June 2012 – Novel Niche

I love writing letters. Some time ago, for a postal swap, I was asked to write a fictional introductory missive, adopting the personage of one of my best-beloved literary characters. I was urged to really get under her skin; to share a glimpse of the kind of woman she was; to, if not plumb her depths, then present her truly, with all the eager possibilities a first letter can afford. When I put pen to paper then, I thought it would be interesting to meet Lizzy fairly early into the events of Pride and Prejudice… before too many dances have passed, before several sparks can fly: you know, before much of that high-spirited Regency rabble-rousing gets thrown down.

Here is what I wrote.

Dear Morgan,

It is my distinct pleasure to be writing to you on this rainy, windswept evening…grey clouds pattern the sky, while the deepening chill in the wind signals to me that winter draws ever closer. As I sit at my writing desk, safely and securely ensconced in the bedroom I share with my dear sister Jane, at our father’s Longbourn estate, I wish most sincerely that you and all those you love are in the very best of health and happiness.

It always pleases me greatly to pick up my quill in celebration of a new and lively correspondence; I do so abhor those dreadful social functions at which one must smile, and simper, and pretend to be charming and easily charmed at every occasion – though, t’is true, I do love a lively dance! There are few activities in my twenty-year old existence, thus far, that enrich the spirit, tingle the toes and bring hearty laughter to the lips as a rollicking country dance!

As you may have guessed by now, my name in full in Elizabeth Bennet, but my family members and friends usually call me Lizzie or Eliza, as it suits them. My mum is often wont to call me Elizabeth when she is out of sorts with me for my peculiar habits and mulishly stubborn choices, which is more often than I suppose I should own to! I have lived my entire life at Longbourn, and am the second eldest of five sisters, but closest, I confess, to my eldest sister Jane, who is the very soul of goodness and sweetness, never thinks ill of anyone, even when perhaps she ought, and has the most charitable heart of any man, or woman, of my acquaintance. She has recently become enamoured, in her quiet way, of a dashing, if slightly dim young man called Mr. Charles Bingley, and I have high hopes for them eventually forming a serious attachment. I can think of few, if any, who deserve a life of happiness as much as Jane.

I suppose it ought to be my major preoccupation in life to endeavour myself matched to a young man of suitable prospects, or a man who makes a decent figure a year, as my mother would put it (though I think she would describe the matter much more loosely than that, alas. Apart from Jane and my dear father, I admit that I am not close to any of my other family members, though I certainly do feel fondness for the rest of them; they do not know me in the way that Jane and Papa do). Honestly, I find that I cannot seriously burden myself with fawning over every man who seems to have a laden purse and gives me an inviting glance at an interminable country ball.

I hope you will not think it too silly, Morgan, but I wish to marry for love… I wish to meet a man with whom I can hold forth in vigorous, sustained conversation and debate! A man who loves to read, to take long, contemplative walks, but above all, a man who will not be afraid to be truly himself with me, in every way, as I should surely feel free to do in his company. I have witnessed the ways in which an unhappy marriage of convenience can erode the lives of two people, slowly and excruciatingly. I do not want that to be my fate… I think I would prefer the life of a so-called ‘old maid’, for at least I would be allowed to be myself, and much happier for it, I firmly believe.

You know, at the same dance at which my sister made the happy acquaintance of Mr. Bingley, I too had an encounter with a man, but I cannot claim that I took any level of pleasure in it. Indeed, not! I found this man in question, Mr. Darcy, to be rather haughty and full of himself. He looked the entire time as though the event was decidedly beneath him (but I could not help but wonder if he was merely uncomfortable and awkward, and decided that a frosty illusion of control would make him seem superior?) Either way, I feel certain that he and I shall not be fast friends – far from it.

