A lot happens on each April 5th – 2019, 2020, and 2021. In his book Day: A Novel, Michael Cunningham tells the story of two couples plus a single gay brother whose search for meaning in their lives is intensified by the pandemic.
2019 sets the scene for the five main characters. Robbie, the brother, lives with his sister Isabel and her husband Dan and their two children. Robbie is asked to leave what was supposed to be temporary accommodations and find his own place. Dan’s brother, Garth, agreed to be a sperm donor when approached by his lesbian friend Chess and unexpectedly finds himself wanting a family relationship with the woman and her son.
Even though we are with each character for only a day each year, we get to know them well. Each person has a chapter and speaks in his or her own voice. They all have a difficult time. Living life in the 21st century when roles and expectations are changing is not easy. The women have careers and don’t want marriage and children as the center of their lives. The men take on child rearing and have chosen jobs that should have been fulfilling – art, music, teaching. Despite privileged middle class lives, they are unhappy. Ennui, boredom, and self-doubt fill the pages (maybe too much).
Except for Wolfe (the fake online creation of Isabel and Robbie) whose engaged energetic life, detailed in several posts per day, is self-assured and content. He is wish fulfillment personified and gets many likes. Through the contrast between made up Wolfe and the real characters, Cunningham makes it plain that “happiness ever after” is available only in a fairy tale. In real life, success and happiness come in small hard-won doses.
Around the time I was reading Day I watched My Life as a Turkey, a charming documentary based on the book Illumination in the Flatwoods by Joe Hutto. Joe is present when a clutch of wild turkeys hatches; he is the first thing they see and he is imprinted on them as their parent.
As he lives with the birds daily, he becomes convinced that the turkeys play and find joy in their everyday lives. If so, it was easier for the turkeys to find happiness than it was for Cunningham’s characters! Maybe too much choice is more a burden than a pleasure.
When I was young, I would often see in the media women I admired in some way. I liked the way one dressed; I admired the other’s poise; I envied still another’s ability to build something. They were all bright, energetic, and involved.
Now that I am in my 80s, it isn’t so easy to find an admirable woman my age in the media. And finding one as a main character in literature is almost impossible. I can think only of Miss Marple and Olive Kitteridge – but now there is also Mimsy Bell.
The feisty Mimsy is introduced to us in The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell, the debut novel by Laurel Dodge. Mimsy, 81, has returned to her childhood home in small town Maine, and we meet her sending letters to the love of her life, her teenage boyfriend who drowned sixty years ago. She puts each letter, about what she is doing, the local gossip, her worries and regrets, her memories, into a bottle which she tosses into the river where he was lost. These thoughtful, bitter-sweet letters make up the novel.
She had quite a life after she left home in the 60s – flower child, talented fiddle player, wife of a famous rock and roll star, touring with the band. Now the husband is dead, there has been a falling out with the band, there are no more drugs except for blood pressure, and she has returned home. Her perceptive thoughts about grief and loss, her determination to live in the present, to build a new life with new friends, her interest in preserving the beauty of the countryside around her – all give a second meaning to the book title’s “buoyant.”
I like that literature is starting to acknowledge the importance of the music of the 60s and 70s. Besides this book, I’ve recently read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (click to see my blog Nostalgia) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (Obscure Puzzles) and The Candy House (Now and Soon).
Although Buoyant’s main character is an octogenarian, the novel speaks to all ages. Fitting into a new environment, finding purpose in life, making oneself useful, overcoming hardships, all are universal issues.
As a bonus, it is beautiful book – with a lovely translucent orange front page. I didn’t find it in any libraries yet and it isn’t on Amazon, but it can be ordered from Littoral Books, Portland, Maine. https://littoralbooks.com
If anyone can think of other books with an old women as a main character, or literature that gives current music a prominent place, please leave a note in the comment section and share.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, that prolific couple, have each collaborated with a well-known mystery writer to produce thrillers of their own. In 2021, Hillary joined Louise Penny to write State of Terror (Politics and Crime). Bill, unemployed earlier than she, joined forces with James Patterson in 2018 to publish The President is Missing.
In Bill’s, the novel is suspenseful from the beginning. President Duncan faces a terrorist threat so dire that he takes the extraordinary step of leaving the White House and his security detail to meet with someone alone. The threat is a computer virus that has been patiently infiltrating all computer systems for three years: banks, Wall Street, insurance companies, hospitals, utilities, military, plus the Internet of Things which was a new term for me. It means the connections of our appliances, phones, thermostats, engines, etc to the internet. When the virus is activated, it will wipe clean all software, thus getting rid of all records at one time. Its nickname is “Dark Ages.”
Patterson keeps his plot with its many twists moving along. The President’s part is slower. We hear about vicious struggles for power within the government and the delicacy of international relationships. There is a long political speech at the end. But the President is brave and honorable and puts his country first; he reminded me more of Biden than Clinton.
Books with an old women as a main character: Peg and Rose Solve a Murder by Laurien Berenson, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Guide to Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto, Secret Lives by Mark de Castrique, Dangerous Women by Mark de Castrique, The Sunset Year of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, The Marlow Murder Club (Series) by Robert Thorogood, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon, An Elderly Lady is up to no Good by Helene Thurston, Killers of a Certain Age by Deanne Raybourn, The Old Woman With a Knife byByeong-Mo Gi.
Wow. Thanks. I have good reading to look forward to!