She should have died a child; she knows that but has never said it to the nuns, has never included in the story of herself the days that felt like years when she lay among the fallen stones. It would have lowered their spirits, although it lifts her own because instead of nothing there is what there is.
The Story of Lucy Gault is a melancholy, tender, and strangely comforting novel about the devastating consequences of hatred, violence, and loss. It begins in 1921 with an act of self-defense, a shot fired to scare away boys who have come to “fire” the Gaults’ home of Lahardane on the coast of Ireland. They had been by once before but the dogs had scared them away; “within a week the dogs lay poisoned in the yard, and Captain Gault knew that the intruders would be back.” The bullet strikes one of the boys, and though he does not die the incident makes the anger and suspicion and fear in the community worse and finally Captain Gault and his English wife Heloise decide to leave Ireland. “The trouble will go on,” Heloise tells her husband, “truce or not. You can tell it will. You can feel it. We can’t be protected, Everard.” So they make their plans, pack their things, and say their goodbyes.
But they underestimate their daughter Lucy’s fierce resistance to leaving her home, where she knows and loves every stream and path and stone:
“I won’t go.”
She ran from the room and ran down to her crossing stones. They came to find her, calling out in the woods, but everything she said to them on the way back, they didn’t hear. They didn’t want to hear, they didn’t want to listen.
Much later, Everard will insist that this was their failure, that they carry the blame for what happens next: “that a child’s anxieties had been impatiently ignored was the cruelty that remained.” Because of it, Lucy comes up with a scheme to derail their planned departure. It goes horribly awry and the consequences change everything, for her parents, who leave believing they have lost her forever, and for Lucy, who ends up staying on at Lahardane but in circumstances none of them ever imagined.
There’s an almost stately simplicity to the novel’s unfolding after this precipitating crisis, which launches its characters into a strange state of limbo. Lucy’s parents, unaware of developments back in Lahardane, roam Europe, exiled from home and happiness by their grief and guilt; Lucy, shamed by what she has done, pays penance for it with a life of near total isolation, even refusing love, when it is offered, as something she cannot accept “until she felt forgiven.” When a reunion finally comes, it is almost too late to repair the damage they have collectively wrought or to make up for the time spent apart, mourning and waiting. There is redemption in the story, though, and it comes from what the nuns who visit Lucy late in her life call her “gift of mercy.” Lucy herself sees nothing extraordinary in what she has done, nothing that needs the kind of explanation others wish they could command: “for what does it matter, really, why people visit one another or walk behind a coffin, only that they do?”
The Story of Lucy Gault is elegantly structured, bringing us patiently around to complete the pattern begun by Everard’s shot in the dark. The story itself is first gripping then almost unbearably heart-wrenching, and then, slowly, it unfurls into a kind of sad, calm beauty. There’s something mesmerizing about the cadences of Trevor’s prose, which is measured but not minimalist, evocative but completely without flourish. Unlike some contemporary writers whose sparse writing seems very flat to me, with little of interest below its dull surface, Trevor’s pulses softly with meaning and feeling. Every page yields a potential example, though it is the cumulative effect that is most powerful. Here’s a sample that perhaps conveys the qualities I liked so much. “For her part,” he tells us,
Lucy did not wonder much about the nature of exile, accepting, with time, what had come about, as she did her lameness and the features that were reflected in her looking-glass. Had Canon Crosbie raised with her the question of going out into the world, she would have replied that the nature and tenets of her life had already been laid down for her. She waited, she would have said, and in doing so kept faith. Each room was dusted clean; each chair, each table, each ornament was as they were remembered. Her full summer vases, her bees, her footsteps on the stairs and on the landings, and crossing rooms and in the cobbled yard and on the gravel, were what she offered. She was not lonely; sometimes she could hardly remember loneliness. ‘Oh, but I’m happy,’ she would have reassured the clergyman had he asked her. ‘Happy enough, you know.’
