by Robin Bradford
Every year I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen it coming at all. Suddenly,
spiral notebooks appear in the supermarket and traffic blooms with anxious
children heading back to school. I can’t imagine that the delicious leisure of
summer that we allow ourselves because of the heat can just vanish. “It’s still
95 degrees! Give me back my vacation!” I want to scream in the crosswalk. I’m
staying by the pool until November, still working on my pile of summer books.
Call it “autumn” only if you must.
On the cover of Spinsters by Pagan Kennedy (High Risk
Books/Serpent’s Tail, $11.99 paper) a Plymouth Valiant, Sixties op-art, and
a pastel U.S. map commingle with the scrollwork lettering of the title in an
appealing way. Set during the summer of ’68, Pagan Kennedy’s novel is about
Frannie and Doris, middle-aged sisters from a small New Hampshire town who long
ago gave up their own futures to care for their sick father. “The story of
Doris and me began when we stood before Dad’s empty bed,” Frannie explains as
the novel begins. In search of a shape for their new lives after their father’s
death, they pack up the family car and begin a journey of self-discovery that
parallels the nation’s larger tumult and despair.
As much as Frannie wants to retain the quiet, practical life of a “spinster,”
Doris wants to meet strange men and go home with them. The longing of both
characters is delicious to read: when they drive past an amusement park Frannie
imagines the cars are packed with newlyweds and that “the violent rattling of
the wheels would make their bodies vibrate and their teeth chatter, but to them
the fear would feel delicious”; in a roadside diner Doris observes “Whatever’s
wrong in my life at least I don’t have to wear a polyester waitress outfit.”
But a great setting, great characters, and great writing still left me
stranded:The novel’s skinniness curtailed development of the family dynamics
that created this spinster pair and diminished the historical events of the
period to a few easy TV frames. But if you measure your self-development by
summers (and isn’t it remarkable what a difference those three sticky months
make?), then you will love this fast, smooth, piling-up-the-miles read.
The flashes of humor and mockery that flare through Ajay Sahgal’s
Pool (Grove/Atlantic, $10 paper) reminded me of sunlight flashing
off the pool. A twentysome-thing movie star named Emery walks off the set of
his latest vacuous movie and shows up at the work-in-progress Vermont country
house of his friend Jeremy. As the summer passes, the house becomes a sort of
Nineties Graceland (instead of the Jungle Room there’s the Wall Room, where
visitors scrawl their innermost thoughts like “abe vigoda is alive and well and
LIVING with jim morrison on 13th between 3rd and 4th”). This pack of privileged
losers haunts local bars by night and, after lengthy recovery, tackles the
problem of where to swim by day.
The would-be pool, necessary because the nearby pond is
over-populated with turtles (despite party-animal Louis’s BB-gun potshots), is
a metaphor for where these characters lives are going. When the washed-up
screenwriter Nathan refers to the hole he’s begun digging as a “building site,”
Louis sets him straight: “Building refers to growth upward. Digging is what
we’re doing. Not building.”
“Vacuous and proud of it,” Emery, the narrator of the story, is
unhappy but too big a star to know it. When his buddies sell off all his stuff
at a “GIANT CELEBRITY GARAGE SALE,” he is grateful for the opportunity to pare
down. He tries to compose a letter to his girlfriend/manager: “I stare at a
blank page… I try to draw a picture of the house, Nathan’s swimming pool, the
Concorde, caricatures of Hurley Thompson, Keanu, Jason, Luke, Donovan, Flea,
the rest of them.” He flips through a magazine and comes upon “a page with a
picture of me on it. I am standing on my head at the beach and there are two
girls in bikinis holding my legs up.” The producer’s daughter, Anne, with whom
he has had a fling, says, “I miss you.” “I miss myself, too,” Emery answers.
Just as the summer slips into a vast depression relieved only by alcohol
and drug abuse, Monty, the producer of the film Emery walked out on, decides to
move the filming to Vermont. The daily task of movie-making instills a sort of
meaningless order to daily life and finally propels Emery into forward
movement. Pool sparkles with crisp, flat dialogue and down-played yet
outrageous (and funny) games of self-abuse. This is the sort of empty-headed
novel I love to hate – but this one sweet-talked me all the way through.
I am not a good person to review this last book; I refuse all responsibility.
Like Carlos Fuentes, I, too, truly believe that “Maria Luisa Bombal is the
mother of us all.” More than 10 years ago, I first fell in love with her when I
happened upon a collection of her stories on a back shelf of Garner & Smith
bookstore on the Drag. Since then, I have pushed this slim book onto all my
best writing friends. So, when I found out that two of her novels House
of Mist and The Shrouded Woman (UT Press, paper), had
been translated by Bombal herself and published in a single volume, out I was
excited to renew my passion for her.
I love these novels so much I almost want to keep them a secret. I don’t want
anyone to dare to love them less – or even more – than me. Yet, I will try to
resist such selfishness. The first story, House of Mist, is the
atmospheric, romantic tale of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. As the
years painfully pass, a single memory of a stolen moment of true passion gives
meaning to her life. But when she discovers that her life’s great love may have
been nothing more than a drunken fantasy, the changes that occur dramatically
expand her idea of what happiness is. First published in the 1930s (and in
English in the 1940s), both novels excel at the magic realism that Gabriel
Garcia Marquez has made famous. In House of Mist, the magical element of
the odd weather pattern that doesn’t budge from the marriage house is a
metaphor for the relationship’s entrapment.
The Shrouded Woman, the second novel in the volume, is the ingenious
story of a woman’s last hours on earth: “As night was beginning to fall, slowly
her eyes opened…. And in the glow of the tall candles, those who were keeping
watch leaned forward… unaware that she could see them. For she was seeing,
she was feeling.” Though dead, the woman lying in her coffin nonetheless
retains a level of consciousness that, prompted by visitors coming to pay their
last respects, recalls the many dramas of her life. “Must we die in order to
know certain things?” the woman wonders as old lovers, relatives, and friends
file past. The stories that unfold – of the unreturned love of a childhood
beau, a father’s repressed emotion, a beauty so great that it kills, and a
friendship wrongly forsaken – are as mysterious and painful as life itself. As
her daughter, who was known for her passionless demeanor, breaks down in
mourning, the shrouded woman thinks: “But don’t cry, don’t cry!… I shall
continue to breathe within you and to evolve in you and to change as if I were
alive….”
Bombal’s depiction of death continues right through the funeral procession and
even past the burial. Her imagining of what follows life is evocative and
sensual – even funny and inventive. Though The Shrouded Woman is about
life and the permanence of our decisions, the story sheds a reassuring light on
what death might feel like and the gifts it may offer. Like summer, I truly
wanted this story to never end, to stay just this pleasurable and rich,
forever. n
This article appears in September 29 • 1995 and September 29 • 1995 (Cover).