The Reading Corner, Issue 1

Emerging and Fading Voices

By: Pam Stolpman
Published March 9, 2010

(page 2 of 2)

Love and Summer
By William Trevor

With Love and Summer, Trevor brings us the story of Ellie Dillahan, a “foundling” who has been raised by nuns in Cloonhill, a small rural Irish convent. When the novel begins she has been married for nearly five years to a widower several years older than she, who lost his wife and young child in an accident several months before Ellie was “placed” with him as his housekeeper. After two years as his housekeeper and companion, the relationship naturally evolved into marriage, and Ellie’s only discontent was her failure to become pregnant.

And then Florian Kilderry, a charming young bachelor, returns to the neighboring town of Rathmoye to settle his parents’ estate by selling the property and paying the debts against it. Had Ellie had children to keep her busy, she might never have discovered that “she hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband.” Or had the relationships of her early life not entirely consisted of nuns and other young girls, with no more than a sighting of a man of any age, the plot might have taken a different turn. Instead, she is literally swept off her feet by simply talking with Florian, answering the mundane questions he asks her out of interest in how differently this young woman was raised. For his part, Florian is completely enchanted with Ellie’s calm, sweet demeanor, and simple beauty. Still, he is not naïve. While enchanted, he is aware that she is married, and that he will, at the end of the summer, be leaving Rathmoye for good.

Trevor gives us glimpses of Ellie’s husband throughout, as he wonders at his good luck in having found two such wonderful wives, and watches, with growing concern, as Ellie becomes noticeably and inexplicably saddened. We come to know him as a good hearted and gentle man.

In and around this story, Trevor interweaves the stories of so many of the people of Rathmoye, that we are left with a view into a complete, interdependent world, one filled with an enormous spirit of generosity and ordinary human kindness.

Excerpt:
Florian and Ellie are at the abandoned farm where they always meet. Florian finally reveals to Ellie that he has sold his property and will soon be leaving Ireland.

“Is it for ever that you’ll be going?”
“It is for ever.”

He would go and that he was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here. He would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard . . . when she fed the hens and stacked the turf. It would be there while she lay down beside the husband she had married, and while she made his food and cut his bread, and while the old-time music played.

My Father’s Tears, and Other Stories
By: John Updike

The difference in these short stories from Updike’s earlier, similarly autobiographical ones is that these are very clearly set at the end of the characters’ lives. In the forward to a collection of early stories, Updike described his younger self sitting in his office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where “my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – and to give the mundane its beautiful due.” The 18 stories in this posthumously published collection, all written in Updike’s last decade, have an added poignancy exactly because “the mundane” descriptions are those of someone looking back, reviewing the matters of a lifetime and grappling with the effects of aging, decline and death.

In The Full Glass, the final story of the collection, the main character is approaching eighty (Updike died at 76), and the “full glass” refers to the pure pleasure of having the glass of water that he drinks with his “life sustaining” pills at bedtime filled and ready to drink before he has even begun the nightly ritual of face washing, tooth brushing and so on. As he describes it: “Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eye drops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full . . . it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure . . . in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me . . .” The rest of the story details many of this character’s “full glass” moments over a lifetime he considers well lived. We, as readers, have the good fortune that Updike’s own life was not only precisely observed, but also so exquisitely recorded.

Excerpt from the short story Varieties of Religious Experience:
There is no God; the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall. Standing on [his daughter’s] terrace, he was still puzzling over the vast quantities of persistent oily smoke pouring from the Twin Towers, when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise.

(months later) By daylight, from the terrace, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were simply not there . . . They were not there, but Dan was here, and God with him; his conversion to atheism had not lasted. His church pledge needed to be delivered in its weekly envelopes; a minor committee of which he was a member continued to meet…Dan would have missed the mild-mannered fellowship - the handshakes under the vaulted ceiling, the awkward passing of the peace.

While he stood there the towers’ distant absence seemed a light throwing a shadow behind film, a weak shadow, but inextricable from his presence - the price, it could be said, of his being alive. He was alive, and a shadowy God with him, behind him. Human consciousness encompasses curious properties. However big things were, it could encompass them, as if it were even bigger. And it kept insisting on making a narrative of Dan’s life, however nonsensically truncated the lives of others - crushed in an instant, or snapped off on the birthing-bed - had been.

To read more of Pam Stolpman’s The Reading Corner book reviews, please click here to visit her blog page.

Article by Pam Stolpman

Pam Stolpman has lived at Trilogy Central Coast, with her husband, Paul, since December 2007. She and Paul were drawn to California, generally, because both grown sons and a set of grandchildren all live in the Bay area and, specifically, to the beauty of the Trilogy Community, itself, and the incomparable landscape and charm of the Central Coast. Pam is a retired clinical audiologist, and a published poet, whose greatest passions are reading, writing, and sharing ideas and thoughts about books she's found intriguing.