“That Reminds Me…”
Just seconds ago, I closed To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney and my fingertips are tingling with the need to dump my brain onto the page. This was one of those books I will put into the shortlist known as The Mother Lode. Certain books seem to unleash me. For me: To Have and To Hold is a Mother Lode book because it is so perfectly itself, but it simultaneously mirrors and refracts and suggests other books, philosophies, ideas. Humanity, I guess. But. Sigh. Okay. I guess I am just going to dive in. Backwards.
On the inside back cover, Patricia Gaffney describes her imaginary village of Wyckerley as “humble imitation of Hardy’s invented Wessex country” and I think Gaffney is being humble in her use of humble. Wyckerley is an homage in the best sense of the word. Gaffney’s love of Hardy comes through beautifully, not as a weak approximation but as a source of inspiration. Lately, I pretty much reserve the use of homage for when I am despairing of something’s authenticity and hope to point out its derivative lack of originality. It’s best said with a mediocre French accent, as in “Some people think that movie is an homage to Kurasawa,” the clear implication being that anyone who thought that is a pretentious idiot.
Anyway, I need to breathe. To Have and To Hold had me thinking about everyone from Thomas Hardy to Lionel Shriver to Ian McEwan to Amanda Quick to Ford Maddox Ford to Joseph Conrad. Hardy for the obvious reasons: the redemption, the countryside, the small town, the nature of…well, nature. Lionel Shriver for the exquisite moral ambiguity. I remember reading somewhere that Lionel Shriver likes to make her readers squirm. There is a level of trust that a reader must have to open a book knowing that the author will torment you, but that you are in good hands. I trust Shriver implicitly. I trust Gaffney implicitly. Ian McEwan for the tragedy…you just know it’s coming and it’s so relentless. (Put the book down. Breathe. Go pretend you are shopping at Old Navy and that you are not worrying over how the characters are going to survive.) Amanda Quick for the intimacy, the humor between the lovers, the adult nature of their communication (more on adults-only in a minute). Ford Maddox Ford for the onslaught of modern hells, industrialization, inhumanity. Joseph Conrad for all that black yarn, the click of the knitting needles, the evil.
Okay. I feel better already getting all of that off my chest. I guess Hardy is the main thing. I am rusty. I was more of a Far From the Madding Crowd reader, than Tess of the D’Urbervilles. FFTMC was assigned my senior year in high school. Looking back, our English teacher was quite the revolutionary. D.H. Lawrence. Alice Walker. Howard’s End. Chinua Achebe.
Maybe those are part of my personal canon, so that’s what comes out when I really love a book…because it reminds me of the love I have for other books in my personal memory. Maybe Mother Lode books just release whatever it is in each particular reader’s mind, unhooks the latch that keeps it all together and things start to fly free. Of course, these days any mention of Hardy leads me to Anastasia and Christian and his gift of the first edition of Tess. (Available here for $14,000 for any romantics out there who can’t afford the hang glider or the place in Aspen). I think Fifty Shades is also a Mother Lode book because if you ask twenty readers what they liked most about it, you’d get twenty different answers: the power dynamic, the sex, the pace, the immediacy of the first-person narrative, the obscene wealth, the voyeurism, the titillation, or even the despising of that book is an answer in itself.
Unfortunately, as far as Tess of the D’Urbervilles is concerned, I fall into the sad tranche of popular culture for whom Tess will always be a pouty Nastassia Kinski with a strawberry dangling over her lips and a voiceover saying, “A Victim of Her Own Provocative Beauty” rather than “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.” When I was thirteen, when that movie came out, the letter that slipped under the carpet drove me insane. It felt like such a cheat. Because it was. I never got past it.
So, I’ll own it. I think Far From the Madding Crowd is a much better book. (For me!) Again, I am VERY rusty and I am away from home so I do not have access to my own copies of both books in which a plentitude of adolescent fury crowds the margins, but Gaffney and Hardy (and Shriver and McEwan et al) are all ON IT. And here’s why: It’s in the details. And the squirming.
Gaffney has lush evocative passages about flowers, streams, birds, the shadows cast by trees. Of course, these are beautiful poetic episodes that show the awakening spirit of the character who is walking through that landscape. The resurrection. But it’s also the writing itself. Like in Ian McEwan’s Solar, his descriptions of the boot room on the Arctic ship, the protagonist’s inability to remember which items belong to him, the damp, the mayhem. Again, I hardly know what I am saying, but in the description of the boot room you get the description of the character. McEwan never says, so-and-so is unraveling. And it’s not as easy as that tired writerly advice, show-don’t-tell, it’s the actual quality of the writing. It’s the quality of the writing in the seemingly peripheral scenes, the ones that some readers see as filler. The perfectly chosen word when it doesn’t really matter to the plot. Because it always matters. Because if McEwan is going to go to the trouble (the joy?) of perfectly describing a boot room, I can only surmise that when his characters are faced with visceral moral quandaries, he will use the same care.
Gaffney writes with that kind of care. She’s never precious. I’m too frantic to list all the examples (“his hands on her face the lightest of prisons…as out of place as a tiara in a root barn…either dozing or writing a letter, or possibly both at once…it wasn’t anything as simple as cruelty, she was sure of that, because his mind was too subtle, his depravities too complex…”), but trust me, she delivers.
She’s darkly funny (“Necrophilia wasn’t one of his depravities yet…”) I put LOL in the margin for that ’yet.’ That ’yet’ set off a whole slew of ideas about my recent preoccupation with the idea of what it means to be an adult. To be autonomous. Parenthood is a huge fly in that ointment. We think we have to be examples. All. The. Time. Guess what?! We don’t! The pendulum swings—I think about Vita Sackville-West describing the thirty minutes a day she spent with her sons, when they told her about their days and then went back to their babysitter (nanny, governess, whatever). Adults Only doesn’t necessarily mean prurience (but hey, that’s fun too!), it just means This Is For Grown Ups. Sebastian Verlaine and Rachel Wade are grown ups. This book is for grown ups.
And it’s a book. That might sound trite, but it seems lately some people need reminding. Books are meant for reading. That means that forced seduction, rape, cruelty, indifference, sex as a tool of power—everything that happens in the book, is a literary device. In the first Gaffney book in this trilogy, To Love and To Cherish, there is a devastating rape scene when the debauched husband (who, the reader is led to believe, has a raging case of syphilis) forces himself on his wife. They are estranged. It’s gruesome. Much has already been written about rape and narrative, recently and quite eloquently by Angela Toscano.
This is what books are for, aren’t they? To play out these gruesome parts of humanity and really tease them apart and stare at the wormy, pale underbelly? Like Will Ferrell’s character in Old School, at the marriage counselor’s office, I often want to cry out: “I thought we were in the tree?” When I talk about books, I want to believe I am in the tree. That I am safe.
If we can’t talk about these things in the abstract, the discussion comes to a grinding halt. Here is Henry Louis Gates acknowledging the right of William Styron to write The Confessions of Nat Turner. As writers, as readers, we are all in the tree. Be honest. Be human. What do we see? In others and, more importantly, in ourselves, especially if a character is particularly disturbing.
Go read a book. See what it unleashes in you.
Megan Mulry recently signed a three book deal with Sourcebooks.
