[Thursday 3pm #29] Janet Hobhouse and The Furies October 15, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review.add a comment
Janet Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer in 1991 in her forties. She didn’t finish editing The Furies, but it’s seen as her greatest work. It deserves to be read.
Reviewers invariably treat it as autobiography rather than the novel it was published as, and it certainly has the feel of autobiography. The trajectory of the narrative has all the repetitiousness and random intrusions of life itself. It starts before the narrator is born, with the tangle of family that led to her:
That my mother, who viewed herself as as related to very few other beings in the universe, should have descended in a mere three generations from this world of wealth and kindness, this reliable multiplicity of connected others, this cohabitation of cousins, aunts, servants etc., says something about the speed of American life in this century, which cannot only provide a solitary immigrant with the means to create, in a matter of decades, a secure and well-populated dynasty, but can also, and at the same rate, take all these steps in reverse, reducing, as in our case, a huge, prosperous, civically active and internationally connected clan to a mere handful of desperate solitaries, operating like ball-bearings in outer space.
The book follows the narrator through childhood and adulthood, to the horror of her mother’s suicide and the sudden plunge into cancer. A postscript of apparent recovery; we know this wasn’t to last. It’s a book and a life with many tragedies. I felt the same as one reviewer who said to read this book is to get to know Janet Hobhouse, only to lose her. She seems like someone who would have been worth knowing.
Her prose has an unusual quality: confessional, honest without a hint of apology. Her story is compelling, giving the feel of life without even zooming in on many scenes, but capturing the flow of it.
(PS: Couldn’t help being delighted by the similarity of title and name to my novel. Hobhouse/Hobby – The Furies/ The Fur.)
[Thursday 3pm #28] The Hoarding Recluses: A Review of E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer and Langley” October 8, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, books, history.Tags: Collyer, doctorow, Homer & Langley
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Homer and Langley Collyer were two hoarding recluses who suffered notorious celebrity, at least in New York City, in the 1940s as they fought against the power company, the bank, and the city council. They lived in a large house inherited from their parents and filled it with everything they could get their hands on. Homer was blind; Langley saved years of newspapers in massive piles (‘like cotton bales’ Doctorow imagines) in case Homer ever got his sight back and wanted to catch up on the news. By the end, the paranoid brothers had set traps around the house and could barely move through the narrow passageways between junk. They died within days of each other in 1947 and compulsive hoarding is named after them – Collyer Syndrome. According to Wikipedia, 103 tonnes of rubbish was removed from their house:
Items removed from the house included baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child’s chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old.
From such promising source material in the hands of a masterful novelist, Homer & Langley disappointed me. It feels like a novel which never takes off. Narrated by Homer, it is an episodic account of his life from childhood to the late 1970s (Doctorow has the brothers live on several decades longer than they did in real life). A gangster and a group of hippies stay with the brothers at different times, and many others come into their lives for a little time only to leave again. Doctorow doesn’t stay with any of these characters long enough for their interactions with the Collyers to take on enough significance.
The other problem is the first person narration. It doesn’t suit the story Doctorow is telling. We need a narrator who can see the significance and full eccentricity of the Collyers, rather than one to whom their life is insignificant. We need fresh eyes – and Homer has no sight at all – to describe the wonders of the hoarded house.
Perhaps the conflict with the power company and banks would have been more compelling if there was a character representing one of them, an antagonist in ongoing conflict with the Collyers, instead of a couple of faceless stand-offs at the front door.
The charms of this novel are in Homer’s philosophy of the world and his mad projects.
He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. For five cents, Langley said, the reader will have a portrait in newsprint of our life on earth. The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would be only an example. The reader will always be up to date, and au courant with what is going on. He will be assured that he reads the indispensable truths of the day including that of his own impending death, which will be dutifully recorded as a number in the blank box on the last page under the heading Obituaries. (p.49)
At moments like these, the novel brings to mind Paul Auster and the fascinating life projects of his characters.
I could find only one non-fiction book written about the Collyers; it’s called Ghosty men : the strange but true story of the Collyer brothers by Franz Lidz.
