The book concerns one woman, May, and the seven large, dominating episodes of her life. It's absolutely stunning to witness the manner in which the author puts across the totality of the aura, mystery, and events of her character's long life—her complete journey from childhood to death—in what amounts to a comparatively short novel. This kind of counter-Joycean approach reminded me of the way spare, spaced lines of cool jazz reacted against the busy, technically difficult style of Bebop in the Fifties (a shaky analogy, perhaps, but my feeling, nonetheless).
The point is that the minutiae doesn't matter;
the big occurrences do.
Imagine you're sitting in a theater watching a
film of your life, one which proceeds in true
chronology. Imagine, further, that you're given
the task of splicing, out of that film, its seven
most important incidents, and stringing them together—not
in chronological order but by how you'd rank them,
with respect to their psychological or emotional
importance to you. If you can do this, you'll
have a good idea of how Seven Loves reads.
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Now, in reality, telling a story out of order
isn't very new. I believe it goes all the
way back to Ford
Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.
There's novelty, however, in Trueblood's more
postmodern approach, insofar as there's no
plot of which to speak, as such. Interconnectedness,
yes, but no plot. Some of the people who are
highlighted in one chapter show up as supporting
players in others. Irony and coincidence—the
kinds of things that a young person doesn't
fully get because he/she hasn't fully encountered
them, yet—abound. The matter of interest
that a heretofore insignificant or unknown
person may suddenly acquire in our lives—in
a moment, without warning—is demonstrated
with great skill and depth of feeling. It's
probably wisest to review the novel chapter
by chapter, with a brief glance at the "love"
with which each one is specifically busied.
1. Jackie | As the book opens, May is seventy-four
years old. Retired and widowed, she now works
in an office after a lifetime of teaching
high school English. The "love"
of this chapter is Jackie, twenty-four, a
co-worker. This is how May thinks of her:
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At
seventy four, she is in love. Or not
love. What is it? A consuming interest
in another person—a person of not
much interest, really, she thinks in
bewilderment—has seized her, so
that she looks forward to even the mildest
encounters at work.
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Jackie has numerous insecurities, isn't very bright, and has lost her two children in court (although, as a matter of practicality, her deadbeat husband has returned them to her). But Jackie has a quality that keeps her in the forefront of the consciousness of everyone she meets: she's drop dead beautiful:
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But
there is her beauty. Wherever she goes—in
her car, on the street, in stores—she
is pointed out. In the building, their
floor is known as the one where Jackie
gets off the elevator. Her beauty is
a pollen shaken onto all of them. She
could be looking out over ruins, over
oceans, a stone woman holding up a roof.
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Why would May be so interested? At first this
seems contrived and preposterous; but, as
the chapter and book play out, we begin to
see the malleability built into the story,
a piece of clay to be bent and molded. Later,
we'll see Jackie's connection to another person
who plays a huge role in May's life, a person
who was involved with her son, Nick. Although
we don't meet Nick in the first chapter, we're
provided with allusions. The first happening
in the yarn involves a young mother and her
small child passing by May, with the mom jokingly
asking, "Should we keep her?" This
early, we're ignorant of the import this holds
for May, but it represens deft narrative construction.
2. Nathanael
| Here, we jump back from the relative present
to 1960. May is at a teachers' conference
in Chicago, where she meets the man with whom
she'll have her single extramarital affair,
a black school principal named Nathanael.
They live far apart, are both happily married
with families, and know, from the start, that
their involvement can't last. They meet desperately,
three times before Nathanael calls it off
for good; to enhance the sense of drama, Trueblood
utilizes one of the oldest plot contrivances
in literature—May gets pregnant. She
assumes the baby to be Nathanael's and realizes
she has no choice but to tell her husband,
Cole, about the tryst. She confesses; but,
to everyone's surprise, the child turns out
to be Cole's—looks exactly like him,
even has one of his distinctive facial characteristics.
Trueblood sets the amourette against the backdrop
of the 1960 presidential campaign, caving
in to the universal temptation among writers
to identify with Kennedy
and The
New Frontier (even to the point where
we learn that Nathanael, swept up in the idealism
of the times, actually leaves education to
go into politics, becoming the mayor of his
town).
Nathanael is one of two of the seven loves
who doesn't meet any of the others, who doesn't
have any interaction with a substantial part
of May's social network; and, in this way,
Trueblood emphasizes how a brief, singular,
intense relationship can live in time, in
memory, almost as though a tangible thing
locked in an icebox of the mind for many,
many years.
3. Cole
| It's interesting that while May's husband
and son are counted among the loves, her daughters,
Vera and Laura, who both play fairly prominent
roles throughout, are not. She's caught up
with her menfolk in large, dramatic ways that
it's impossible for her and her daughters
to approximate. There are emotional scenes
in Cole's chapter, and in Nick's, that make
us tremble, even weep if we so allow, while
the girls are coolly efficient, make lives
and careers of their own, in fact, don't appear
to need their mother beyond a certain juncture
in their lives. May never sees her daughters
in vulnerable situations as she does her husband
and son, nor is she vulnerable around them.
