The Dog of the Marriage

(Author's note: Sorry for not posting this last night! I passed out about thirty-six seconds into watching the first Harry Potter movie for the first time in seven, no eight [fuck, I'm getting old], years.)

Reading, writing. Writing and reading. I made myself sick this morning, reading this book on the way into the city, the train car shifting on the track as I read about guide dogs and divorce. I did better with it last night, tucked into bed with my own dog (not quite calm enough nor independent enough to be among the pages of Hempel, he who struggles spastically on his leash to get away from a tipped over, empty trash can on the mornings when the neighbors put theirs out to be picked up, emptied, and thrown haphazardly onto the sidewalk by the men who cling bolding to the backs of the garbage truck) curled around my hip, his head resting drowsily in the crease where my propped up torso met my legs.

But finish it I did, and happily.

For all of our sakes, I promise this will be shorter than the others. Have you noticed them creeping up in length from 2100 to 2700 to 3100 words each? Do not fear: half of this book and subsequent note taking was lost in nausea. This will be brief.

But don’t let the brevity suggest that this book was anything other than startlingly lyrical, poignant, suspenseful in its manipulation of details, thought provoking, and pause inducing.

The writing is pared down to the essentials, no fragrant adverbs, no flowery adjectives. Simply lyrical in its unapologetically bare prose. Paragraphs end in lines that one would expect to find in a poem, or are so short that they feel like prose poetry. One of the pieces, “Memoir,” is a one-line story (poem?) that forces the reader to pause and admit the truth and humor in it: “Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” (95).

But let’s jump directly into the heart of it, shall we?

The epigraph sets the tone of the entire collection: “But the greatest desire of all is to be/ In the dream of another, / To feel a slight pull, like reins, / To feel a heavy pull, like chains.” In each story we encounter a character in a heightened state of loneliness, in a time immediately after the trauma of a divorce, a death, a sexual assault, or the return of an old lover. In none of them is this loneliness romanticized. Instead, they each reach for something more, a lover to replace a dead wife, the marital drama of an overheard neighbor.

There is an underlying ambivalence in their loneliness, an avoidance of the deeper consequences of their current situations, a quiet quality of lives that lack purpose and direction. It reminds me of lonely souls in Dave Eggers’ short stories, How We Are Hungry. In “Jesus Is Waiting,” the main character drives aimlessly along the east coast, purchasing hot peppers to “be good for whatever there was to be good for” (12). When she speaks to the gas attendant she asks him for directions: “’Where’s anywhere else?’” (10). She seems unconcerned when he doesn’t even point. In these stories, told by such vivid narrators, the sense is that each of us is so important, so unique, so deeply complicated. In “The Dog of the Marriage,” the narrator speaks of a piece of heirloom jewelry given to her by her ex-mother-in-law. She describes how little care she took of it, leaving it in a drawer occupied by mice. When she opens the drawer later, she finds the brooch surrounded by the shit left by the scavengers: “I thought about it, but I did nothing about it, and now the timeworn jewelry was in this sorry setting when it should have been safe in a tiny velvet pouch. All of us should be safe in a tiny velvet pouch” (24). That is the driving force of the collection: how we need to be cared for, to be loved, to love, to be seen, to be put to good use, and to be looked after.

This theme of loneliness, I’m convinced, is haunting me in my literary selections. But let’s really consider the works in which it has been the most striking: it is not specific to singles, to divorced wives, or widowed men. Even in the seemingly life-long marriage of Olive and Henry Kitteridge, loneliness pervades. I pity those people who avoid experiencing it, who stay in relationships that no longer fulfill them, who date without end a string of meaningless men. We are, each of us, always alone, even when we are together. Maybe it’s not the loneliness haunting me. Maybe I seek out the loneliness between the lines, between pages nine and ten, because I love characters, authors, plotlines that embrace it.

On that uplifting note, I give this collection four out of five stars.