[Thursday 3pm #25] Endpoint and other poems : a dispatch from the afterlife September 17, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in John Updike, Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, death, poetry.add a comment
Reading John Updike’s final book, a collection of poems, is like receiving a dispatch from the afterlife. The poems take us nearly up to the point of his death from lung cancer in January this year. He sent the manuscript off and then he died.
The cover photo has a poignancy to it, with its spontaneous, snapshot quality, the sombre ordinariness of it in its black and whiteness, and the sense that John is about to head off down a path we can’t follow him down, not yet.
The collection starts with the ‘Endpoint’ sequence that takes us through each of his last birthdays, starting with his seventieth in 2002, and then into his diagnosis and swift death. His thoughts range across his life, from childhood to old age, as he reflects on mortality, aging, memory. In 2005 he writes
A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? (p.8)
In hospital, having learnt of his death he writes:
Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown. (p. 23)
His final reflections are baldly honest. His poetry is less ornate than his prose, and it makes him seem more vulnerable, frail. He has let me in on the final secret journey he took, which I only learned he had taken when his death was announced that hot, hot January day.
After the ‘Endpoint’ sequence, are pages and pages of other poems, as if to say John is not really dead, as if to say he’s still alive like he should be, like I thought he would be.
[Thursday 3pm #23] Possession: the novel and the film September 3, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, film review.Tags: A.S. Byatt, Possession
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Novel: Possession: A Romance / A.S. Byatt (1990)
Film: Possession (2002)
The novel
I found Possession an engrossing novel. It is the story of two contemporary literary scholars – Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey – who discover a secret affair between two (fictional) nineteenth century poets – Randolph Ash and Christobel LaMotte. The scholarly world is captured with all its interesting intrigues.
At one level, the novel’s title refers to questions of ownership over history and historical figures and their traces. The theme is illuminated by Roland Mitchell’s initial act of theft of a draft of a letter from Ash to LaMotte when he discovers it in a book Ash once owned. Mitchell feels it’s his discovery and he should ‘possess’ it; a feeling intensified as he enlists Maud’s help and they find themselves on the run from other Randolph Ash scholars, including the American collector Mortimer Cropper whose massive cheque-book allows him to ‘possess’ many Ash relics.
The word ‘possession’ also sums up the exploration of romance and relationships. In both the nineteenth century affair between Ash and LaMotte and the contemporary one between Roland and Maud, the lovers struggle with the nature of love. Is it about possessing the other?
The nineteenth century narrative is created purely through documents (with the exception of the epilogue) – including letters written by the lovers, diaries by their respective partners (Ash’s wife, LaMotte’s lesbian partner), and pages and pages of their poems. The poems read just like nineteenth century poems; an incredible achievement. But they bored me and I skipped over pages of them – I wanted to read a novel, not poems!
The film
The film version of Possession takes just 98 minutes to adapt a 511 page novel. It is both a simplification and a ‘greatest hits’ collection of scenes that on its own – without knowledge of the novel – lacks emotional power and significance. Trying to develop two parallel romances in different centuries in that short amount of time is impossible, and the film makers barely even try – Maud and Roland, the present day lovers, are reduced to one awkward encounter and then discussion of it.
The thriller element of the novel, with different parties pursuing the secret of Ash and LaMotte is only lightly used in the film, a strange decision given its cinematic potential. The film-makers do use the dramatic grave robbing climax, but in a truncated and disappointing scene which doesn’t make much sense. Roland Mitchell wrestles the box from Cropper and takes it away to look at it with Maud, no more ethical than Cropper himself.
The most disconcerting aspect of the film is the casting of big jawed hunk Aaron Eckhart as the supposedly shy and bookish unemployed scholar Roland Mitchell. In the book his girlfriend calls him ‘Mole’, a name no-one would apply to Aaron Eckhart’s character. Probably to appeal to the American audience, he has also become American, when his Englishness was so central to his character in the novel.