Is the story of Lucy Gault a tragic one? I don’t think so. It is a sad one, certainly, but for all its heartbreak the novel conveys the same sense of peace that draws the visiting nuns to Lucy’s home:
Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides, the gentle fruit of such misfortune’s harvest? They like to think so: she has sensed it that they do.
It’s not that there’s a silver lining to the Gault family’s “calamity”: Trevor offers us nothing so pat. I think what makes the novel comforting in spite of its characters’ thwarted joy is that, like Lucy, it settles us into the day-to-day possibilities of grace without insisting that a life without more than that is a failure. “Instead of nothing there is what there is,” Lucy reflects, and what there is has beauty that is its own kind of happiness:
She settles in her chair by the window, to gaze out at the dusky blue of the hydgrangeas. The avenue has gone shadowy, the outline of its trees stark against the sky. The rooks come down to scrabble in the grass as every evening at this time they do, her companions while she watches the fading of the day.
“We had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink. Dorothy Whipple was a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us. A considerable body of women novelists, who wrote like the very devil, bit the Virago dust when Alexandra, Lynn and I exchanged books and reports, on which I would scrawl a brief rejection: ‘Below the Whipple line.'” — 
But. It really doesn’t do more than tell this story. There aren’t any layers to it. The characters are fairly two dimensional, especially the French temptress Louise, who to me was the novel’s weakest element. She’s a selfish narcissist who takes what she wants for her own gratification. The whole catastrophe, in fact, is the result of her resentment at an old lover in her home town in France, himself blithely ignorant “that he, at such a distance, could have had anything to do with the breaking up of that family” or with the rift that opens up between Louise and her own parents. Her unmitigated nastiness sapped the novel of any chance of a real moral or emotional dilemma at its center: Avery is wrong to get involved with her and that’s that. Whipple plays out the moves on the board she has set up, but there’s nothing in it for us to think about: we just follow it all through to the end. And that is just not a terribly interesting exercise: Ellen is a bit of a limp noodle, and the solution that unfolds to her problem of finding her own place in the world is too pat, too easy.
I did enjoy Someone At A Distance in the moment, but I also found myself comparing it unfavorably to another much better book (in my opinion) about an affair, Joanna Trollope’s Marrying the Mistress. In Trollope’s novel the “mistress” is a genuinely sympathetic character; the relationship that develops creates a genuine tension for the husband and then, eventually, for his children, who can’t help but like his new partner in spite of their loyalty to their mother; and the marriage that ends, while not a bad one, has weak spots that made it vulnerable—indeed, that maybe even made its end, while painful, a change worth bringing about. Yet even though her mistress is not an evil temptress, Trollope is less sentimental about love, and less blandly optimistic about fixing what has been broken. Someone At A Distance ends with the promise of restoration, but why? Knowing what she now knows about her husband, what is that promise worth to Ellen? I didn’t really care, though: by that point I was ready to be finished with her.
We all have our crosses to bear, our own personal sorrows. Mine is that the people who should be dearest to me, my own children, my sisters, consider me a bad woman. The grandchildren have been taught to be wary. I think I’m a disgrace to them, really. After the war when the newsreel film was shown of what had gone on in Germany and Poland, those places, the horrors . . . It all got tangled up in their minds, as if we’d stood for such barbarism.
Even after her long imprisonment Phyllis remains indignant that her commitment to Mosley’s cause has cost her anything at all and especially that it has led to people concluding she is not a good person. It would be at once pathetic and laughable if it weren’t also plausible and unhappily timely: Phyllis insists that she and her fascist friends were very fine people. The novel approaches them with sly delicacy, never presenting them as outright villains but allowing the us to experience their moral corruption through the lens of Phyllis’s own self-justifications. It also focuses on the personal relationships that naturalize and sanitize the fascist cause for those directly involved, keeping the political context just vague enough that the reader almost has to shake herself to remember that what they stand for is not acceptable, that fascism isn’t just one reasonable choice among many no matter how elegantly its proponents are dressed or how preoccupied they are with their families, lovers, and friends.