Apart from hoping that I shall one day find a partner for the sake of true love – oh, I do hope I don’t sound like a hopeless romantic! – I try my best to be realistic on all points, especially since I live in a household of, for the most part, exceedingly silly females. I spend much time with my thoughts, as well as in the glorious open woods and trails. I adore walking. It gives me deep personal strength, and the space I need to think, to reflect and to have wondrous conversations with Jane, Papa or my dear childhood friend, Charlotte Lucas. I particularly like spending time with Charlotte; we’ve known each other since infancy, and have shared so much that we’re often of one mind on most things. She is a beacon of common sense, a practical, good-natured and wonderful friend. I may not have the most enthralling life, from any outsider’s perspective, but I am lucky to have been gifted the presence of dear friends and wonderful books. Reading transports me to new and exciting worlds daily… but I do often long to see more of the world, to travel far and wide, to take control of my own destiny, wherever it may lead.

Mr. Darcy’s sisters, incidentally, were also at the ball I mentioned earlier. My mother was very much taken in with them, as is her way to be impressed by young ladies of great finery (and one of them has married well, so I suppose she is moved to flattery by that as well). I confess to you that I cannot trust them, nor think of them so kindly. I felt their criticizing eyes on me and my family, particularly my frivolous younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia. Now, I cannot claim to approve of the ways in which Kitty and Lydia will carry on, flirting with all the young and dashing gentlemen as they do – but why should standards of behaviour be different for a woman’s social conduct, I ask you, as opposed to a man’s? I have observed that a man may generally behave as he will without direct criticism, but it is an entirely different tale for a woman. I do hope that I will live to see more equality in the ways men and women are treated! I will strive, in my own small way, to make changes.

I have greatly enjoyed writing with you, Morgan. I am off to the post now with Charlotte for a leisurely walk, to think, laugh, and mail this letter to you!

Wishing you great happiness and health, now and always, affectionately,

~Eliza Bennet

At the great encouragement of my talented romance writing friend, Morgan Kelly, I’ve shared this letter. Perhaps it will incite scorn in the Austen purists; perhaps it will delight those more open to the notion that we can live freely and unreservedly with the books we love, entering into conversations with the characters who inhabit them. I have many other ideas for future literary letters, including a narcissistic rant from American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman to himself (because who else would he write to, anyway?), and a blotted parchment ramble from Wide Sargasso Sea‘s Antoinette, to her curiously distant English husband (and, just maybe, a response from him, in one of his weaker moments.) I hope you’ve enjoyed encountering Elizabeth in this non-canon fashion! It was a pleasure to strive towards inhabiting her thoughtspace, gleaning a sliver of her concerns, listening to her passionate heart beat in time with the pen’s thoughtful, considered slant.

Black and white images used (from top to bottom):
Woman Writing Letters by Charles Dana Gibson
Elizabeth Bennet by LindseyKal
Elizabeth Confronts Darcy by Edwin Phillips
Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1980 BBC adaptation)

Published in 2008. This Edition: Vintage Books, 2011.

Matt King’s life, all things considered, could do with a major overhaul. His wife, Joanie, has been in a coma for twenty-three days, courtesy of a boat-racing accident. Matt finds himself flounderingly out of depth in the management of his two daughters: rebellious, drug-recovering Alex, and exuberant, highly peer-pressurized Scottie. Lurking in the background of this familial implosion is the weight of a decision Matt must make: as principal trustee to a collective of Hawaii’s wealthy, royalty-descended landowners, he must say to which highest bidder huge tracts of heritage land should be sold. As time ticks by, and Joanie’s future prospects look increasingly grim, Alex stuns Matt with the revelation that Joanie has been unfaithful to him for some time. Bundling up his daughters, Matt takes them on an unexpected trip to locate the man Joanie possibly loves more than him, so he, too, can pronounce final farewells at her bedside.

It isn’t hard to fathom the reasons why this novel inspired a touching, thoughtful film adaptation. (As you can see, the book’s cover features a haunted George Clooney gazing into the distance, perched on Hawaiian littoral, flanked by sandcastles.) This is one of those books that reads as though there’s a script already imbedded in the prose, waiting to be lifted, licensed and imaged for the screen. Almost every good point I can make about the visual imagery of the descriptions tie in to how stunningly well they salute the mind’s eye. Witness, for instance, this picture of Scottie, who, having gone on an impromptu mini-adventure with her father to Alex’s boarding school, arrives decidedly the worse for wear.

