Raymond
Carver’s short story “The Beginners” was later published as his best known
classic, the Gordon Lish edited version, “What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love.” As Mel says in the story, “It
seems to me we’re just beginners at love.” Carver’s point, we’re all
“beginners.” Anne Tyler takes this
concept and also applies it to loving and then losing (and everything else in
between) in her new novel, The Beginner’s
Goodbye.
I
read the book soon after I finished Anita Shreve’s Light on Snow. Anne Tyler and Anita Shreve are two of my favorite
contemporary American female writers.
They are different in so many ways, and their writing is so clearly unique
to each. I make the gender distinction
only because there is a feminine touch to their writing, making observations
about matters normally invisible to their male counterparts.
Tyler
has a special place in my heart as our very own Jane Austin, recording the
foibles of society in that part of Baltimore I think of as Tylerville, where
quirky dysfunctional men are portrayed along with their strange wives, mothers,
and friends. Although these people live in Baltimore, as
does the author, it is a Baltimore of Tyler’s creation, more like a little city
you’d find along a Lionel train board.
The Beginner’s
Goodbye
particularly appeals to me as it is about a publisher, Aaron Woolcott, the
narrator and protagonist. He works for a vanity publishing company that he and
his sister, Nandina, inherited from their father (Nandina is more the grounded sibling
and thus more in charge). It is a vanity
publisher in the old tradition, not the on-demand world of today (although Woolcott
Publishing is a contemporary firm in the novel). But they also publish little
guidebooks, slices of life they call “The Beginner’s” series. Just fill in the rest of the title. Hence, The Beginner’s Goodbye is fittingly
about loss and reclamation.
Aaron,
like many other Tyler leading men, is damaged goods. Last time in Noah’s Compass it was Liam Pennywell. In this case, Aaron is in his late 30’s, has
a paralyzed arm, a stutter, and walks with a cane. His mother and his sister have basically
taken care of him and one would think bachelorhood would be his future, until
he meets Dorothy, a plain speaking, but not very compassionate doctor, some
eight years Aaron’s senior. The two most
unlikely people (for marriage) are married soon after they meet. Here is Tyler’s description of their courtship
as expressed by Aaron: It makes me sad
now to think back on the early days of our courtship. We didn’t know anything at all. Dorothy didn’t even know it was a courtship,
at the beginning, and I was kind of like an overgrown puppy, at least as I
picture myself from this distance. I was
romping around her all eager and panting, dying to impress her, while for some
time she remained stolidly oblivious.
Unfortunately,
Dorothy is the victim of a tragic (almost comical) accident, and Aaron is now a
widower. Here Tyler resorts to the contrivance of Dorothy “coming back,” Aaron
catching glimpses of her and having imaginary conversations….until he can learn
to say “goodbye.”
Tyler’s
description of Dorothy is consummately written, viewed by a woman of a woman,
although the narrative is Aaron’s: She
was short and plump and serious-looking.
She had a broad, olive-skinned face, appealingly flat-planed, and calm
black eyes that were noticeably level, with that perfect symmetry that makes
the viewer feel rested. Her hair, which
she cut herself in a heedless, blunt, square style, was deeply absolutely
black, and all of a piece. (Her family
had come from Mexico two generations before.) And yet I don’t think other people
recognized how attractive she was, because she hid it. Or, no, not even that; she was too unaware of
it to hide it. She wore owlish,
round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat –
wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes of a
type that waitresses favored in diners.
Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her
writs and her neck. Only I knew her
dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells. (Maybe a description to some degree of the
author?)
As
for the publishing concept, the “Beginners” books: These were something on the order of the Dummies books, but
without the cheerleader tone of voice – more dignified. And far more classily designed, with
deckle-edged pages [just like the book I’m holding] and uniform hard-backed
bindings wrapped in expensive, glossy covers.
Also, we were more focused – sometimes absurdly so, if you asked me.
(Witness The Beginner’s Spice Cabinet.)
Anything is manageable if it’s divided into small enough increments, was
the theory; even life’s most complicated lessons. Indeed, maybe even saying “goodbye.”
Fate
and chance figure heavily in Tyler’s work as does humor. A tree falls on their house, and a TV crushes
Dorothy’s chest: Sony Trinitrons are known
for their unusual weight.…If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still
be alive? Or if her patient hadn’t canceled.
Then she wouldn’t even have been home yet when the tree fell. Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead
of heading for the sunporch.
Tyler
describes most of her characters to a tee by defining the opposite, a “normal”
character in Aaron’s publishing company, Charles. Generally we deferred to Charles in matters of public taste. He was the only one of us who led what I
thought as a normal life – married to the same woman since forever, with
triplet teenage daughters. He liked to
tell little domestic-comedy, Brady Bunch –style anecdotes about the daughters,
and the rest of us would hang around looking like a bunch of anthropologists
studying foreign customs.
