Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the 32nd one.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. There’s this beautiful Alice Munro story—I mean extra beautiful, they’re all beautiful— “Jakarta,” about these two young couples at a beach for the summer. Sonje and Cottar hold big get-togethers on the beach and have a kind of hippyish lifestyle. Kath and Kent are more conservative. They have a one-year-old daughter and can’t really party with Sonje and Cottar, and anyway, Kent disapproves of Sonje’s and Cottar’s ways. Kath and Sonje have a friendship where they kind of talk around their discomfort in their marriages, their serious doubts.
Because this is an Alice Munro story, as you’re reading it and trying to keep track of who Kath is and which one she’s married to, etc., you also are intensely captivated by the drama of these uncomfortable marriages and the tiny ways that the discomfort is conveyed by all involved parties.
The situation each woman is in is very stressful and you become extremely anxious about it. The things they say to each other are threatening, because they are both so uncomfortable. Their conversations approach the edges of their unhappiness and discomfort. Their marriages—and, more important, the way their marriages seem— reflect their sense of inadequacy, values they don’t have, ways of being they don’t want to be. “‘My happiness depends on Cottar,’” Sonje tells Kath. “That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn’t want it to be true of herself. But she didn’t want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.”
Anyway, point being: the whole situation is set up, we learn a lot about both women, both marriages, the story’s going along, and then, when you’re feeling really stressed out and worried, and—
slash
—it’s decades later. All these peoples’ lives have become disentangled from each others’. Kent is on a trip visiting a bunch of people from his past, and he stops to see Sonje, who has spent years caring for Cottar’s mother, Delia. Cottar is dead. Kent is on his third marriage. Kath lives in Ontario. At first you don’t understand what is happening, why Sonje and Kent are sitting together talking—then, after a few lines of dialogue, you do.
A reeling sense of time’s power.
Time just worked them. We don’t know the details of the disentanglings. They no longer matter to anyone in the story at this late date; they no longer matter to the story itself. It’s not that either character has achieved some sense of peace or anything; they both seem pretty caught up in themselves and their problems, just as we last knew them. But the problems we last knew them with are gone from the face of the earth.
I think about this story when there’s a new year coming or when I have a huge problem. Time will work me. That’s what it does.
Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Lucy
never read this one - what a pleasure... also btw finished The Walmart Book of the Dead in one go New Year's Eve - beautiful, sad, and such luminous writing. I hope there's more.
Off to a good start this year re-reading Alice Munro stories thanks to you!