Another Marvelous Thing

I remember now why I put myself on a temporary Colwin moratorium: I work better when she isn't around. Another Marvelous Thing is supposedly a collection of eight short stories. I disagree--it's clearly much closer to a novel. Stories stand alone; these stories give insight into each other. All of the short stories deal with Frank and Billy, a couple having an affair, each married to other people. Each short story approaches the affair from a slightly different angle, with certain things running consistently through the stories--Billy's lack of taste in clothes, for instance. Frank is thrilled with the affair; Billy struggles with it and detests it. Some of the stories follow Billy's post-affair pregnancy and motherhood and a brief meeting with Frank after her baby is born.

Okay, so, there are loads of affairs in Colwin's fiction. It's a bit much. On the other hand, my defense of her treatment: Colwin always takes love seriously, in all of its incarnations. Her characters never attempt to pretend it didn't happen.

For instance, Billy and her best friend have a conversation about Billy's affair:

"'You'll get over it,' said Penny.
'That doesn't seem to matter,' Billy said. 'Maybe I will and maybe I won't. But now it's part of me. It's history. It's my own historical event. In some way it doesn't matter what I feel. It's what I remember.'"

And in another story, Billy says, "The water doesn't close over your head. I mean, it doesn't close over mine. I realize that no matter what happens Francis is indelible. He's part of my experience--like seeing Stonehenge or traveling in India."

However, Colwin also portrays the extra-marital affair as something isolating, something that you can't ever really own (she compares this to her premature baby being stuck in the hospital--she feels like a childless mother). It is telling when Billy quotes William Blake: "Love seeketh only self to please."

Elsewhere Colwin writes, "And where, Billy wondered as she walked, did Francis fit into this? The fact was, he didn't. He had never fit in at all. He and Billy had nothing in common and were as different as two people can be. Yet there was no denying they had fallen in love, a process as mysterious as creating a child out of two cells. A love affair was another amazing product of human ingeniousness, like art, like scholarship, like architecture. It was a created thing with rules, languages, and reference. When it was finished it lived on in its artifacts: a million memories and gestures."


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