[Thursday 3pm #7] Youth and age : a review of Tolstoy’s War and Peace May 14, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, history.Tags: Lubbock, Napoleon, War and Peace
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War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy (1865-8; translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1958)
It’s common to hear that War and Peace contains all of life, depicting the full range of human experiences. As a reader, it also evoked the full range of reading experiences for me, from the exhiliration of acute insight that resonated with my experience of life, to boring pages I wanted to flick over; from thrilling narrative drive to moments of narrative listlessness.
I have spent so long reading it – five weeks – that I have begun to feel that I was never going to read another novel, that this was the novel which would last me the rest of my life.
My dad asked me to sum up the plot. I couldn’t do that. How about this: it’s about three Russian families in the time of the wars against Napoleon’s army between 1804 and 1812, with an epilogue set several years later?
Percy Lubbock thinks ‘War and Peace’ is a bad title and I agree. (Even though it captures the epic nature of the work and has become a cliche in itself.) Or it’s not a bad title, but it focuses attention on one half of the novel, and the less interesting part to my mind – war and peace are the backdrop for an exploration of ‘Youth and Age’. Has a ring to it, I think. Better than its insights into war are the insights into the impetuousness of youth, the mad zeal which would drive young men to throw their lives away for the sake of glory; or the dive into marriages ranging at first from the unsatisfying to the miserable; and the insights into the quiet wisdom of age, or the fastidious fussiness of it; or just the depiction of characters – particularly Pierre and Natasha – moving from youth and into age.
In the first half, as possible ideas for this review ran through my head, I was going to write how remarkable it is that Tolstoy avoids the intrusiveness of so much nineteenth century writing; he doesn’t intervene with pages of boring exposition about history or culture but lets the story tell itself. And yet in the second half, Tolstoy becomes very interventionist, hammering home several key points that are worthy in themselves but are belaboured and out of place.
A lot of the problem seems to come about because Tolstoy spends so much time debating the historians of his age. He wants to rehibiliate the reputation of the commander of the Russian army, Kutuzov, who Tolstoy saw as a hero and not a fool for abandoning Moscow and refusing to directly engage the retreating French army.
He wants to prove that Napoleon was no genius.
He wants to elucidate his own theory of history and of war, that it is not made by Great Men but by inscrutable forces, the sum of millions of individual decisions which no one person can particularly influence one way or the other. A theory that sits well with contemporary views of history, but that he shows so well in his novel he doesn’t even need to explain.
In short, Tolstoy addresses the concerns of his day, the debates around the Napoleonic Wars that were going on fifty years after the event but which matter very little to most readers of War and Peace today. If only he knew that he would one day be as famous as Napolean and that readers would be more interested in the brilliance of his psychological depictions of his characters than in his contribution to historical debates.
My favourite character is Pierre. He has an ineffectual idealism; he stumbles into life. The illegitimate son of a rich prince, he receives a massive inheritance thanks to an older woman’s political acumen. He goes from being treated as a shabby, uncouth zealot to a desirable bachelor. He marries the wrong woman because she charms him; he lets himself be robbed and mistreated over and over. Stuck in a carriage with a freemason, he joins that movement with high ideals, only to find that the other members don’t share them, that the movement can’t live up to its own claims.
Perhaps the most fascinating, almost Dostoeveskian passage, involves him staying behind in Moscow as the French army invades and getting in his head the idea that he is the chosen one destined to assasinate Napoleon. Being Pierre, it doesn’t turn out right and he is captured as a prisoner of war while rescuing a baby from a fire. Perhaps I should have known that there had to be a happy ending for him; after being set free, he finally marries the woman who was meant for him all along.
Tolstoy finishes with two epilogues; the second is regrettable, a long meditation on war and history not at home in a novel at all. But the first is fascinating, a glimpse into the lives of the characters years later, as the surviving ones come together, now with children, another generation arising, and yet so many of the old quirks and problems remaining. It gives the novel an even bigger sense of expanse, a glimpse that this could keep on going on forever if only Tolstoy had more pages.
Between you and me : a review February 26, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Christian writing, Western Australia, book review, poetry.1 comment so far
Between you and me / By Amber Fresh (2009)
Let me tell you a secret: the last six years I’ve found it hard to enjoy poetry. Something changed in my brain sometime around 2003. But then there’s collections like this one that remind me how good poetry can be.
