Toward the end of “Lake Effect,” the new novel by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Clara Larkin recounts at a dinner party the story of her mother’s decision to leave her family for the married man across the street.
Read more What we know about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding
A woman Clara doesn’t know responds to the story by asking, “Wasn’t that what everyone was doing in the seventies?”
And just like that everyone dismissed the story — “the conversation moved on to a new downtown restaurant.” It is the beginning of Clara’s decision to let go of the pain she had been carrying since high school when her mother blew up their family.
Readers are supposed to applaud development. Clara is a difficult character to like. Maybe she made too big a deal of the whole divorce thing. After all, everyone was doing it. In the wake of the “elopement,” Clara does not speak to her mother, Nina, and does not visit her and makes it very hard for her younger sister to do so either. Clara has a reasonably competent father, but she takes over the role of keeping house, cooking and watching over her sister. When she decides not to go to college in order to stay in this role, her mother says to her, “I truly hope this is the last time you hurt yourself by exaggerating the importance of your presence.”
What an awful thing to say when a girl is abandoned by her mother and sees herself as needing to fill in.
Both “Lake Effect” and “Whistler,” Ann Patchett’s recently released novel, are interested in the question of what happens to children when adults decide to end their marriages. Both books give reasonable accounts of why the adults would want to leave their marriages. Coincidentally, both Nina and Abigail, the mother in “Whistler,” find themselves married to men who are gay but in the closet. Is that enough reason to end a marriage?
Read more 18 people injured in explosions as French president visits Syria
Despite Nina’s guilt about breaking up her family, her loveless marriage seems to her a reasonable justification. Abigail’s decision, though we don’t see it from the same vantage point, suggests that her husband’s regular infidelity was an issue. While both novels take place during a time when people had fewer options, the question is still whether the ultimate end of marriage is personal fulfillment or whether the former should be sacrificed when the latter can’t be achieved.
“Whistler” is told from the perspective of Daphne, Abigail’s daughter, who as an adult has a chance encounter with her mother’s second husband, Eddie. He was only in her life for a couple of years but had an enormous (and positive) influence on her and her younger sister. He was kind and clearly a stabilizing influence on their mother. He was cultured and well-read. During the most important interaction, Eddie helps Daphne overcome her fears to save their lives after a car accident. Abigail banished Eddie from their lives afterward — though she never explains why — and it would be decades before Daphne sees him again. Her mother marries again and has more kids but it’s clear that Daphne never gets the kind of love, attention and stability that Eddie offered.
Slowly Daphne (with the encouragement of her sister, a therapist) realizes the hole that was left in their lives when they lost Eddie. Abigail dismisses his importance in the life of her daughters, and even when her sister tries to tell the story of Daphne saving Eddie’s life, her mother says, “That’s a little hyperbolic.”
Why do parents underestimate the impact that their absence has on children? It’s hard not to. Children can seem “resilient.” Daphne never tells her mother what Eddie meant to her. As a 9-year-old, did she really know? Clara makes clear what the divorce means — she feels her mother’s absence so hard that she tries to replace her — but the adults in her life have made their decision. She is just presented with the fait accompli.
Our divorce rate has reached a low point recently — in part because we’re not getting married as much. We have come a long way since the ’70s when “everyone” was doing it. Though both novels describe the pain of adults trapped in loveless marriages because of the conventions of their times, the stories are also an acknowledgment of the wreckage left behind when adults tried to extricate themselves.
Read more Microsoft slashes Xbox workforce amid underperforming role in global AI race