I have drifted away from my purity of purpose, and have been reading library books as well as books from my shelf. Reading what I already own has proved surprisingly problematic as it turns out that despite having a room lined with bookshelves there's very little in there I'm actually interested in reading again. Also, I keep going in there looking for a specific book I think would be fun, and discovering we don't own it, even though I think we do. This has happened wit On Moral Fiction by John Gardner (which I might have a vague memory of weeding last year), The Family Tree by Sherri Tepper (which come to think of it, I might have thought was by Connie Willis, so it's probably in there), and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.
That last search was futile but productive, though. I quickly weeded the unreadable The Greenlanders and the bad early novel Duplicate Keys, without needing to crack the covers. And I pulled Ordinary Love and Good Will off the shelf to re-read, mainly because I mis-took it for The Age of Grief, a novella I have always loved.
I liked the two novellas that make up this book, though I didn't love them. Smiley likes to write about people who love one another but don't really understand each other, or who aren't comfortable with intimacy. The mother in Ordinary Love, for instance, who pretends she doesn't see her grown son because "if he was going to cry, she didn't want to know it," or the father in Good Will who loses the back-to-the-land farm life that means the world to him because he cannot understand the feelings behind his young son's escalating bad behavior. When his son burns down the house of a classmate who represents all the mainstream comforts he doesn't have at home, they lose everything, but I was thinking the father just needed a parenting class or two, or some empathy training, to see that his son wanted the shiny toys and goods, the pizza, television, and electric lights, that the other kids had.
But people in Smiley's novellas don't do feelings. They don't talk about feelings. The don't express feelings. In these two novellas, that leaves me feeling alienated and frustrated, but I love it in The Age of Grief, where Smiley tells the story of a man who is convinced that if he and his wife can just avoid acknowledging that she is having an affair, everything will be fine. And ultimately, he's right. I love how Smiley draws that character, how he has to hold in what he knows and feels to preserve what is precious to him--and that's a contrast to the protagonist of Good Will, who could, I am convinced, save his farm and the life he loves if he were just able to open up a little.
Now that I've remembered Connie Willis didn't write The Family Tree, I think I'll read that next.
Posted by Su Penn at August 12, 2003 05:39 PM | TrackBack