Amber is a Perth poet and this small collection evokes a certain scene in Perth so well, of poetry readings, of enduring a session at the Ocean Beach Hotel, of twenty and thirtysomething parties, of Coles carparks and of the inner suburbs.
Her poems have a casual, insightful humour which manages, paradoxically, to also be passionate and intense. Thus in ‘Casual as’:
While you were at the bar
trying to organise some
casual sex
I was in my room
writing a melancholy song for you
and drawing a comic about how we met
…
But that’s because
I didn’t know then
that you were at a bar
making other arrangements
That phrase ‘making other arrangements’ gets me every time I read it – such a brilliant piece of sarcasm and so terribly sad, using that rather old fashioned phrase to devastating effect.
These poems show an ability to express states of mind and stray, strange thoughts that I believed no-one else knew about it. Thus in ‘Did you do it’:
i hit myself in the face
to see what it would feel like
it felt like
did you do it?
Two poems deal in a fascinating way with faith; in “1 Corinthians 6:18″, the Holy Spirit is compared to ‘an X-men girl/ who turns boys to dust/ with a touch of her hand’. It’s an earnest, distinctive take on evangelical experience. In “Jesus is my homeboy”, the poet hears God tells her to take her doona to some people who will need it ‘on the corner of aberdeen and station street’. It’s a poem of quiet faith that doesn’t lose its sense of humour just because it’s talking about God.
The collection hangs together so well. I was left at the end feeling like I’d read a short novel, that I’d experienced a season in the poet’s life. It was a season that felt a bit like the film You and me and everyone we know, with that same quirky take on big questions, a bit like Leunig’s cartoons, and a bit like (I’m not sure why this came into my head) Leonard Cohen’s novel Favourite Game.
You can buy the book at Oxford Books in Leederville (I’m told it’s on the counter) or from Amber herself – amberinparis@hotmail.com. It costs around $15 plus postage.
Christianity as grace and mystery : Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead February 6, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Christian writing, Christianity, book review.Tags: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
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Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)
In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Ames has lived in the Iowan town of Gilead all his life. It is a digressive testament, journal-like, added to day by day. It starts out in the past, focusing on the conflict between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, both ministers of the same church he now pastors. The second half focuses on the present return of his prodigal grandson, Jack Boughton, and Ames struggle to love Jack. In the end, love wins out and Jack confides his secret to Ames.
Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It was twenty-four years since her previous novel and it feels like the sort of novel a writer might spend decades on.
It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) It is a novel which shows a lot of love for people and the world, even in their ugliness and brokenness.
Ames’ grace contrasts with his grandfather’s ‘activism’ and his father’s ‘holiness’. Robinson is contrasting three streams of Christianity – what Richard Foster would call in Streams of Living Water the social justice, holiness and incarnational streams. For Ames’ grandfather, Christianity means justice at any cost, and he steals and shoots to achieve it. For Ames’ father, having no part in evil is what counts, and he leaves the church for a time during the war to sit with the pacifist Quakers.
Robinson privileges Ames’ type of Christianity – a moderate, grace-filled faith of small things. There’s less certainty and more mystery.
There are few novels that are both so Christian and so accomplished. There are evangelicals writing consciously Christian novels which are Christianised popular fiction. There are great writers (Updike and Greene, both now deceased; Winton) with Christian tendenancies or some measure of faith writing novels which have some Christian themes. But there are few writers writing great literature that are so drenched in a Christian worldview.
And yet having said that, I didn’t connect to the novel as much as I wanted to. I think it just comes down to my personal aesthetics of writing, that this isn’t the kind of book I like to read best. Perhaps it’s the lack of particular kind of narrative drive I miss. Perhaps I like less saintly narrators with more ambition and sin to their name.
Last year, Robinson published a follow-up novel from the perspective of Jack. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Paul Auster’s Moon Palace : an overview February 3, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Paul Auster, book review.Tags: Moon Palace
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(Moon Palace is my second favourite novel of all time. I just finished reading it for the third time and I wanted to write an outline of the novel for future reference and to help my own understanding. I hope to write another post exploring why it is so important to me.)
