I was prepared to hate this book since Hopkins does (okay, maybe "hate" is too strong, but what's life without exaggeration?) and, let's be honest, she's a pretty good barometer of these things. I convinced her to lend me the book since I'm on a Colwin kick and I was out. I didn't hate this book at all. I think this is one of my (many) faults: when I like an author I insist on liking anything he's ever written. I'm just not that discriminating, when it comes down to it. I love Laurie Colwin. Laurie Colwin makes me feel like Lauryn Hill--"I felt [s]he found my letters and read each one outloud."In this novel/ella, she addresses the process of dealing with grief, although, as always, within the context of love. Love is just constantly central for Colwin. It's hard for me to imagine a story of hers that doesn't deal with love. It's more shocking to write about love in the context of a recently widowed 27-year-old, Elizabeth "Olly" Olive Bax. Olly deals with losing her husband, Sam, and with falling in love with his brother, Patrick. (Now, half of me hates this on principle, but the feminist half of me thinks it's great that a woman finally wrote the reverse of a man and two sisters.)
Olly thinks through her loves and lusts, past and present. She sorts through them in her mind, sharing them with the reader. I think that this is the way that I work--I want to make sense of everything, so I just tell myself different narratives about it, searching for the narrative in which everything fits together.
Some quotes, as usual, for no reason:
"Tears in public cost, and even a group of two is public. ... Eddie splattered his trust like fingerpaint in kindergarten, and when I went off with Sam I knew I was right. Sam never cried, which was probably as bad, except that it had more dignity to it."
...
A man whose wife buys him crazy ties: "'She started buying these horrors for me when we were young,' he said. 'She said I was the oldest person in the world and that she had always wanted to be married to a visible eccentric.'"
Two little little critiques: 1) It's shocking how little Olly regrets from her marriage. I guess it's just not quite believable--relationships are complicated and no one does them perfectly. But Olly, who is incredibly reflective about her romantic life, finds almost nothing that she wishes she would have done differently. 2) Perhaps Colwin overdoes the love aspect of her novels--in this novel there are really no relationships besides romantic one--Olly knows her parents and her in-laws, but barely interacts with them. There are also a couple of older men who are friends of the family and help take care of Olly; once again, however, their role is very small. Reducing life to romance (albeit not a romance divorced entirely from friendship) diminishes it. Plus, romance occurs within social contexts--it isn't something that's entirely private. She had the potential for real friendship with Charlie, but had to include (illicit) romance there, too.
Colwin gets that love is messy, and that some romances help us understand others. She takes this point a little far with Charlie, though--her romance with Charlie helps her understand her romance with Patrick: "If I hadn't met up with you, there are things about him I never would have known, or things about myself. Being with you doesn't shake my ties to him. It affirms them. I'm right to love him, and I'm right to love you. You've been a great friend to me. I'm glad this happened." I think that Colwin's problem at the end of the day is that she doesn't have a very good notion of friendship. Colwin's friendship always includes love (possible exception here). This means that she can't really understand love as something that excludes others. On the one hand, sure, loves broaden your understanding. On the other hand, you can't just go around falling in love with people. She sort of takes love to a silly extreme.
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