★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
On the surface, this is a story about Ruth and Lucille, two young girls who are raised by a succession of relatives in an impoverished lakeside village in Idaho. The girls face a series of abandonments that create a tension throughout the book of when they might find themselves adrift and alone again.
Yet there are layers within layers in this one. This is a novel, yes, but also a ruminative memoir on grief, on loneliness, and on the power of memory to rekindle these losses again and again over time. I’ll be reading along and following the story, and in the middle of a paragraph, slip through a rift to find myself on a whole different level in the novel with deeply symbolic references, many of them Biblical, and all of them a lifetime away from Ruth’s first-person narrative. I might read a passage three or four times and not suss it at all. I understand the words, but not the meaning, at least on the intellectual level. But, at the same time, I do understand on a subconscious level. Like the best kind of poetry.
There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.
This is a book to take slow and let it flow over you, trusting that the story and the many poetic rifts will weave together in a satisfactory way. The end of this novel could not have been more perfect. I might have struggled along the way, but I’m better for having read it.
Highlights
But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.
Then there is the matter of my mother’s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.