This story of how Marco Stanley Fogg’s life ‘began’ is told in first person; at one point he specifies that he’s writing in 1986, fifteen years after the narrative ends. We don’t learn anything of these intervening years save a single scene; its the first twenty-three years of M.S. Fogg’s life we learn about.
M.S. tells his childhood quickly, giving us summaries and a few brief incidents. When his mother is killed in a traffic accident, he is adopted by his Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor is a member of a band called the Moonmen and has a big influence on the young M.S.. He gets him thinking, gets him reading and teaches him that names have a power; they aren’t just co-incidental – the baseball player Glen Hobbie will never make it big, because his name implies amateurism; M.S.’s name itself carries much better significances – the explorers Marco Polo, Stanley Livingstone, Phileas Fogg. M.S. himself goes on to reflect on the initials M.S. which become his name and the idea of his life as a manuscript, a narrative in progress. When he heads to Columbia University, his uncle gives him his collection of 1492 books. The boxes form the furniture of M.S.’s apartment.
M.S. hasn’t finished university when news reaches him of his uncle’s death. Money was always going to be tight, but by the time he’s paid off Victor’s debts, he knows he is living on limited time, that he has to do something or he will not have the money to finish. And yet in an irrational act of quixotism, a kind of bravery or solitude or stubbornness, he decides to do nothing, to see what will happen to him.
His concession to his situation is to sell off his uncle’s books, but he reads each one before he sells it. Since the books were stacked chronologically, the sequence of titles resembles the sequence in which his uncle read them – except that the boxes themselves are not in order – and in doing so, he feels he relives his uncle’s life. (This might seem a small point, but it is the touches like this that are part of the brilliance of the novel for me.)
When he runs out of money, he goes to visit his friend David Zimmer (who, of course, reappears in Auster’s The Book of Illusions). Zimmer has moved on, but he bursts into a breakfast party held by the new tenants. They feed him; he eats ravenously and meets his ‘twin’ – Kitty Wu, who is wearing the same t-shirt as him.
Soon he is kicked out of his apartment. He goes to live in Central Park. He gets sick, holes up in a cave and is on the verge of death when Kitty and Zimmer finally find him. Kitty has been looking for him for some time; she never felt so sorry for anyone in her life, she tells him, than when she met him that one time at breakfast.
He recovers in Zimmer’s apartment for several months and is rejected for the Vietnam draft. Zimmer urges him to go and pursue Kitty; she’s in love with him and she’s waiting for him to make the next move. Kitty and M.S. become lovers, discovering in each other true soulmates.
M.S. needs money; he answers an advertisement and becomes a companion to one Thomas Effing, an elderly bad tempered man who is either blind or pretending to be blind. M.S. moves in to Effing’s house, leaving Zimmer behind. At this point Zimmer disappears from the narrative and M.S.’s life, which seems extraordinary – why didn’t Kitty and M.S. keep up with him, at least? In the only flash-forward, M.S. tells us that the only time he’s seen Zimmer since was four years ago, in 1982, when he saw him, his wife and kids walking down the street and stops and talks to him for twenty minutes.
(We don’t read about this incident in The Book of Illusions; the only link to M.S. we learn about in that novel is that one of Zimmer’s sons – who die soon after in a plane crash – is named Marco. Surely Zimmer would have told M.S.? I don’t think Auster had realised he was going to do this when he wrote Moon Palace; if only he could go back and adjust it.)
After some space devoted to the great love between M.S. and Kitty, Kitty moves out of focus for a chapter as M.S.’s adventures with Thomas Effing come to the fore. I make the mistake of picturing Effing as the Big Lebowski, the one in the wheel-chair, from the Coen brothers’ film, but this is wrong. Both are grumpy and insane, but Effing is a tragic figure as much as a comic one.
