Archive for the ‘Bildungsroman’ Category

Mary Lawson (2002) – Crow Lake

Monday, March 1st, 2010

 

Crow Lake reminds me of another gentle but powerful book, James Agee’s semi-autobiographical 1956 novel A Death in the Family.  Agee was six when his father was killed in an automobile accident.  Kate Morrison, the narrator of Crow Lake, is seven when both of her parents die in the same way.

 

Death in principle I had known about; death in practice—no.  I hadn’t known that could happen.  (p.30)

 

But whereas the story of A Death in the Family deals with the struggle of its child narrator to understand the full implications of his father’s death, the narrator of Crow Lake tells her story from a vantage point some twenty years after the traumatic event.

 

Kate’s narration as Lawson has written it is a complex interweaving of events in her present and events in her past, especially the first year following her parents’ death.  Lawson is true to the reality that our adult recollections of childhood are—can only be—the memories of a child under the scrutiny of the adult that child has become.  For better or for worse, we cannot retrieve anything more than we saw and felt at the time.  And so, we come to take for granted that the way we experienced the events of our past and the interpretations we placed on them are no more and no less than the facts of our personal life—who we are and who those closest to us are as well.  And therein hangs the tale of Crow Lake.

 

At first, it is not clear what the story of Crow Lake will be.  Following an idyllic prologue, chapter one begins on an ominous note:

 

When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue….  We didn’t know that the Pye nightmare was destined to become entangled with the Morrison dream.  Nobody could have predicted that. (p.7)

 

Dark clouds on the horizon.  We read on to a description of dinner at the Morrisons’.  We learn that the Morrisons are not generally an expressive lot.  As Kate’s twenty-seven year old self recalls, the family recognized a number of supplemental Commandments to the usual Ten.  For example, “the Eleventh Commandment, carved on its very own tablet of stone and presented specifically to those of Presbyterian persuasion: Thou Shalt Not Emote.” (p.9)  Later, we learn that “the Twelfth is Thou Shalt Not Admit To Being Upset, and when it becomes evident to the world that you are upset, Thou Shalt On No Account Explain Why.” (p.36)  We are introduced to older brothers Luke and Matt, and younger sister Bo, charmingly described as having “a fine, fair fluff of hair that stood straight out from her head as if she’d been struck by lightning.”

 

I can’t easily discuss the book further without giving away plot points that are better discovered on reading.  Stop here if you want to experience the book as written, but please come back later. 

 

Okay, you were warned.  Disaster strikes the next day.  In the penultimate paragraph of chapter one, Matt tells Kate that her parents have been killed.  Kate’s reaction is finely drawn.

 

I remember being terrified that he would cry….  As if that would be the worst thing; much worse than this incomprehensible thing he was telling me.  As if for Matt to cry was the one unthinkable thing. (p.19)

 

Yes, this is how a seven-year old might react.

 

But the death of Kate’s parents doesn’t involve the Pyes at all, so the reason for Kate’s cryptic reference to the “Pye nightmare” remains unexplained.  Indeed, it remains unexplained for another two hundred pages or so, and even then it is not until the last fifteen pages of the book that we understand what Kate has been obsessing over for two hundred seventy plus pages.  It is to Mary Lawson’s credit that she manages to keep up the tension without driving the reader completely crazy.  Not only that, the denouement, is reasonably satisfying and (not withstanding that the French dénouement means untying) ties together just about everything that has gone before.

 

As I say, the tension is not unremitting.  In fact I made a note to myself on page 27 that says I just realized that I had at this point forgotten to be worrying about the Pyes.  But time and again there is a reminder that something terrible is going to happen (from the reader’s standpoint) that has already happened (from the narrator’s standpoint).

 

 

Ordinarily, to tell a story that happened in the past, you start with once upon a time and then proceed with A said this and B did that, then A did this and B did that and said that, and so on until you come to the end and then stop.  The story of Crow Lake is told in a much more complex way.  Events in the story are presented out of temporal order so as to illuminate extra-temporal themes, thoughts, and feelings.  A case in point.  In chapter three, Kate talks about her boyfriend Daniel (pp.35-37).  She starts from a point in time at which she has told Daniel about her family and then recalls.

