The Lone Pilgrim

"This is fiction a feminist can love if you are willing to love stories about one woman after another who is brilliant in a different field, quirky in an enchanting new way, and more often than not, lives happily ever after with a man who seems clearly to deserve her." --Letty Pogrebin

This collection of Laurie Colwin's short stories is perfect. It is all about love--falling in love, adultery, inappropriate and appropriate love, unwanted love, falling in love with someone you don't want to fall in love with, people who can't love, falling in love with the wrong person. What better topic is there than love? Colwin tells us over and over that life is complicated. Whether we try to analyze those complications or just roll with them doesn't exactly matter--life's complications remain nonetheless.

The women in the book, as Letty Pogrebin blurbs on the back of the book, are smart and observant and genuine (even when they are learning lessons about love in the course of the story). The stories are often narrated by women, with the help of an omniscient third-person observer. The women of the book, also, more often than not, eat strange food, which I identify with. For instance: "The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums. I cooked carrots with honey and garlic and ate them cold--the odd tastes of a solitary person. ... I gave my husband what I ate ... He ate what was set before him and never said he found the meal strange, which warmed me to him."

Colwin herself is brilliantly witty as well as deeply insightful. The mix of charming turns of phrase and cutting insights is a potent one. She takes you off guard and looks into your soul. Reading her work tells you loads about yourself and about life.

Of course this means that I have to give you a little taste in the form of some of my favorite lines:

(On a woman meeting her lover's father:) "It was a hard, dry hand. quickly withdrawn, the sort of hand that, when attached to the wrist of your loved one's parent, is often a portent that you and your beloved are not going to spend your declining days watching the sun go down and reflecting on the happy years you have had together."

(On the first time a particular man came to call, and they just sat there with nothing to say:) "'I find looking at you very interesting,' said Alden. 'Is there any chance I can come and look at you some more one day soon?' Naturally he came back, and I fell in love with him."

"There were marriages that seemed propped up with toothpicks, and ones in which the wife was present but functionless, like a vestigial organ."


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