb, and there would sometimes be as many as six or seven cousins perched on various branches. When we weren't doing that, we'd watch people from the neighborhood, either on foot or in cars, go up and down the street. It wasn't a busy street, and there was just enough activity to be interesting. Three doors down was a tiny plaza with a laundromat, where my mother would do our vacation laundry and we'd buy Ale-8-Ones (a local soft drink with a gingery bite) out of the machine.
What did we do on those long summer nights? Nothing special, but that's what was so great about them. To me, the choices seemed infinite: first of all, you would eat. Afterwards, you could sit on the glider, listening to it squeak as you rocked back and forth, climb the tree, play croquet, goof around on the swing-set, make ice cream, listen to the grownups talk, catch fireflies, watch Amos (our Grandpa's big collie) chase his tail, view home movies on a screen in the back yard, play with sparklers (if it was near the Fourth of July), have another biscuit, and look forward to the next day's outing to Natural Bridge or Boonesborough State Park.
I realize now that things were not as perfect as they seemed, but I'm glad I didn't know, because I have those warm, carefree nights, somehow both aimless and full, to go back to in my mind. They're still my yardstick for what a summer night is supposed to be. I remember the feeling of being surrounded by people, of belonging, and of never being bored. I remember the green-yellow light of the fireflies, blinking on and off in the yard, and how they became a living nightlight, small Mason jar beacons to drift off to sleep by in the living room. The next morning we'd let them go, and they'd all disappear in the bright light of day, a bit dazed by their experience, if you ask me. It didn't matter: they'd be back, all out again in force when twilight fell, at the end of another full and infinitely long summer day.
I wonder if most people don't have a similar image that conjures up everything a summer night consists of. For me, it goes like this: a backyard of green grass, tilted slightly uphill, big enough for croquet wickets near the top and a gathering of lawn chairs under a big maple at the bottom. Under the tree was where the grownups sat. The kids didn't sit anywhere for long, but there were several options: a picnic table, a swing-set, and a glider on the back porch. If you sat on the glider, you'd share it with my grandfather, who favored it, and who always had his tobacco can and cane nearby.
The house itself smelled like pipe tobacco, the soap my grandmother used in her bathroom, biscuits, and fried chicken. It had a smell all its own, somehow old-fashioned and Southern, and it will never be duplicated. I remember also the damp, musty smell of the basement with its gravel floor and rough-hewn posts, usually visited when Mason jars were needed for fireflies. It was full of Daddy-long-legs, was lit by a bare bulb, and was somewhat of a novelty in my eyes. In Florida, where I lived with my parents and siblings, I hadn't seen many houses with basements.
There was always something to eat at the house, since family gatherings inevitably involved food: my grandmother's fried chicken, salty and tender, especially the little piece with the wishbone that I liked; her rib-sticking biscuits (I later imagined Tolkien's lembas as being a bit like those savory morsels of shortening, flour, and salt); potato salad; corn on the cob, baked beans with onions, ambrosia salad, green beans with ham; cucumbers in vinegar; cornbread (salty, not sweet); sliced cantaloupe; watermelon; and brownies. Sometimes, we'd make ice cream, and the kids would all take turns with the crank. That ice cream was both sweet and salty, due to the rock salt we used.
There were only four rooms in the small square house besides the bathroom. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, was the heart of the enterprise, the repository of all the food, and the place where as many as ten people were sometimes crowded around the table if it was raining. (Typically, everybody picked a spot outside, picnic-style, paper plates full and balanced precariously.) There were African violets in the kitchen window, countertops full of food-containing Tupperware, and (always) a plate of biscuits on top of the stove.
There were also two bedrooms and a living room. When we visited our grandparents from Florida, my brother and sister and I would sleep on fold-out cots in the living room. Otherwise, that room was mainly known as the way out to the front porch.
I remember the front porch as being the domain of kids; there was another glider there, the perfect spot for drinking sweet iced tea and rocking slowly. There was a maple tree in the front yard that we liked to climb, and there would sometimes be as many as six or seven cousins perched on various branches. When we weren't doing that, we'd watch people from the neighborhood, either on foot or in cars, go up and down the street. It wasn't a busy street, and there was just enough activity to be interesting. Three doors down was a tiny plaza with a laundromat, where my mother would do our vacation laundry and we'd buy Ale-8-Ones (a local soft drink with a gingery bite) out of the machine.
What did we do on those long summer nights? Nothing special, but that's what was so great about them. To me, the choices seemed infinite: first of all, you would eat. Afterwards, you could sit on the glider, listening to it squeak as you rocked back and forth, climb the tree, play croquet, goof around on the swing-set, make ice cream, listen to the grownups talk, catch fireflies, watch Amos (our Grandpa's big collie) chase his tail, view home movies on a screen in the back yard, play with sparklers (if it was near the Fourth of July), have another biscuit, and look forward to the next day's outing to Natural Bridge or Boonesborough State Park.
