Zeus, Hera, and Author's Intent

This week I read Mary Higgins Clark's recent book, As Time Goes By, which features a murder, a woman's search for her birth parents, illegal trafficking in prescription drugs, romance, sleuthing, and family drama. Ms. Clark's reputation as a writer of popular fiction is well established, and I'm sure some of my readers are more familiar with her than I am, but I was interested in certain domestic themes that appeared in her book. It may sound grandiose to suggest that they are mythic, but indeed, they are; works of popular fiction are often the place in which mythic themes first appear.

It's tricky to try to infer an author's intent. Even if they tell you their purpose, there may be ideas in their work that appear as if of their own volition: that's the way the unconscious works. By the time you untangle your interpretations (which may be brilliant but almost inevitably involve some degree of projection) from the author's own intents and purposes (as far as they can be known) you are left with an explication that may bear little resemblance to what the author was thinking as he/she sat down to write. I'm inferring that Ms. Clark intended Delaney Wright to be her main character since the prologue begins with the story of her birth. However, this is somewhat belied by the fact that there are several intertwining stories in the book, some of which offer more drama than that of Delaney's search for her parents.

This at least is my perception. Ms. Clark certainly has a Demeter and Persephone theme going in which Delaney plays the Kore role, although she is a particularly well-adjusted Persephone. In her case, a successful life is shadowed by her need to know her origins but is not consumed by it, and this may be the reason I didn't sense as much dramatic tension in her part of the story. The real center of the action, it seemed to me, was the murder plot in which a wealthy woman is accused of murdering her husband, a victim of Alzheimer's disease, in order to marry her old flame. Betsy Grant is loved and respected by a wide group of friends, but the circumstances of her husband's death make it very difficult for someone who doesn't know her to see her as anything but guilty. Most people believe she snapped under the pressure of her husband's illness, a perception largely influenced by the fact that the only other person with a clear motive has an alibi.

It wasn't until the various subplots began to fall together into one storyline that the identity of the guilty party became obvious, and that was late in the novel. To try to ascribe mythic personalities to the characters involved in the murder plot would be to reveal too much to those who haven't read the story, but it's true to say that the motivation behind the crime is different than it appears to be. I noted in passing the motif of "three," common in folk tales and fairy tales, in this case embodied in the character of Dr. Grant, the murdered man, and his two partners, all three of them orthopedic surgeons. The theme of healing is turned on its head by the murder; ironically, Dr. Grant is killed by a pestle, a symbol of medicine given to him as an award for his professional accomplishments. There's even a deus ex machina of sorts in a talkative burglar named Tony Sharkey.

What I really think this story is about (and Ms. Clark might contradict me) is marriage. I say that because most of the characters appear most often in conjunction with their spouses (or former spouses), in a series of more or less successfully--sometimes much less successfully--matched pairs. The story jumps from one to the other of these private dramas in succession. Delaney's not being married is one thing that sets her apart from all of this domesticity.

Actually, I was reminded of nothing less than Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage. Bergman's theme was the public face of a seemingly successful couple and how greatly that can differ from married life as experienced by the couple themselves, especially as the relationship unfolds over time. It struck me as curious that the purported heroine of As Time Goes By so often takes a back seat to these other characters. She is a Persephone surrounded by Zeus and Hera types, a circumstance that certainly underscores her "orphan" state. Maybe that's the point, but for me the pathos of her story paled somewhat in comparison to the theatrics of the married couples, which I found more entertaining.

I doubt if it was Ms. Clark's express purpose to throw the limelight onto a secondary character, but I was most interested in the relationship between Dr. Grant's former partner, Scott Clifton, and his spouse, Lisa, for whom the phrase "trophy wife" seems appropriate. Lisa has given up her successful pharmaceutical sales career to marry Dr. Clifton and is in the process of realizing how empty the relationship is when we first meet her. She first tries to save the marriage, but when she realizes it has all gone south and is not coming back, she calls up the movers and arranges to get her old job back. Nothing wrong with a can-do spirit; she is one of the few characters who refuse to be constrained by circumstance.

Undoubtedly, Ms. Clark was more interested in telling an entertaining tale than in anything else, but I found the way in which all of these married couples kept stealing Delaney's thunder to be so pointed that I had to wonder if the author was being at least slightly satirical. I can't say for sure. I went so far as to look at the author's picture on the back of the book, and she does strike me as a person who is fully in control of her material, so who knows, maybe she was pulling our leg a little bit. I also noted with approval how well-groomed, poised, and successful she appears, all good characteristics in any writer, and qualities to which we may all aspire.