M.S. takes Effing for walks, and must describe the world to him, quickly and precisely, noticing all the details he has taken for granted. Then one day Effing declares he is going to die in two months and it’s time to get started on his obituary. Effing tells his life story, a story which parallels and resonates with M.S.’s. Effing was born Julian Barber in a wealthy family. He was a painter and disliked his ‘frigid’ wife. He sets off into the Utah wilderness with the heir of another rich family to paint the unique light. Their guide is unscrupulous and when the young heir falls down a ravine and is fatally injured, the guide refuses to stay with him or to take him back. Effing stays with him as he dies and then wonders what to do.
Fearing his name will be mud because of the death of the heir but perhaps also sensing the opportunity, Effing decides to not return, to stay out there in the wilderness. Just on the point of death, he finds a murdered hermit in a cave. He decides to take over the hermit’s life, and paints his best paintings ever, knowing that no-one will ever see them, painting them only for himself. He learns that the hermit was murdered by a gang of robbers and that the robbers will be back. When they return, he’s waiting for them, killing all three and taking their loot. Rich again, he heads back to civilisation, exiled from everyone he once knew and living under his new identity of ‘Thomas Effing’.
In time, he learns that he actually fathered a son the night before he left for Utah and he observes the man’s life from afar. His son’s name is Solomon Barber and he is a history academic.
His time nearly up, Effing wants to give away the original amount of money he took from the robbers. Despite his bad health, he forces M.S. to take him into the streets where they give away the money. On the last night, it’s pouring with rain but Effing insists on continuing and M.S. realises he is determined to die. Sure enough, he catches pneumonia and holds onto life only until two minutes past midnight on the day he had nominated as his day of death.
Effing leaves M.S. a sum of money and for a time Kitty and M.S. enjoy a blissful, carefree existence living together. M.S., meanwhile, writes to Solomon Barber, who is keen to meet M.S..
Sol realises as soon as he meets M.S. that M.S. is the son he didn’t know he had. While a professor he slept with M.S.’s mother – his nineteen year old student – in the morning they were discovered in bed together and the scandal caused Sol to be dismissed. She went back to her hometown and refused to speak to Sol again. Sol doesn’t tell M.S. any of this, figuring there is lots of time, that the right moment will come. He does, however, move to New York and become friends with M.S. and Kitty.
In the meantime, the bliss of M.S. and Kitty’s love is destroyed. Kitty gets pregnant; she wants an abortion and M.S. desperately wants the baby. M.S. frames it as his mistake, that he was foolish to be upset about her wanting the abortion. When he gives in and she has the abortion, something breaks in his heart. He can’t bear to be with her; he moves in with Sol for a ‘break’. Sol tries to get them back together; Kitty waits for M.S. to return – but he cannot.
(One can only speculate on Paul Auster behind the text here. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will. Perhaps like M.S., as an American liberal, he believes in his head that abortion is a necessary choice, not something to mourn. Yet perhaps he had an experience like M.S. where his heart felt it was a terrible thing and wouldn’t match his head.)
Sol hatches a plan to get M.S. out of his funk. They are going to find the cave in Utah where Effing lived for a time and hid his paintings. On the way, they stop to visit M.S.’s mother’s grave. Sol starts sobbing at the grave and reveals the truth to M.S.. M.S.’s first reaction is anger and Sol blinded by tears stumbles away, straight into an open grave. His back is broken and he spends weeks dying in the hospital, attended by M.S. day and night.
When Sol dies, M.S. rings Kitty; she’s the only one who might understand. She listens, and is sorry for him, but she won’t have him back. She has someone else; she says he nearly killed her and she’s had to harden her heart to survive. (As much as one might understand this, it’s actually only been three months since M.S. moved out; I can’t help thinking that the truest love would have waited longer than that.)
Having lost everyone, M.S. tries to find Effing’s cave. He finally discovers the area was flooded; all he can do is hire a boat and ride over the lake, knowing he is as close as he will get. When he returns, his car with his inheritance has been stolen. With just his wallet in his pocket, he starts walking. He walks all the way to the west coast, and when he gets there he stands in the Pacific Ocean watching the moon rise. And that’s the end of the story.
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