 

It was a long time before I told Daniel much about my family.

 

In the next sentence, she goes back to the beginning of that “long time”.

 

When we first started going out we exchanged bits of personal information as you do, but it was all very general.

 

And then back to even before that—before they started going out.

 

I knew quite a bit about Daniel’s background because a lot of his background was in the foreground, so to speak, right there at the university.

 

Now, she pops into the present.

 

Daniel is Professor Crane of the zoology department.  His father is Professor Crane….  His mother is Professor Crane….  It’s a little Crane dynasty.

 

Oops, that wasn’t the real present.  It was some kind of generic present, a present-tense recitation of facts learned in the past—facts learned in the past and then later modified in the past as seen from still later in the past:

 

Or, as I learned later, it’s a small subsection of a large Crane dynasty.

 

Now, she takes us back much further into the past.   

 

Daniel’s forebears roamed the cultural capitals of Europe before emigrating to Canada.

 

Generic present:

 

Daniel is a curious man….

 

Back to the beginning of the relationship:

 

One evening when we’d been going out for a couple of weeks he said, “So tell me the story of your life, Kate Morrison.”

 

Hearkening forward from that point:

 

I didn’t know at the time, but that little request from Daniel was the beginning of what was going to be a problem between us.

 

Generic present, again:

 

            I am not from a background where people talk about problems…

 

Hearkening further forward:

 

So I did not, in the months to come, say to Daniel that sometimes he made me feel that he would like to … slide me, like some poor hapless microbe, under his microscope, where he could study my very soul.

 

And back to the past, but still with awareness of things yet to come:

 

            All that was in the future, however… 

 

I couldn’t figure out at the time why I felt such a resistance to the idea…. 

 

And all the way forward to Kate’s actual present.

 

But I now think that most of my reluctance was due to the fact that story of my lie is all bound up with the story of Matt’s life….

 

All this time-traveling in three pages!  It’s not that when an author chooses to narrate in the past tense he or she must always describe events in strict temporal order from earliest to latest.  But it is unusual for the temporal discontinuities to come so rapidly one upon another; and it is a considerable accomplishment for Lawson to have deployed this rhetorical strategy so effectively.

 

 

The TV Guide summary of Crow Lake would be something like: From age seven, Kate has believed her brother Matt’s life story is a tragedy.  Nineteen years later she realizes she was wrong.  The key word is “tragedy”.  In the last chapter, Matt’s wife Marie, hardly a person given to confrontation, nonetheless summons tremendous personal strength to confront Kate on precisely this issue:

 

 “[Y]our disappointment, your thinking his whole life is a failure…. that’s been the hardest thing [for him]….  You think what happened is the great tragedy of [Matt’s] life.  You can hardly look at him, you feel so sorry for him and so angry with him still.”

 

Marie hits the nail on the head.  Kate is stunned.  Kate’s nephew Simon appears and the conversation veers back to uncontroversial matters.  A few minutes later, Daniel notices that Kate is in a state and asks her what’s wrong.  Kate summarizes Marie’s accusation, protesting that it’s not true that she thinks Matt’s whole life is a failure, “but it is true that what happened to him is a tragedy.”  Why does Kate insist on the word tragedy in connection with what happened to Matt?  It all happened when Kate was seven.  “Tragedy” is not a word ordinarily in the vocabulary of a seven-year old girl.  On rereading, I found the answer.  It’s Miss Carrington’s word.

 

When Aunt Annie comes after the funeral of the parents Morrison, Miss Carrington tries to make clear that Matt has the intellectual ability to obtain a scholarship to go to university.  Aunt Annie, while sympathetic, replies that it’s just not possible.  Money is too scarce.  Miss Carrington, overheard by a curious and anxious Kate, tells Aunt Annie hyperbolically, “You must understand—it would be a tragedy if Matt did not go to university.  Genuinely it would be a tragedy.”  (p. 58)  Aunt Annie elaborates on the dire straits of the Morrison children.

 

Miss Carrington said bleakly, “A tragedy then….”