“Scottie looks thrilled by the situation. Her red sores are bright in the hall’s fluorescent light. Her T-shirt says VOTE FOR PEDRO, whatever that means, and her hair is sticking up in places and matted down in others. In one section near her ear, the hair is held together by some unknown substance. She had fruit punch on the plane, and her lips and chin are stained the colour of raw meat.”

The images Hemmings conjures are consistently entertaining, moulded and primed for dark, honest humour, as well as aching sadness. The most notable include impressions of Matt’s difficult, likeable daughters, but also of Matt himself, and the way he perceives everyone and everything around him — tourists; his daughters’ cohorts; hospital staff; the ways in which other people perceive him; his fellow landowning descendants; the shifting structures of Hawaiian landscapes. Matt is a faithful archivist of the place he’s from, the place he loves, and his daily photobooks of observation afford rich, deeply funny insights into a place typically thought of in terms of multicoloured leis and roasted pig cookouts on pristine beachfront.

We think of the impossible caverns of love and grief as thorny terrain to demystify, and perhaps some of the best fiction shies away from putting such things into quantifiable, qualifiable terms. The opposite approach is explored in these pages, with Matt the compass for one man’s perambulations through the messy business of re-evaluating one’s love while simultaneously preparing for the worst. This isn’t to suggest that our protagonist is the only person in the novel whose experiences aren’t linear. Conversely, Matt’s interactions with his daughters, with his in-laws, with Alex’s sort-of-but-not-really boyfriend, Sid, all work like character references in a stuffed docket for emotional complexity. No one loves in singular colours; no one tolerates loss on a full palate of either beatitudes or vices. In one of my favourite passages of the novel, Matt reflects on a rare, treasured memory: his perpetually self-sufficient wife seeking comfort in his arms, immediately following a harrowing trauma.

“She sank down to the rocks, pulling me down with her, and then she lunged into my chest and wept. We were in the most awkward position on those rocks, but I remember not being able to move, as though the slightest movement might upset either her or the moment. Even though she was sobbing in my arms, it was a nice moment for me, to be stronger than her, to be needed by her, and to see her so fragile.”

The torment truly sinks in when Matt contemplates, right on the heels of this, the excruciating possibility that Joanie has dismantled her armour thusly for the man of her affair, too… and, most damning of all, there’s no reliable way of confronting either of them. Matt, like so many people stricken with the dead weight of an infidelity involving two silent sources, is saddled with a lifetime’s worth of maddening, perhaps debilitating hypotheticals.

Immersing yourself in Matt’s bleak and blackly comic inner monologues is as thrilling as it is because it grants you the relief of uncensored permission: to feel fully all those ideas that aren’t politically correct, to hate your children and love them; to hate your wife and love her; to want to be the best person and the worst all bound up in one festering, grinning knot of humanness.

Reading The Descendants is a shotgun ride in the author’s dodgy pickup truck, skirting some emotional landmines, rattling full-on into others. This, really, is what I love best about the novel: it confronts the non-poetic shit storm that reality quite often resembles, without any fumblings towards a sense of… literary rightness. There aren’t any perfect similes for pain, or, if there are, Hemmings doesn’t concern herself with trying to unearth them for our benefit. Truly, cosmically horrific things are as likely to happen to you as they are to the person alongside you in the bus.

How you feel about this book will depend largely, I think, on whether or not you require, or secretly long for, a primer on how to navigate life successfully, with minor bruising. If you find it hard to fathom that there can be one good way to be a worthy father, lover, landowner, descendant, or decent human being, then you’ll be hard-pressed to read something more organically attuned to the general state of loving, grieving and every curious, maddening human state from here to there.

I pledged to give away all the books I bought myself in 2012. I’m giving this book to my exuberant and all-round excellent friend and fellow writer, Leshanta, whose work I’ll be featuring at Novel Niche in a future coming to you shortly.