This chapter swings back and forth between
a scene at a Canadian resort in the 1970s
and the time of the couple's courtship in
the years before World
War II. May is troubled by the revelation
that, a few years prior, a young woman lost
her husband at the resort and he was never
found. Her anxiety over this is intercut with
those days so long ago when she fell in love
with Cole and stole him from the other woman
to whom he was engaged. Her remembrance is
stirred by her observation of a young couple,
first in the lobby and later in the hot baths.
She imagines herself giving them advice about
their future, then she recreates the horror
that the girl who lost her husband must have
felt, and subsequently feels an urgent need
to locate her husband in the pool among the
throngs of other bathers, panicking when,
at first, she can't, and then feeling tremendous
relief and comfort when she does. This remarkable
passage clues us in:
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She
had forgotten this look of his, and
that was her own doing, misplacing it
along with so much else in the merciless
forgetfulness, the oblivion of marriage,
for he always showed this pleasure when
he had been waiting for her and she
appeared, did he not?
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4. Nick |
In the course of her saga, Trueblood frequently
comments on the disconnect between people
of May's generation and contemporary youth.
May meditates consistently on the mysterious
ways of teens—those in her classes at
school and those she observes at random on
the streets of Seattle.
A couple of times, I found myself wondering
about this because it seems as though she
has knowledge of the seedier side of these
kids, knowledge that a woman such as herself
shouldn't have. But then, upon a second
and third reading, I saw how much I'd missed.
For example: "They know May had a son,
as well as daughters."
In the chapter on her son, it's revealed that
he's always been "secretly, deeply favored"
in her heart, but this favoring can't be anything
tangible. It has to spring forward from some
kind of ineffable viscerality, an almost purely
emotive entity that no one is able to verbally
access. May casts around in the chambers of
her mind for reasons ("incompatible chemicals";
"your grandmother was a devotee of Kropotkin";
and a somewhat disappointing discourse on
how, first, a lot of boys—this is in
the sixties and seventies—in the school
began to show signs of drug problems, soon
followed by the girls), but none really come
to the fore as adequate explanations. There's
also a subplot, having to do with a cat, that
surprisingly influences where one of May's
daughters ends up with her husband and family,
a beautiful stroke of storytelling excellence.
5. Arne
| This is one about which I'll remain silent.
6. Sven | At
the end of her long life, May has had several
strokes; in a home, we meet a whole new cast
of characters: Mr. Dempsey, a former union
official who's her best friend among the other
patients; Nita and Nalda, twin sisters—apart
most of their adult lives and, now, reunited;
Renee, a Haitian worker; and Sven, also an
employee, a rowdy punk rocker who drives the
van on outings and performs tasks for the
group such as sneaking in porn magazines for
Dempsey or foods that the house nutritionist
has forbidden anyone to have.
May is in bad shape: "No one would promise
her that another stroke wouldn't finish her
or, worse, not finish her." For obvious
reasons, young Sven reminds her of her son.
When she accidentally walks in on Sven and
Renee engaged in wild lovemaking, the remark
"It's only May" cuts; when she watches
Sven seethe with quiet jealousy at the visits
of Renee's ex husband, it's as if this sparks
memories of her uncut life, hitting her in
the face as would a concrete slab.
The resolution of this chapter—and, thus,
of her life—is something each reader
has to ponder in his/her own way. By placing
it where she does, however, Trueblood signals
that, perhaps, one or two pieces of critical
information have yet been withheld from us.
Specifically, readers should be searching
for instances of medical doctors and piano
players.
7. Anna
| All along, we've gotten quick glimpses of
the mother and her activist political beliefs.
Now, the final chapter of the book takes us
back to May's early life with her parents
and her sister, Carrie (name checking Dreiser?),
who figured prominently in a prior attempt
to straighten out Nick. From early on, the
mother is an anarchist. This is how she meets
May's father, while picketing for her cause:
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The
girl who was to be May's mother handed
him a leaflet that said KEEP OUT. Out
of the war, it meant, the Great War.
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A peripheral perspective is now obtained
on the bloodshed of the twentieth century;
we've seen the story of May's life open up
against the background of the
first world war, the second, and Vietnam.
At the finish, we witness her mother's political
zeal jet utterly out of control, as when she
reads May a story by "the sweet Kropotkin"
that is totally inappropriate for a child,
or makes a fool of herself by giving a speech
to unemployed workers who taunt and jeer her.
As always, this chapter reflexively sheds
light on earlier ones—comments on them,
bolsters them, makes us see them anew. Crucially,
here, we find the link from a woman named
Anna Olafsson back to Arne, from Chapter 5.
Seven Loves carries great weight. I
rarely have anything too negative to say about
the novels I discuss, here; but this book
is truly exceptional in every way. I expect
that, over the course of many years, I'll
return to it often—for advice, for wisdom,
and for instruction in the kinds of things
that really matter.
