It does not pay to start cleaning your place by starting with the bookshelf, _never_ does it pay. If you're like me, you end up on the floor with a beloved book from your past and you open it to a random page, begin reading and get lost all over again.
Darn you, books, I'm supposed to get things done today!
The academics in Marilyn Sides' lovely, funny first novel, The Genius of Affection, are preoccupied with gardens and love... in that order. Toward the end of the book, Sides comes right out and says it: "Martin looked around the yard and said to Lucy, 'It's the urban pastoral.'" An urban pastoral indeed: Everyone lives in gritty Boston, and they all tend their plots like crazy. The Lucy in question is a biographer (with a passion for showy annuals) who's just turned 40 and had decided it's time to get her domestic life in order and find a partner. If the hunt for a husband sounds like familiar territory, don't think Sides doesn't know it. Jane Austen hangs over the novel like a friendly spook, and is invoked in the novel's opening lines: "How lucky, how comforting to have a lover on one's fortieth birthday. Lucy Woolhandler had managed, at the last minute, to meet that deadline. The idea of such a deadline she knew to be ridiculous. She wasn't living, was she, in an updated Jane Austen novel, where the problem was to get the pathetic heroine married, not at twenty-two or twenty-five, but forty?" Turns out, of course, that's just where she is living.
Three suitors court Lucy--the most favored of them is a gardening historian, the least favored plants a hundred prissy white tulips in prissy straight rows. Sides employs the time-tested Austen strategy (not to say formula) where the emergence of the "right" suitor heralds the emergence of Lucy's most "right" self. This is a novel of middle age: its characters don't change, they come to know themselves. Sides, author of the acclaimed story collection The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife & Other Tales, cleverly shows how Lucy's search for love is also a search for a new way of living. Lucy desires dailiness, she grows "nostalgic for everyday life." At 40, she no longer wants the grand gesture, she wants the small, repeated gesture that grows beautiful with time, as in a garden, or a well-made novel. --Claire Dederer
Three suitors court Lucy--the most favored of them is a gardening historian, the least favored plants a hundred prissy white tulips in prissy straight rows. Sides employs the time-tested Austen strategy (not to say formula) where the emergence of the "right" suitor heralds the emergence of Lucy's most "right" self. This is a novel of middle age: its characters don't change, they come to know themselves. Sides, author of the acclaimed story collection The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife & Other Tales, cleverly shows how Lucy's search for love is also a search for a new way of living. Lucy desires dailiness, she grows "nostalgic for everyday life." At 40, she no longer wants the grand gesture, she wants the small, repeated gesture that grows beautiful with time, as in a garden, or a well-made novel. --Claire Dederer
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