Spoiler
Alert
Reading
this book you're closely following the thoughts and feelings of the main
character and the principal secondary character. The main character a Vietnam vet, in 1974, is
deeply burdened by memories of physically and morally horrendous incidents in the
war. The secondary main character is a
novitiate at a farm that is a Catholic nunnery who is trying to make up her
mind to take her vows. Each character is
seeking equanimity. While this book
focuses on the course their individual experiences, their experience is always
involved in a set of binding relationships, mostly with his large family, to
which the novitiate is a friend. These
friends and relatives have serious problems of their own, which is part of
their closeness. These characters
sometimes feel lonely because of their struggle, but the reader always knows
that they are not alone.
The
critic Ivor Winters once described the poetry of Wallace Stevens as, somewhere
"the thought takes place in the images.”
Chessman brings this technique to narrating the thoughts and feelings of
her characters with remarkable felicity.
Often their conversations are rather tacit, but you know what they think
and what their thoughts mean to them because of her lucid descriptions of the
world as it exists at the moment they're speaking or when, later, their
feelings are evolving. Each scene is a
metaphor for what people are feeling there.
This may seem like the much-disparaged pathetic fallacy (“It was a dark
and stormy night….”) but she executes it with such grace and care that it is
very seldom uncomfortable. Here is an
example:
[After
a disturbing revelation]
“Back
at home, I sat out on my second-floor porch for a while, trying to calm
down. One of my neighbors, an old, old
Polish man, came tottering out of his house with a watering can. I watched him filling the cam, walking it
over to the little patch of garden where he planted what books like tomatoes,
lettuce, basil, zucchini, and a whole bunch of weeds. Maybe the old guy had a landlord like mine
who almost never came around to repair faucets or mow, much less help with the
weeding. The old man wore a canvas hat
to protect his wispy haired head from the sun.”
Related
to this, the vet is a lapsed photographer who resumes his craft during the
course of the story, and it is no coincidence that he is capturing and delivering
images, as images have captured and delivered him for the reader.
Similarities
and contrasts reminded me of some of the work of Robert Stone, another writer I
greatly admire. Stone also frequently
deals intimately with desperate people hostage to inward horrors, and as well with
good nuns. But, while in Stone equanimity
is in short supply and self-destruction usually triumphs, often in scenes of
histrionic violence, in Chessman similar characters evolve toward quiescence.
When
I first read the last chapters of this book I shook my head in disappointment,
thinking to myself, this is too nicey-nicey, this is to easy. The novice filled with exultations and beset
by doubts quietly becomes a nun offstage and seems satisfied and indeed delighted
with her life. The vet returns to his
art, and through his art, through his friendship with the nun, and through his
feeling for his family seems set on a successful, and tranquil life. Do I believe that in the real world such outcomes
are possible? Absolutely, but they are
somehow unsatisfactory in literary terms.
They do not provide what Aristotle called a catharsis of pity and fear. .
Chessman provides soothing like an dissolution of pity and fear. My discomfort raises questions about what
‘realism’ means in fiction. I mean, if
we take, say, Balzac, as realism, it partly means his characters’ motives are
base and their periods of happiness brief.
But, really, people’s motives are sometimes noble, or at least not base,
and lives are sometimes happy. I think Chessman
would not mind my discomfort. She is noting
that resolution lies in ordinary things.
Note
the remarkable range of Chessman’s subject matter. Her first novel, Ohio Angels, which I have
not read, is set in the midwestern city she grew up in. Her second novel, Lidia Cassatt Reading the
Morning Newspaper, which I consider a masterpiece, is set in late 19th-century
Paris among the sort of people your meet in James’ The Ambassadors. Her third novel, Someone
Not Really Her Mother, recounts the story of a family dealing with the
Alzheimer's of their matriarch. The family
is in New England and the Jewish matriarch escaped from the Nazi’s in France
and lived in England, though her memories are fleeting away. Then this novel set among Catholics of Irish
origin in New England. The three I know offer real characters with full
verisimilitude. They each involve certain
preoccupations: family, the drama of non-drama, the importance of things unspoken,
death, and the importance of inner life.
Quite a level of accomplishment in the way of
an author putting yourself in different worlds and people.
No comments:
Post a Comment