I realize now that things were not as perfect as they seemed, but I'm glad I didn't know, because I have those warm, carefree nights, somehow both aimless and full, to go back to in my mind. They're still my yardstick for what a summer night is supposed to be. I remember the feeling of being surrounded by people, of belonging, and of never being bored. I remember the green-yellow light of the fireflies, blinking on and off in the yard, and how they became a living nightlight, small Mason jar beacons to drift off to sleep by in the living room. The next morning we'd let them go, and they'd all disappear in the bright light of day, a bit dazed by their experience, if you ask me. It didn't matter: they'd be back, all out again in force when twilight fell, at the end of another full and infinitely long summer day.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Orpheus Told Mnemosyne: Stories of Memory and Loss
I picked out two novels from the new book shelf at the library this past week with similar themes. The first one, The Last Summer (by Judith Kinghorn), is an English romance set before, during, and after the first World War. This territory has been notably trod by Downton Abbey, Atonement, and other works of fiction and offers ripe ground for meditation on love, endurance, privation, courage, the horrors of war, and the loss of innocence, among other subjects.
The second book, The Obituary Writer (by Ann Hood), tells two stories, one of a love affair interrupted by the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the other of a suburban housewife and mother who experiences an unexpected awakening after the disappearance of a neighborhood boy in 1961. In this book, the two stories are linked not only by themes of memory and loss but also by a character who appears in both.
Having recently seen the film The Great Gatsby (another period drama dealing with some of the same concerns), I think I was curious to see how other writers might treat the vast theme of love and disaster. With Gatsby's tragedy fresh in my mind, I'm pretty sure I was hoping for a happier ending. Did I get one? Well, yes and no.
The Last Summer tells a coming of age story as a loss of paradise, and this sense of looking back and longing for what once was permeates the novel. Clarissa has grown up in an idyllic country home with very little to trouble her until, on the eve of World War I, she falls in love with the housekeeper's son. The novel unfolds over a period of some years as Clarissa and Tom pledge their devotion, are separated by war and the disapproval of Clarissa's mother, come back together for brief intervals, and drift apart.
In tandem with the loss of her young man is the loss of Clarissa's home, which is sold due to the family's change of fortunes during the war. Deyning is pictured as an Edenic place of gardens, roses, and expansive lawns, and although, as a reverse snob, I shouldn't have had much sympathy for Clarissa's fall from grace (she's still well off), the image of that paradise lost resonated so mythically that I felt it, too. It was less clear to me why it took Clarissa and Tom so long to get back together when they were obviously so unhappy apart, but that's the way the story developed.
The novel dwells a great deal on privations that can't be undone, but after many troubles, the two lovers reunite, and even Deyning is not as lost as it appeared to be. The story seems linear until the end, when the author circles back to the world that was lost, and we're told that "Moments can and do come back to us." I was more struck by that line than any other in the book, as it implied a sort of mythic eternal return that, while a bit out of line with the plot up to that point, was a relief after all the hardship preceding it.
The Obituary Writer takes a different approach to loss. Vivien Lowe, unable to discover the fate of her lover after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, has left San Francisco but never accepted her loss. She's a sort of female Orpheus, always looking back, and hope kept alive acts for her as a kind of barrier to living in the present (although I was unable to see that she was missing anything, quite frankly). When she does move on, it's not in a way that's satisfying for her, and decades later she's a cautionary tale for her daughter-in-law, who is paralyzed in a stifling marriage.
Vivien's suffering is understandable because the fate of her lover was never clear. To me, it seems reasonable that she would continue to look for him and try to learn his fate. Her thirteen years of searching are presented as if they are a lifetime wasted. And yet her friend Lotte, who follows a sensible path of marriage and motherhood and constantly urges Vivien to move on, sees her own life fall apart in an instant. In such an unpredictable world, who's to say which path is better?
So, one novel has a happy ending that seems a little contrived, and another has a somber message about loss. In The Obituary Writer, the only hope for happiness lies with Claire, the daughter-in-law, whose future at the end is still unknown. But what about Vivien? Should she, when young, have tried to swallow her grief and gone back to San Francisco to pick up her life? Would finding out the truth sooner have mattered? That was the only solution I could see. Should Clarissa and Tom, in The Last Summer, have stopped dithering a little sooner? Maybe so, though it still wouldn't have made up for the loss of their friends and loved ones.
