A Big Storm Knocked it Over

I promise: Laurie Colwin has written only a finite amount of books that I'll bother you with my ravings of (ravings about?). We're over halfway through! Two books of fiction and two books of cooking essays to go.

A Big Storm Knocked it Over is Colwin's last novel. Like Happy All the Time, it is about two couples who are best friends with each other. The main character is Jane Louise, whose married to Teddy. Jane Louise explores in her relationship with Teddy how unknowable other people are--even one's own husband (an insight, also, of The Cocktail Party).

Jane Louise seeks stability and permanence. She feels herself to be an outsider, never settled,* and envies Teddy and the fact that he has lifelong friends and places that he belongs to. She longs for the connections through blood that he has. Teddy, though, is mystified, as his relations have done nothing but make him claustrophobic (he was the site as a child of a battle between divorced parents over his attention).

Their marriage is really all each of them has. Which gets Jane Louise back to the mystery of loving another person and knowing him better than anyone else does, but still having him be a mystery to her.

Marriage is all each has, that is, until they have a child. The end of the novel is an ode to motherhood. It's something that really cements Jane Louise's relationship to the community. It is the attachment that she seeks.

Colwin's portrayal of motherhood in her fiction that I've read is beautiful and transformative--I've really never read anything more adoring of being a mother than Colwin. It's an existential experience, full of meaning. It's also very much a mother/child relationship (there's very little about fatherhood there; even her relationship with her husband, Teddy, seems to fade into the background). Jane Louise at one point notes (in response to a man at the office who sleeps around with a vengeance and has plenty of his own children) that women are responsible for children in a way that men aren't.

This leads to Jane Louise's own anxiety. She's an anxious person: for instance, she's scared of thunderstorms. I can identify with her anxiety and with her fear of thunderstorms (that's where the title comes in). Once again, Colwin has created such a believable character, loaded with insecurities. Although for once, there isn't a smidgen of adultery (which isn't to say that Jane Louise isn't tempted).


*This has loads of overlap with Arendt's notion of a pariah. At the very basic level, Jane Louise is also Jewish. More substantially, her place as an outsider gives her a close relationship to other characters who face some sort of rejection. However, Jane Louise does not embrace her role as a pariah exactly, but rather fights to fit into her husband's world.


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