Family Happiness

When I started reading this novel, I had the strong feeling that I'd read it before--maybe that the plot was exactly the same as another of Colwin's novels only with characters with different names. And then I realized: this novel is an expansion of a short story in The Lone Pilgrim.

Ironically, given the title, this is the least happy of Corwin's novels. The main character, Polly, seems to be living the perfect life with the perfect family and the perfect husband. In reality, though, she's simply not being honest with herself and deeply resents being taken for granted in her hard work of mothering. The novel includes (surprise!) an affair, prompted by, although not reducible to, her absent husband.

Polly is so self-effacing, concerned only with serving her family, that she loses track of herself. Her family pretends everything is great, but in reality it is only a family that doesn't talk about its problems (nor about anything else of importance). Polly learns, in the course of the book, about friendship and about being honest about her troubles. This friendship happens with people, but also with God--in one scene, she, a secular Jew, goes into a Catholic church (and here I quote at length because it's the one time, as far as I can remember, that Colwin writes about religion as something other than an ethnic identity):

"In a synagogue there was no one to confess to, and if you could not forgive yourself you were lost. There was nothing to light a candle to, nothing that made you feel that a small wish might be granted or even asked for, only the stern, harsh law of the patriarchs, the hard, unrelenting law that did not give an inch."
...
"In the darkness of the church, Polly wished that she had been a little Catholic girl; that she might go into the confessional, tell everything to a person she could not see, and be forgiven."
"Jews do not kneel in prayer; they stand. But kneeling felt much more private, so Polly knelt. She had not prayed since she was a little girl. How thoughtful of the church to provide a padded knee rest, Polly thought. ... Her knees were stiff when she got up. At the shrine of Saint Jude she lit a cangle and hoped God would understand what she was doing in a Catholic church."

Some resolution comes at the end of the novel, but it's not the resolution that you'd expect. This novel's treatment of Polly's affair at the end is the least satisfactory of all of Colwin's affairs, I think. Once again, Colwin seems to be comfortable with people loving more than one person at a time.

But, once again, Colwin is a master of explaining, in brutally honest ways, life's complexity. Actually, Colwin gets so inside of me that I get angry, I get sad, I cry when I'm reading. I rant at the dinner table about absent husbands. This book just carries over into my real life.


Here are some of my favorite descriptions: First, Colwin describes Polly's friend, Martha: "She wore the sort of clothes a child might wear to a child's party--smocks and shifts. The rest of her garments were made in India, Guatemala, or Afghanistan. Martha felt solidarity with emerging nations. 'I am sort of an emerging nation myself,' she said."

The describes exactly how I feel about babies: I think that I really like babies because I can identify them--when they're hungry or need sleep they're difficult to be around and they're often driven to tears; the rest of time they are happy, and sometimes even smile. They have very primal desires and they're 100 percent honest about their feelings. And if you are very nice to them when they're tired and cranky, you might even be able to make them laugh. I'm a lot like this.

Second, Colwin describes how much Polly likes beds (again, I identify!): "Polly gravitated toward a bed. She liked breakfast in bed, reading or work in bed, and she liked to talk lying down. The Demarest family often shared horizantal evenings, in which Polly and Henry read or worked, and the children did their homework or some quiet project other than watercoloring, all spread out on Polly and Henry's big bed. The sight of her family lying around her gave Polly a deep sense of pleasure."


(picture, picture)