My 
I thought it might help to write for some places that do run longer pieces, so I wrote a review “on spec” for one such venue but they didn’t want it–in the end it maybe wasn’t a great fit with the place I sent it, although the book I chose (
This is why I keep returning to class prep! It’s so straightforward, and after all, it does have to get done. Maybe I should think of it this way: the better prepared I am for the term, the more likely it is that I can keep working on some kind of writing project even after classes start. My colleagues and I often talk about the way teaching expands to fill however much time you can (or are willing to) give it: this is something we advise TAs and junior colleagues to guard against. Good, detailed course planning is part of a strategy for achieving better balance between my various professional obligations; it’s not just a diversionary tactic when your other commitments are getting you down. Right? RIGHT?!
Thanks to Lurie’s tale, readers will guess the beast’s identity well before Nora does. Before that moment of revelation, however, much has yet to transpire, as Nora’s question for her missing husband and sons brings back memories and leads to encounters with her neighbors, the sheriff, and local ‘Cattle King’ Merrion Crace, all of whom are entangled in a controversy over a proposal to move the county seat from Amargo, where Nora and Emmett have settled, to nearby Ash River. Crace wants to shut down the opposition to the move for which Emmett’s paper has provided a forum; his leverage includes what he knows about Evelyn’s death and what he and the Sheriff tell Nora about Emmett’s fate, and about what Rob and Dolan have been up to since they rode off in the night.
I have read a handful of books recently that I haven’t written up properly here; I thought I would say at least a little bit about them before my impressions fade away.
At a block party recently I mentioned to a neighbor that I was curious about Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, so she kindly lent me her copy. I read it with interest at first but found my attention flagging. It too, in its own way, is a very atmospheric novel, but there didn’t seem to be much more to the novel than atmosphere: not much happens, even in the retrospective spy story that sounds as if it should be suspenseful and, if not action packed, at least eventful. There are events, but they always seemed strangely at a distance; I found Ondaatje’s style portentous, always promising but deferring some deeper meaning that I didn’t think was ever actually delivered. I read The English Patient years ago and I remember liking it, but that was in the dark days Before Blogging, so I can’t go back to an old post to see what I liked about it. A bit of Twitter discussion suggests Ondaatje is a divisive writer. I can see why, given how self-conscious his style is. I liked a lot of moments. One near the end suggested to me the principle the novel itself may be built on:
Finally, I just finished reading Joy Kogawa’s Obasan for my book club. This novel is, of course, a Canadian classic, and I think I must have read it before, though I did not have any specific memory of it. It is a very powerful novel, and a very artful one as well. It is also a depressingly timely one: so much of the racism and anger directed at Japanese Canadians, vilified and scapegoated in the 1940s, is echoed in current anti-immigrant rhetoric, especially but certainly not exclusively in the United States right now. “Which year should we choose for our healing?” Naomi asks, reading through her aunt’s archive of documents about “Canadians of Japanese origin who were expelled from British Columbia in 1941 and are still debarred from returning to their homes.” “Restrictions against us are removed on April Fool’s Day, 1949,” she notes,
Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare is a small gem of a novel–not a sparkly diamond, but something a bit overcast and somber despite its polish, like a black pearl. It is a wry small-scale tragedy, or possibly, if you feel less sympathetic towards its main characters, a bleak domestic comedy. As fa as its plot goes, it is modest and almost painfully intimate: it tells the superficially simple story of a marriage coming apart. The explicit cause of its collapse is an affair, but as self-help books often suggest, adultery can be a symptom of a faltering relationship as much as an explanation for it, and that is certainly true for the characters in The Tortoise and the Hare.
