Of Cats And Men by Nina de Gramont

If one were to go by titles, then this set of stories by Nina de Gramont, Of Cats and Men, should be stories about, well, cats and men. Insofar as they have to do with cats at all, they are stories about cats and women. And yes, a cat does occur in each story, sometimes even in a pivotal role, but the stories are really about women and the men they choose, or choose to leave, and about the ways in which mothering metamorphoses women’s lives. As for cats and men, I’m tempted to say that the men in her stories are as blind to cats (and their real natures) as they are to the women in their lives, but in truth she often paints sympathetic portraits of both men and women. I suspect the Steinbeck allusion was simply irresistible.

What immediately captured me about these sketches was the emotional honesty of the voice in each story. Sometimes it is the voice of a woman who married for love but has to come to the realization that she misses the comforts of her moneyed upbringing. Ashamed to admit to her hard working blue collar husband that she wants more, that she wants out, that she feels stifled and moldy in their ranch-style rental.

Most of the women characters find themselves either trapped in relationships that they shouldn’t be in, or stifled by the confinements of motherhood, but de Gramont usually allows her women to escape. One of her characters survives a near fatal accident (while in her lover’s car), and afterwards shocks her stupefied sister as well as her dutiful husband by simply leaving her home and children behind, calmly explaining to her sister that the children will be better off with their father. Perhaps it is the trauma to the brain that has rearranged the priorities in her life, perhaps simply the near-death experience, but what is clear is that she can now run away, and she does.

Another of the mothers is unable to leave her large family, or at least to leave the house in which they all live, but finds another way to retreat into herself.

At first Simone minds terribly, that their mother has locked herself away in the attic. In the late afternoon before their father gets home, after the summer chaos has cooled with the sun, she can hear rustling upstairs, scraping, and sometimes footsteps. Lonely noises, and eerie: making their way through the far reaches of the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the den. Even after they quiet, Simone thinks she can hear their mother breathe, intermittent but endless sighs, like the audible exhalation of this old, ever-settling house.

Her sister Maggie is nearly ten, more than a year older than Simone. They are the only two who care that their mother has for all purposes left. The others, the older ones, barely seem to notice.

Mothers who run away from home, mothers who hide away in their own homes, anything for a space of their own, a life they can manage. While there is humor in many of the stories, there is also a somber earnestness. The decisions these women have to make in order to keep or rediscover their sanity are wrenching. One young mother, afraid to confess to anyone how suffocated she feels by motherhood finds herself mentally making up ads like ones she has seen in the paper offering pets their owners can no longer keep.

Treasured infant needs new home. Caroline is five weeks old, healthy and beautiful, only cries when she’s hungry. Has been breast-fed but will take a bottle without complaint. We must give Caroline up, because her mother is overwhelmed by the scope and enormity of parenthood.

It is no wonder that couples so often find themselves mismatched in a culture that parades and advertises the cult of love—falling in love, living on love, dying for love, but never mentioning how difficult it can be to simply to live with another person.

I’ve never been the sort of woman who fantasizes about Marlboro Men. I don’t have a weakness for the strong, silent type who works with his hands and gets more emotional over sunsets and Jim Beam than the woman in his life. I like civilized people, who use correct grammar and have at least a vague understanding of silverware placement. People who understand the imperative of a college education and well-written thank-you notes.

Needless to say, I fell in love with Charlie before he became a cattle rancher.

My suspicion is that the author of these stories, the voice behind the various characters, grew up in an economically privileged home, and there is an indelible snobbishness regarding both money and education in many of the stories. Still, there is some real attempt to dissect the snobbery and to poke fun at it, and the writing is fast-paced and darkly humorous. It is a quick and pleasant summer read.

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Sometimes, even with writers whom I like quite a lot, I will arrive at a point where I am convinced that I have gotten from them what I can. I had assumed that to be the case with Richard Russo when I read Empire Falls. After all, he is not a great writer, nor does he have a profound understanding of human nature or of social-political history. And so it was almost an accident that I picked up and began to read his latest novel, Bridge of Sighs. I am now convinced that this is his best novel so far in its ability to create deep, convincing characters, in its understanding of life, and in its social commentary.

