Summer reading : Suzanne Berne. - Review - book review

Commonweal, June 16, 2000 by Suzanne Berne

There are a few books I've read three or four times, and plan to read again. These are the books I hoard, that I'm reluctant to lend when a visitor wanders into my study requesting a book for summer vacation. But usually altruism and a certain evangelical impulse get the better of me. "Well, if you want something really good," I say, then pull my favorites from the bookshelves and begin describing them with such enthusiasm that I generally succeed in persuading my visitor not to borrow a book from me after all. But now and then someone perseveres, and these days the book that gets carried away is likely to be Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 225 pp.).

Set in eighteenth-century Saxony, this novel focuses on the true story of Fritz von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy and trainee clerk in the Directorate of Salt Mines, who is destined to become the poet Novalis. Brilliant, voluble, kindhearted Fritz is beloved by his enormous, eccentric family and his circle of intellectual friends (which includes Schlegel and Goethe). All of them are stunned when he falls deeply in love with a twelve-year-old named Sophie. The girl is not very bright (she can't spell Fritz's last name, for instance), nor very pretty, and yet Fritz loves her to distraction, calls her his "spirit guide" and his "philosophy," and plans to marry her.

What makes this strange, ironic novel so compelling is Fitzgerald's genius for detail--every page offers marvelously precise information about eighteenth-century German life--and also her genius for pronouncements on the human condition, which are never anything less than startling yet always seem true. For instance, on Christmas Day, Fritz's gloomy, pious old father is instructed by the director of a Moravian religious order to remember that Christmas is a day of joy and to accept that joy as would a child. "The Brethren were experienced in joy," Fitzgerald writes dryly, "and perhaps sometimes forgot what a difficult emotion it is, and how unfamiliar to many."

Short-story collections by Alice Munro and William Trevor share a similar blend of microscopically precise detail and cosmic insights into the human heart. Munro's characters mostly live in Canada, Trevor's in Ireland. Munro writes about women, many of whom live in unlovely provincial villages and are pining for scenes of vitality that they themselves embody. Although I'm partial to them all, my favorite of Munro's collections is her first, The Lives of Girls and Women (NAL-Dutton, $11.95, 244 pp.). Trevor's characters, too, frequently find themselves in rural outposts, beset by family obligations, stymied, yearning for a wider life. Both writers focus on the unexpected, piercing moments of revelation that strike people who think they have been living ordinary lives, until suddenly they realize the hidden, perverse patterns that have been guiding them.

Various friends have tried to borrow Trevor's novel, Other People's Worlds (Viking Penguin, $9.95, 240 pp.). It's the story of three people with dramatically different lives who are nevertheless intricately connected. Two of the characters are betrayed and abandoned by the third, and yet he does not inspire hatred, neither in them nor the reader. This man's identity--he is an actor who occasionally appears in tobacco commercials on television--is so ephemeral and compliant that to hate him would be like hating one of your own fantasies. The triumph of this particular novel is that it never loses a strangely tender comic sympathy toward its characters no matter how dark and limited their worlds come to seem.

Another favorite, William Maxwell's fictionalized memoir, So Long, See You Tomorrow (Random House, $10, 160 pp.), is one of those slender novels that grow large and luminous, occupying far more imaginative territory than its modest size suggests. Set in the Midwest in the 1920s, the novel follows a boy whose mother has died in the 1918 flu epidemic, as he navigates his grief and loneliness and his father's remarriage alongside the unfolding of a tragic small-town scandal, which involves the family of a boy he knows slightly. So delicate is the interweaving of these two seemingly separate stories that you don't realize how profoundly they're related until the last page.

Surprising relationships occur again in Michael Cunningham's The Hours (Picador, $13, 230 pp.) which lyrically links the lives of Virginia Woolf and two modern women. I was astonished by this book, particularly by the unexpected insight Cunningham offers into what consoles us in our daily human struggles. It's so modest, and so convincing, simply "an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

So many of those hours come while reading, don't they? No wonder I hoard my books.