Aaron
moves in with his sister after he loses Dorothy and his house is partially
destroyed. In fact, he painstakingly avoids
going back to the house although it is being renovated. The contractor visits him at his
sister’s. Meanwhile, Dorothy begins to make
unexpected appearances to Aaron, even having conversations (in his mind). Everyone, in particular his secretary, Peggy,
tries to cater to him, bringing him food, trying to comfort him. But Aaron avoids the attention. This comes to a boil one day. Tyler’s dialogue shines:
‘”That is so, so
like you,” Peggy said.
“What?”
“Only you would
think of resenting someone’s doing you a kindness.”
“I just meant –“
“Normal people
say, ‘Why, thank you, dear. This makes me feel much better, dear. It makes me feel loved and valued.’”
“Okay…”
“But you:
oh, no. You act so sensitive, so
prickly; we all just walk on eggshells around you in case we might say the
wrong thing.”
I said, “How did
we end up with me all of a sudden?”
“It’s not fair,
Aaron. You expect too much of us. We’re not mind-readers. We’re all just doing
our best here; we don’t know; we’re just trying to get through life as best we
can, like everybody else!”
Getting
through life is what Tyler’s characters seem to be struggling to do and in the
process, finding some happiness along the way.
Even straight-laced Nandina finds it and finally Aaron does in a perhaps
contrived happy ending, that comically coincides with a new vanity title the
firm publishes, one that goes on to be one of their best seller’s, Why I Have Decided to Go On Living.
I’ve
made this observation before concerning some of my favorite writers as they
age. Tyler is one year older than I am, and thinking some of the same
thoughts. Aaron is trying to piece
together a photo album that was destroyed in the accident, frustrated that the
photos were not labeled, having difficulty identifying subjects and years the
photos were taken. This business of not
labeling photos reminded me of those antique cemeteries where the names have
worn off the gravestones and you can’t tell who is buried there. You see a little gray tablet with a
melted-looking lamb on top, and you know it must have been somebody’s child who
died, but now you can’t even make out her name or the words her parents chose
to say how much they missed her. It’s
just so many random dents in the stone, and the parents are long gone
themselves, and everything’s been forgotten.
Losing
a child. Indeed, the worst. And in the annals of time, “random dents in
stone.” But from the tragic-comic we
move to deadly serious, written on an entirely different plane, although it is
also in the first person, and as in other Shreve novels, written in the present
tense (narrated by a 30 year old as seen through the eyes of her 12 year old self). Losing a child (and then saving another one)
is central to this novel, Light on Snow. Consider some of Shreve’s opening sentences
that set the stage, both for the story and her style of writing:
“The stillness
of the forest is always a surprise, as if an audience had quieted for a
performance. Beneath the hush I can hear
the rustle of dead leaves, the snap of a twig, a brook running under a skin of
ice.”
“I am twelve on
the mid-December afternoon (though I am thirty now), and I don’t know yet that
puberty is just around the corner or that the relentless narcissism of a
teenage girl will make walking in the woods with my father just about the last
think I’ll want to do on any given day after school. Taking a hike together is a habit my father
and I have grown into. My father spends too many hours bent to his work, and I
know he needs to get outside.”
“A branch snaps
and scratches my cheek. The sun
sets. We have maybe twenty minutes left
of decent light.”
“My father has
lost the weight of a once sedentary man.
His jeans are threadbare in the thighs and tinged with the rusty fur of
sawdust. At best he shaves only every
other day. His parka is beige, stained
with spots of oil and grease and pine pitch.
He cuts his hair himself, and his blue eyes are always a surprise.”
The
father in the story is Robert Dillon, former successful architect, who two years
before lost his wife and their baby in an automobile accident and out of great
despondency quits his job and takes his then ten year old daughter, Nicky, and
simply drives north, settling in a remote town in New Hampshire where he (and
she) become virtual hermits, he taking up furniture making, Nicky more or less
being left to herself to go to a school where she knows no one.
Until,
in the woods and in the snow, they come across a new born baby that had been
abandoned only minutes before and from there the action begins, ultimately
leading to their getting involved with the police, the town, and finally, the
mother of the child. Chance and fate play roles in Shreve’s novel as in Tylers’.
It
is Shreve’s spare prose and character development that gives the simple plot suspense
and the feeling of loss and redemption.
It is also a coming of age story for Nicky who is desperately seeking
both a replacement for her lost mother and her lost sister. Perhaps the mother of the baby, Charlotte,
can be both?
Robert,
Nicky, and Charlotte are all changed by the time the tale is told, masterly by
Shreve.