I keep going back to Jay Gatsby, whose intransigence started this whole train of thought, I now realize. I keep envisioning a happier ending for him in my version of "dreaming the myth onwards." (Oddly enough, I find that this quote comes from Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, which I spent several hours reading this very afternoon.)
So to Gatsby I say, with all the conviction I can muster, forget about that green light. It's a siren, a phantasm, that will lure you to the rocks. You've been to college (even if it was only one semester, it was still Oxford), so you should know the light is only a metaphor for Daisy, a lovely girl but an altogether flighty one. Just because she's a famous literary character doesn't mean she has street cred.
Take your fortune and reinvest in something safer. Move away from godforsaken West Egg and all those snobs and their old money. Why not try . . . California? Go west, young man. This could work. Who needs a castle, anyway?
The second book, The Obituary Writer (by Ann Hood), tells two stories, one of a love affair interrupted by the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the other of a suburban housewife and mother who experiences an unexpected awakening after the disappearance of a neighborhood boy in 1961. In this book, the two stories are linked not only by themes of memory and loss but also by a character who appears in both.
Having recently seen the film The Great Gatsby (another period drama dealing with some of the same concerns), I think I was curious to see how other writers might treat the vast theme of love and disaster. With Gatsby's tragedy fresh in my mind, I'm pretty sure I was hoping for a happier ending. Did I get one? Well, yes and no.
The Last Summer tells a coming of age story as a loss of paradise, and this sense of looking back and longing for what once was permeates the novel. Clarissa has grown up in an idyllic country home with very little to trouble her until, on the eve of World War I, she falls in love with the housekeeper's son. The novel unfolds over a period of some years as Clarissa and Tom pledge their devotion, are separated by war and the disapproval of Clarissa's mother, come back together for brief intervals, and drift apart.
In tandem with the loss of her young man is the loss of Clarissa's home, which is sold due to the family's change of fortunes during the war. Deyning is pictured as an Edenic place of gardens, roses, and expansive lawns, and although, as a reverse snob, I shouldn't have had much sympathy for Clarissa's fall from grace (she's still well off), the image of that paradise lost resonated so mythically that I felt it, too. It was less clear to me why it took Clarissa and Tom so long to get back together when they were obviously so unhappy apart, but that's the way the story developed.
The novel dwells a great deal on privations that can't be undone, but after many troubles, the two lovers reunite, and even Deyning is not as lost as it appeared to be. The story seems linear until the end, when the author circles back to the world that was lost, and we're told that "Moments can and do come back to us." I was more struck by that line than any other in the book, as it implied a sort of mythic eternal return that, while a bit out of line with the plot up to that point, was a relief after all the hardship preceding it.
The Obituary Writer takes a different approach to loss. Vivien Lowe, unable to discover the fate of her lover after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, has left San Francisco but never accepted her loss. She's a sort of female Orpheus, always looking back, and hope kept alive acts for her as a kind of barrier to living in the present (although I was unable to see that she was missing anything, quite frankly). When she does move on, it's not in a way that's satisfying for her, and decades later she's a cautionary tale for her daughter-in-law, who is paralyzed in a stifling marriage.
Vivien's suffering is understandable because the fate of her lover was never clear. To me, it seems reasonable that she would continue to look for him and try to learn his fate. Her thirteen years of searching are presented as if they are a lifetime wasted. And yet her friend Lotte, who follows a sensible path of marriage and motherhood and constantly urges Vivien to move on, sees her own life fall apart in an instant. In such an unpredictable world, who's to say which path is better?
So, one novel has a happy ending that seems a little contrived, and another has a somber message about loss. In The Obituary Writer, the only hope for happiness lies with Claire, the daughter-in-law, whose future at the end is still unknown. But what about Vivien? Should she, when young, have tried to swallow her grief and gone back to San Francisco to pick up her life? Would finding out the truth sooner have mattered? That was the only solution I could see. Should Clarissa and Tom, in The Last Summer, have stopped dithering a little sooner? Maybe so, though it still wouldn't have made up for the loss of their friends and loved ones.
I keep going back to Jay Gatsby, whose intransigence started this whole train of thought, I now realize. I keep envisioning a happier ending for him in my version of "dreaming the myth onwards." (Oddly enough, I find that this quote comes from Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, which I spent several hours reading this very afternoon.)
So to Gatsby I say, with all the conviction I can muster, forget about that green light. It's a siren, a phantasm, that will lure you to the rocks. You've been to college (even if it was only one semester, it was still Oxford), so you should know the light is only a metaphor for Daisy, a lovely girl but an altogether flighty one. Just because she's a famous literary character doesn't mean she has street cred.
Take your fortune and reinvest in something safer. Move away from godforsaken West Egg and all those snobs and their old money. Why not try . . . California? Go west, young man. This could work. Who needs a castle, anyway?
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