Russo’s male characters almost always have a gruffly good-natured quality to them—men who know they have not measured up even to their own expectations, but who muddle along in their relationships and their lives trying to do better while never deceiving themselves into believing that they are more or better than they really are. Usually, they have problems with commitment to spouses or even to lovers, and suggest that the women in their lives would, most likely, be better off without them. Most of them seem to have a kind of Walter Matthau charm to them, likable partly because of their own constant and critical self-analysis. Louis C. Lynch, the lead character in this novel, is again a character in that mold, almost morbidly self-reflective, but in my estimation he rises above the others both in his understanding of the relationships in which he finds himself and in understanding himself.

Louis C., maliciously nicknamed Lucy by his childhood friends, is a slow-talking, deliberate and lonely boy. Like his father, Lou senior, Lucy is big, good-natured and so measured in his delivery that he seems to others to be dimwitted. Add to this that he sometimes has spells, periods of time when he more-or-less blanks out, neither speaking nor moving, and it is no wonder that the people in his small upstate New York town, Thomaston, think he is at the very least odd. His best, and for much of his young life, only friend, Noonan, is Lucy’s opposite in almost all ways. Feisty, brave and dashing, Noonan is chosen by Lucy, latched onto, but always chafes at the affection and attention Lucy beams at him, and is relieved when his abusive, authoritarian father insists that he terminate the friendship. That Lucy’s love for Noonan is unrequited seems only to intensify his obsession, and he manages at a few different periods of their young lives to bring Noonan back into the sphere of his life until finally Noonan escapes not only from Lucy, but from Thomaston and even from the U.S., ending up as a relatively famous painter in Venice.

The reader is introduced to the characters as adults. Lucy has remained his entire life in Thomaston, content and seeing no reason to leave, and is looking backwards over his life while writing a clumsy memoir. His wife, Sarah, also an artist, and far less content with their sequestered small-town lives, insists finally on a trip to Europe where the couple hopes to meet up with the long departed Noonan. As Lucy looks back, the reader is invited to look at the close and loving relationship Lou junior has with his optimistic and upbeat father and at his more troubled relationship with his much more astute and realistic mother, Teresa, or Tessa as she is called by Lou senior. Tessa and Sarah have much in common; both are wise and efficient, understanding the naïve optimism of their husbands and taking steps to avoid the pitfalls that the men’s naivete would otherwise land them in. From the first, Tessa understands that her son’s love and devotion to his friend Noonan is almost all one-sided, and she does what she can to protect him from his own blindness. Likewise, she understands the financial ineptness of her husband, and does what she can to keep the family from ruin.

Through these two strong female characters, Russo is able to make clear (as he does in his earlier works) his conviction that women have an emotional intelligence that most men lack. He also paints his women as stronger than the men, more able to deal with the necessities of life. While the men dream and founder, the women have families, make decisions, and persevere. But there is a price for their loyalty and realism:

They’d both loved their husbands more than anyone even suspected, and in return had been adored. But each of them had walked through and open door, then heard it slam shut behind them and the mechanism lock. While neither regretted her decision, knowing the door was locked was disconcerting just the same, as was the fact that their husbands, if they’d heard that same slam and click, seemed untroubled by it. If anything, knowing that there was no turning back was reassuring to them.

While it is obvious that Russo admires the women in his own novels (and no doubt in his own life), there is a kind of essentialism that I find troublesome. I think he tends to forgive his male characters (and himself) for their faults in relationships by suggesting that it simply cannot be helped—men, given who they (by nature) are, simply cannot cope as their better and stronger women can. It is women who must finally understand the children, and help the men try to understand themselves. And while he suggests that men are probably more trouble than they are worth, something rings false in his analysis.

A commentator for the New York Post remarks that this book is very much in the Russo pattern but “is a departure into deeper, almost philosophical realms.” Yes, and why say “almost philosophical,” as if only philosophers and not mere writers of fiction can do philosophy? Russo does wax philosophical in this novel, and he does try to deal with real problems of economic oppression and racism and sexism, even daring at a few points to write in the voice of black characters. While there is still something myopic and unsophisticated about his political commentary, this is a novel that tries to look back and sum up what has occurred in this country in the last century, tries to expose some of the rifts in the American dream. Certainly, the novel has an intellectual maturity I did not find in his earlier works while preserving the humor and light-handedness of those novels.

Let me leave you with a longish quote that I think evidences some of Russo’s philosophical maturation in this book:

Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind the next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we’ll have found not just our true, destination but also its meaning....
But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end ... To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy ... And yet not all mystery is lost, nor all meaning.