 

When Matt returns later, Kate tells him what Miss Carrington had to say:

 

She said you were the cleverest child she’d ever taught.  She said it would be a … tradegy … a tragedy … if you didn’t go to university.” (p. 63)

 

So nearly two decades later, Kate is still parroting Miss Carrington’s word.  The imperfectly understood traumas of childhood give rise to life decisions; and those decisions will rule our lives imperfectly for as long as we let them.  We can’t see them.  We need others to draw our attention to them and to insist that we reconsider them from our adult standpoint.  Kate is lucky that Marie cares enough about Matt to raise the issue, and Kate is lucky that her Daniel cares enough to insist on an alternate, adult, formulation.

 

“Well, I agree with you about one thing, Kate.  I do think there’s a tragedy here.  But I don’t think it’s what you think it is….  [I]t’s just a shame.  It’s not a tragedy.  It makes no difference to who Matt is….  [M]y guess is that he came to terms with it a long time ago.  The problem is, you didn’t.  And as a consequence, he’s lost what he had with you.  That’s the real tragedy.” (p. 282)

 

To her credit, Kate responds to the challenge to her idée fixe.  For the first time since she was seven, she looks back at her assumptions about Matt with new eyes—as an adult—realizing that “The weight of … years … of things unsaid, unresolved, had made strangers of us.”  (p. 286)   Suddenly the future looks brighter.

 

Mary Lawson has accurately observed and portrayed the process by which one may, with only the best intentions, become estranged from reality, suffer thereby, and eventually find reality again.  With the exception of Calvin Pye (whom I guess we didn’t really meet face to face in the story), I was pleased to meet her characters and spend time with them.  May we all find ourselves in such a supportive community.

Anne Tyler (2010) – Noah’s Compass

Friday, February 5th, 2010

As I recall, Anne Tyler’s 2002 The Accidental Tourist is the story of what happens when change forces itself on a man who hates change in his life, a writer of travel books who advises staying in your hotel and pretending you are still back home.  Her 2009 Noah’s Compass, too, explores what happens when involvement happens to an underinvolved man.  Here, Tyler’s protagonist, Liam, is a man whose world has been progressively shrinking.  His resume makes more sense read in reverse.  He has just been fired, at the age of 61, from a job, teaching fifth graders, which was preceded by a job teaching history to high school students, in turn preceded by graduate study in philosophy.  He downsizes his life, discarding most of his possessions; and, as the book opens, moving from a large apartment into a small one-bedroom apartment.

 

Liam’s plan for the future is apparently to do nothing in particular, and do it very well—rather like the House of Peers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe.”  The extent of his ambition, if such it may be called, is to toy with the idea of becoming a “zayda”, a teacher’s aide in a nearby pre-school.  But the world intervenes, and Liam, struck on the head under circumstances he cannot recall and determined to recover the memories he lost as a result, sets himself on a rather odd path involving a woman more than twenty years his junior, whose job is to be the “rememberer” for a well-to-do businessman with incipient Alzheimer’s.

 

Although the plot takes satisfyingly surprising twists and turns, this is a gentle, domestic novel that slowly expands to bring in three generations of Liam’s families—in a world in which marriages end or dissolve with such inevitability, how else can one designate the collection of individuals to whom one is or has been related?  His sister, his ex-wife, his children with her, his grandchild.  The grown child of his deceased first wife.  His father and the woman he left Liam’s mother for.  But it doesn’t feel overwhelming or confusing: they all have distinctive qualities that make it possible to keep them separate in the reader’s mind.

 

In the end, Liam does not exactly kick over the traces and run away into a new life, but he does become more engaged.  Whether the choices Liam makes on the way are optimal is not obvious.  Some seem overly rash; others seem to close off possibilities unnecessarily; others are, well, just decisions we have to make and hope we get them right.  There is food for thought here.  At first I was disappointed, but on reflection I see the denouement as plausible for Liam—true to his nature and life-affirming in its way.

