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Connection between people like Toni and Leo is predicated on the existence of a world in which men and women conform to a romantic notion of themselves as men and women. These two have never been real to each other. They were bound to end in her stretch marks, his convertible. Carver knows that. Instead of being jolted by what he knows, startled into another posture, he feels only sad and bad. He mourns the loss of romantic possibility in each life; in Carver's work, story after story"What Do You Do in San Francisco?" "Gazebo," "They're Not Your Husband," "Little Things," ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"is saturated in a wistful longing for an ideal, tender connection that never was, and never can be. Carver's surrogate character seems always to be saying, "Wouldn't it be lovely if it could have been otherwise?" In short, the work is sentimental. Trapped inside that sentimentality is the struggle so many women and so many men are waging now to make sense of themselves as they actually are. The struggle has brought men-and-women-together into a new place; puzzling and painful, true, but new nonetheless. In the country of these stories not only is that place not on the map, it's as though the territory doesn't exist.
fair
There's a novel by Richard Ford in which the narrating protagonist says, "Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling though anything doesn't go, of course, and never did. . . . [But now] . . . I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can't help in the age-old ways. . . . Not that I've lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can't sidestep -- the essence of a small empty moment." Frank Bascombe delivers himself of this insight on page 61 of The Sportswriter and then goes on speaking until page 375 exactly as though he hadn't. Taking in his own experience is not what this man is about.
lmao
It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world, lost, empty, shocked to the bone by the way it's all turned out. He feels compassion for women but not empathy. At bottom, they do not remind him of himself. The only character in the book who even comes close is his ex-wife, and she, incredibly enough, is called X. It is X who brought on the divorce, X who found the emptiness between them unbearable, X who wanted to take another stab at living her life and, although she looks like a busy suburban mother, X too seems to be floundering and suffering. We can only deduce this from the hints Frank throws out. We never see X straight on. She is a shadowy figure, always at the periphery of Frank's vision. One would assume that he would know her well. But he doesn't. She is the ex-wife. In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life.
ooof
Dubus's characters -- blue-collar people who live in the old mill towns not far from Boston -- are mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and construction workers. They have almost no conversation in them, and very little sense of things beyond their own immediate needs. They drink, they smoke, they make love: without a stop. Inevitably, the limitation of appetite becomes apparent, and they begin to suffer. When they suffer, they do terrible things to themselves, and to one another. There is nothing any of them can do to mitigate the suffering. They cannot educate themselves out of their lives; they can't leave home, and they can't get reborn. This situation is Dubus's subject, the thing he concentrates on with all his writer's might. His concentration is penetrating. We feel his people trapped in their lives so acutely that they enter into us.
In Dubus's work, sexual love is entirely instrumental. Men and women are alive to themselves and to one another only in the mythic way. They provoke in themselves the fantasy that romantic love will bring one to safe haven. They are tremendously influenced by an idea of "men" and an idea of "women" that Ernest Hemingway would have understood and approved of, but that many people today find alarming, if not downright silly. The reader can see early on that the marriage in Adultery will come to disaster. Without genuine connection -- that is, connection of the mind or spirit -- sexual feeling quickly wears itself out. Such love is bound to come a cropper. Yet neither Dubus nor his characters see what the reader sees. In many of his stories, the characters are middle-aged and have been through these affairs many times over. Yet they remain devoted to the fantasy. They resist taking in their own experience. Theirs is the distress of people unable to arrive at wisdom.
The despair of these writers can never be as moving to a reader like me as it is to the writers themselves. At the heart of their work lies a keen regret that things are no longer as they once were between men and women, a regret so intense that it amounts to longing. It's this longing, endowed with the appearance of hard reality, that informs much of their writing. But from where I stand, the hard reality is this: that question about why things are not as they once were has got to be asked honestly, not rhetorically. Then something more might be known about why life is so empty now, and the work of writers as good as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford would be wise as well as strong.
damn. i still want to read these writers but i enjoy this line of critique
The genius of the narrative lies in the desperate calm with which the husband charts the weeks and months of unhappy suspicion, all the while a piece of unwanted knowledge is collecting steadily in him. "I am thirty-five years old," he tells us in the middle of his story, "and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. . . . It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. . . . It is more that . . . after all that schooling, all that care . . . the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from." There. He has said what he came to say, and said it quite clearly.
damn
[...] When Emma Bovary was loosening her stays with a man other than her husband, or Anna Karenina running away from hers, or Newbold Archer agonizing over whether to leave New York with Ellen Olenska, people were indeed risking all for love. Bourgeois respectability had the power to make of these characters social pariahs. Strength would be needed to sustain exile. Out of such risk taking might come the force of suffering that brings clarity and insight. Today, there are no penalties to pay, no world of respectability to be excommunicated from. Bourgeois society as such is over. If the wife in The Age of Grief walks away from her marriage, she'll set up housekeeping on the other side of town with a man named Jerry instead of one named Dave, in ten minutes make a social life the equivalent of the one her first marriage had provided her, and in two years she and her new husband will find themselves at a dinner party that includes the ex-husband and his new wife: everyone chatting amiably. Two years after that, one morning in the kitchen or one night in the bedroom, she'll slip and call Jerry Dave, and they will both laugh.
For this character to be hungering for erotic passion at a crucial moment when she's up against all that she has, and has not, done with her life struck me as implausible. She had to know better, I thought. On the other hand, if blissing-out was what the wife was up to, then the story could be made large only if the author of her being called her on it. But Jane Smiley wasn't calling her on it. She was using the illicit passion of the wife straight -- as though she expected me, the reader, to accept erotic longing at face value as an urgency compelling enough to bring into relief the shocking ordinariness of these stricken lives. But I did not accept it. I could not. I know too much about love. We all know too much. I could not accept as true that a love affair would bring the wife (and therefore me) to feel deeply the consequence of her original insufficient intentions. And that is why an otherwise excellent novella struck me as a small good thing. Embedded as it was in a convention, not a truth, the conceit itself prevented the writer from asking the questions necessary to deepen thought and action.
reminds me of eva illouz
A couple of years ago, at dinner with a couple I've known for year -- she is an academic, she a poet; he makes the money, she does not -- I fell into some aimless exchange about marriage, in the middle of which the husband had occasion to announce casually, "Of course, it's a given that the one who does the supporting holds the one being supported in contempt." The wife stared at him. He stared back. Then she gasped, "Henry! I can hardly believe you've said what you've just said." He looked at her, unperturbed. "What is it?'' he asked mildly. "Is this something we don't all know?" Silence fell on the company. She looked bleak, he remained impassive. A minute later she said the equivalent of Pass the salt. I remember thinking, If life was still a Cheever story this would have been the climactic moment, but as it is now 1995 it is only a break in the conversation.
In great novels we always feel that the writer, at the time of the writing, knows as much as anyone around can know, and is struggling to make sense of what is perceived somewhere in the nerve endings if not yet in clarified consciousness. When a novel gives us less than many of us know -- and is content with what is being given -- we have middlebrow writing. Such writing -- however intelligent its author, however excellent its prose -- is closer to the sentimental than to the real. The reader senses that the work is sentimental because the metaphors are inaccurate: approximate, not exact. To get to those nerve endings a metaphor must be exact, not approximate. The exact metaphor is writer's gold.