The Appearance of Wonder, Sorrow, and Coincidence

It is a story of duality.   We see the grandeur and beauty of the setting, the mountains, wild animals, the river ice cracking, snow falling.    But the hardships of homesteading the harsh Alaskan wilderness only bring the couple further loneliness, injury, and despair. 

Then, in the midst of this frozen landscape comes a wish improbably granted.  A little girl appears in the woods looking very much like the child they had made from snow the night before.  She wears its scarf and mittens.   Is she the snow child come to life?   Ivey’s answer is ambiguous.  The girl slowly joins the couple’s life, bringing them the gifts of love and warmth.  Neighbors visiting across the ice become friends, then family; a young man, a surrogate son; and the magic child herself enables them to be the parents they so wanted to be. 

Ivey explores the independent wildness in all of us juxtaposed with the need for love and companionship.  This is a sophisticated telling of an old-fashioned kind of fairy tale, the kind before Disney.  Things didn’t always work out “happily ever after,” but showed life the way it really was with both joys and sorrows.

One of the themes of Ivey’s novel underlines this maxim. Enjoy what you have when you have it because things don’t last forever.

But then – “something happens” to the princess daughter at the prom.  The family is blasted apart, leaving members to grieve and rebuild in their own very individual ways.   Although this particular story seems dated, (the setting is the 70’s; the cultural feeling is the 50’s), the pain and sorrow of trauma are depressingly timeless.  Recovery is a long road.

Oates wrote at a time when novelists thought many lists and precise details made the story more realistic.  For those of us who disagree, the novel is balanced by Oates’s insight into betrayal, cruelty, weakness, revenge, and like the book above, that old cliché, “This too shall pass.” Bad things don’t last forever either.

“Nothing is, my dear.  Only what our opinions make of it.”

My reading friends and I are not the only ones thinking about Joyce Carol Oates lately.  Popping up in my newsfeed today is “Who’s Afraid of Joyce Carol Oates?” by Miles Klee who writes about digital cultural in Mel Magazine.  Klee describes himself as “Mel’s resident tank-top dirt bag, shitposter, and meme expert.”  Not my usual kind of reading material. 

But hurray for 83-year-old Oates to be singled out by the hip younger generation.  Klee describes her Twitter account as one where “A relatively normal day online can tilt into chaos whenever Oates has an idea that travels unfiltered from her mind palace to her feed…She’s an artist, and it’s a pleasure to witness her bold, non-predictable craft.”

One of her more arresting posts: “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naïve?”  Well, that stands apart from the crowd.

The bears in the woods take full advantage, visiting farms for sheep and cat dinner with honey for dessert.  When one uncharacteristically attacks a human, the residents, besotted with guns, take their beloved weapons out for exercise.

The joke-like title prepares the reader for a quirky and humorous book, but this nonfiction work also provides a serious exploration of the unexpected consequences of libertarian thinking.  City inhabitants may be successful in limiting laws about trash removal, fire and police departments, but they can’t do anything about the rules of nature and leave themselves vulnerable to problems solved long ago by civilization.  Vivid, sympathetic portraits bring the residents and their town to life.

Published in 2020, this discussion of personal freedom is very timely.  We might not have bears, but we do have a virus invasion which, like the bears in the book, attacks the vulnerable who pay the price for the “personal choices” of others.

My husband and I have been hiking and bird watching in the woods many times in our lives, but never, until now, have we encountered a live bear. 

While I was reading this book, we were birdwatching in the Washington Cascades, along a trail marked “Wildlife Viewing” when we paused to look at an odd, out of place nest.   Osprey?  It was barely five feet above us – much too low.  Then I saw its three-inch claws.  We were out of there in a hurry and this photo is not ours, but courtesy of Google.  As we met other walkers we warned them, but one group took it as an invitation.  We saw them later, all excited, as they said yes, it most certainly was a bear.  It had uncurled itself and ambled down the tree into the chokecherries.  Was it a cub?  Oh no, she said.  It was bigger than me!