 

Noah’s Compass is a Bildungsroman about the personal growth of a 61 year old man—nice that the author thinks it is possible.  It reminds me of Robert Hellenga’s 2006 Philosophy Made Simple—about the man who retires to Texas and acquires an elephant named Norma Jean—but a little less over the top.  It is not a novel filled with rhetorical pyrotechnics like Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; but I did find a nice turn of a phrase here and there.  In fact, I noticed the same three or four that reviewers called out.  But the style is eminently readable and every time I had to set the book aside I looked forward to returning to the story.

 

It’s particularly difficult to write about Noah’s Compass without spoiling the surprises Tyler creates for her characters and the reader.  So be warned.  There are spoilers in what follows. 

 

First surprise: the first night Liam is in his new apartment, he goes to bed, and an intruder apparently breaks in and knocks him unconscious.  He wakes up in the hospital with no memory of anything after getting into bed. 

 

Second surprise: In the course of trying to regain his memory, he becomes fixated on Eunice, the “rememberer” he saw in the neurologist’s office.  His muddle-headed conviction that she will be able to help him remember ends up with the two of them falling (in very slow motion) in love.  She is 38, he is 61.  They decide that’s not a problem.  Their love is real to them, but they act like pre-adolescents in love.  There’s talking and kissing and hugging, but no serious action.  “Come on, Liam!” you want to say, but you don’t know whether that’s because you want him to make her his, or to stop being stupid and find someone more his own age.

 

Then comes the biggest surprise: Liam (and the unsuspecting reader) learn that Eunice is married.  I say it’s unexpected, and it was on first reading, but on a second reading, I noticed what Eunice says when she has dinner with Liam and his friend Bundy.  Eunice is blathering about her earrings while Bundy is relating how he found out that his girlfriend done him wrong (pp. 173‑4).   

 

“Are you listening to this, or not?”  Bundy asked Eunice.  “I’m telling you how my heart was ripped out.”

 

… [Eunice listens “obediently, like a child in a classroom.”  Bundy finishes his tale, presumably expecting sympathy.]

 

“Maybe you’re well rid of her,” Eunice told him.”

 

“Say what?”

 

“Why do you even care?  You want to watch TV, she wants to do something else; let her do it!  Let her go off with her beautician!”

 

“He’s not her beautician.”

 

“Let her go off with whoever!  Maybe every day she’s been thinking, What are we together for?  Don’t I deserve something better than this?  Someone who understands me?  And meanwhile you could be with some woman who enjoys watching sports on TV.”

 

“Huh,” Bundy said.  He rocked back in his seat.

 

Eunice projects her own situation (which we don’t yet know anything about) onto Bundy’s ex-girlfriend and ends up sounding perspicacious instead of unsympathetic.  I didn’t remember this exchange from my first reading, even though in the very next scene (pp. 177-8) Liam meets Eunice’s mother and the cat jumps out of the bag.  It’s nice that Tyler knew her character well enough to put this in even if her readers may miss it.

 

Other surprises:  Kitty wants to live her senior year with Liam, and Liam says she can.  When Xanthe finds out, she explodes at Liam because he never let her live with him, but rather abandoned her to Barbara when he and Barbara divorced.  Liam, devastated, gets on his knees and begs her forgiveness.  Structurally, this is nicely done.  Early in the novel, when Kitty first comes to stay the summer with Liam, she goes down on her knees to plead melodramatically with him to talk Barbara into allowing it.  When Kitty insists on Liam going immediately to ask Barbara in person to agree to Kitty’s senior year plans, Liam expects her to take to her knees again…  But she doesn’t.  That sets up the situation where it’s Liam (presumably having learned from Kitty) who is begging from his knees.    

 

And Liam turns out to be a good zayda.  The first time that possibility was raised, it looked like Liam was grasping at straws to find something to tell Louise he could do with his life in retirement.  He uses it the same way when he tries to get Eunice off the conviction that he is looking for a job with Cope Industries (Cope!).  But as we see, the prospect had its real appeal, and Liam followed up.

 

At the end, we’ve seen that Liam is not a total nothing.  Sometimes he takes a little prodding, but as Freud said, all behavior is overdetermined, so who’s to say how much of the prodding was really necessary?  Everyone feels they have had a part in what eventually happens.  That’s called consensus.