Imogen (as her name implies) has all the qualities of a conventional romantic heroine of the English rose variety, the kind of woman who should win the game. That’s certainly what she thinks, and her very expectation of success is, one of her friends eventually suggests, what defeats her:
The Tortoise and the Hare is not that book, though, any more than it is a wholly sympathetic picture of Imogen’s plaintive suffering. Still, all the affect of the novel–its emotional texture–is on Imogen’s side: I actually found it quite stressful being immersed in her anxious uncertainty as she watched Evelyn’s relationship with Blanche reach further and further into the corners of her own life, including her awkward relationship with her son Gavin (who is, in his turn, an unattractive reiteration of his father’s least sensitive aspects). Once the truth is impossible to deny or ignore, her indecision is painful but completely understandable. “You did use to have very liberal ideas about these matters,” Evelyn says when finally confronted. “But I did not ever imagine quite this sort of thing,” says Imogen: “so domestic, like a wife already.” She thought she could cope with “an ornament, an addition,” but instead she has found herself displaced, redundant, in the one role she knows how to fill.
The 
That sense of reconnecting with my former self is part of what always makes time in London feel so special to me. After 
But why? Not just why did seeing Arbury Hall move me so much but why was I so emotionally susceptible to seeing those bits of Bleak House or standing next to Dickens’s desk? I am used to feeling excited when I see things or visit places that are real parts of the historical stories I have known for so long, but I have not previously been startled into poignancy in quite the same way. Is it just age? I do seem, now that I’m into my fifties, to be more readily tearful, which is no doubt partly hormones but which I think is also because of the keen awareness of time passing that has come with other changes in my life, such as my children both graduating from high school and moving out of the house–an ongoing process at this point but still a significant transition for all of us. Also, as I approach twenty-five years of working at Dalhousie, and as so many of my senior colleagues retire and disappear from my day-to-day life, I have had to acknowledge that I am now “senior” here, and that my own next big professional milestone will also be retirement–it’s not imminent, but it’s certainly visible on the horizon.
Perhaps it’s these contexts that gave greater resonance to seeing these tangible pieces of other people’s lives, especially people who have made such a mark on mine. Though I have usually considered writers’ biographies of secondary interest to their work, there was something powerful for me this time in being reminded that Dickens and Eliot were both very real people who had, and whose books had, a real physical presence in the world. People sometimes talk dismissively about fiction as if it is insubstantial, inessential, peripheral to to the “real world” (a term often deployed to mean utilitarian business of some kind). But words and ideas and books are very real things, and they make a very real difference in the world: they make us think and feel differently about it and thus act differently in it. Another of my London stops this time was at 
Although Ernest’s murder and the subsequent trial are the novel’s central plot points, however, or at least its most dramatic ones, it’s interesting how easily subsumed their effects are in the novel’s quieter undercurrents. Surely an act as significant as murder should turn the novel itself into melodrama, should in some way transform our perspective on its characters. How can a woman dubbed “the weedkiller killer” by the tabloids seem so harmless–seem almost, even more provocatively, like a victim herself? Ernest, though abhorrent, is surely not so evil that he deserves his fate, and Elsie and Rene are hardly heroic figures of resistance, to patriarchy or to anything else. Yet all they ever wanted was to live quietly and honestly, and together, and as the lawyers and journalists gather and gawk, Ernest starts to seem in retrospect like a graceless embodiment of all the social forces that try to make something strange and ugly out of their intimacy. The glare of publicity exposes them to all the prurience the novel itself scrupulously avoids:
In retrospect, I’m glad my pitch for a article reporting back on the George Eliot Bicentenary Conference was rejected: the cognitive dissonance I struggled with during the conference was strong enough that I have been puzzling over how or whether to write about it even here, in relative obscurity and without being answerable to anyone else for whatever it is that I come up with to say.
Each of the presenters on our panel addressed quite a different “application” for George Eliot. I spoke about what I see as reasons for but also the difficulties with “pitching” her work to the kind of bookish public I have been trying to write for–at left is my design for a George Eliot tote bag meant to illustrate the case I made that her books are not, as too often assumed, 
It isn’t exactly that I want no part of it, though. As I hope I have also made clear here over the years, my own intellectual life has been shaped and enriched by many kinds of academic scholarship (though 
Novel Readings 