If you haven’t had the chance to be gripped in the powerful prose of Judith Guest, now is the time. Yes, there is a movie, ignore it for now.
I’m talking about the book, Ordinary People.
Referred to the book by a writing teacher, I actually downloaded to my Kindle a more recent book by Guest, A Tarnished Eye, and was immediately sucked in, but I knew that I needed to read Ordinary People, if just to understand the storytelling principle we are discussing in class.
So I ran to B&N (yes, this is July, no book buying, but this was a special circumstance) and then came home and devoured Ordinary People within a couple hours (it’s a slim book).
Alternatively told in two voices, that of Calvin and Conrad, father and son, it sets the landscape of a family devastated by two heartrending tragedies, the first, an older son’s death in a boating accident and the second, the younger son’s near-death in an attempted suicide. Lest you think the book was nothing but darkness, no, the most impressive moments are when Calvin and Conrad reach out of their abyss toward each other or toward others. For Connie (his nickname from school), he reaches out toward a therapist and the friendship of a girl. The father, Cal, attempts to talk to the therapist, and thus reaches out to his wife, in his way, but is spurned. It’s an amazing dance of plot and subplot, intertwined in a lyrical display of the most vivid of human emotion: that of betrayal and the inability to forgive.
The denouement is that you walk away from these characters realizing that they will be okay, even though nothing works out in a neatly tied up package at the end. Guest is a master at portraying pain and grief without overpowering the reader and is just as adept at finding the lightest moments in those dark times to tickle just enough so that her reader smiles.
I was moved and inspired. The image of the mother holding too tightly to a perfect family image, trying to make them extraordinary, even after one son was dead and the other had been long lost, and refusing to acknowledge that it was not anyone’s fault that her plans had gone awry, was a lesson to me (who does not yet have kids). The tighter I hold to my ideals, to what I firmly plan for each day, the more I’m bound to be disappointed.
I wanted to shake the mother out of her perfectness, if only to wake her up. That’s the true sadness of the book, she misses all the best lived moments, clinging so desperately to her picture of perfect that slipped so quickly out of her grasp.
And that’s what perfect does. As soon as humans touch it, it disappears into the ether.
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