| <-back Book reviewers have
used the phrase "I couldn't put it down" so often and so carelessly
that the words have almost lost their meaning. But I must use a variation
on that hackneyed comment when talking about Elizabeth Cox's slender
second novel, "The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love." I could and did
put it down. More than a dozen times in the course of this novella-length
story about the atrophy of a marriage, I stumbled on a passage insightful
enough or moving enough to make me want to stop and absorb it. In an
age of mindless, bulky page-turners, this was a rare and welcome experience. Contemporary novels
and films are preoccupied, almost obsessed, with the pain of divorce.
If you think there's nothing fresh to say about married people who wake
up one day and discover they don't want to be married anymore, think
again. Better yet, read Elizabeth Cox. "The Ragged
Way People Fall Out of Love" is particularly touching because of
the author's stubborn refusal to place blame and assign guilt. Nobody
in the Hanner family wears a black hat, or a white one either. You will
like every one of them; you will hurt all the more when things fall
apart. Molly Hanner is
an artist living in North Carolina. She has loved her husband, Will,
since she was 16. They've been married for almost two decades and have
three children. Molly cannot imagine ever loving another man, but she
has been feeling a void, a slippage: "During the past year they
had been waking at night, both of them, as though an end were coming,
as though they expected it to come in the night and surprise them. They
didn't yet realize the ragged way people fall out of love and how it
is never completely done." "I don't love
you anymore," William tells Molly one Sunday morning in their den.
After that flat, five-word announcement, Molly's world seems to spin
off its axis. We all know by now
that bad things happen to good people. The sad corollary to this particular
Murphy's Law is that worse things are apt to follow in their wake. That's
what happens to Molly and William. Seeking order in
a world that looks askew, Molly enrolls in an astronomy course only
to find more confusion when she's sexually attracted to her professor.
She frets about the emotional and physical decline of her widower father;
she gropes for the right words to explain the divorce to the children.
In a note she writes to herself during an astronomy class, she tries
to relate the concept of "aberrations of light" to the inconsistencies
of her current life. Cox's portrayal
of the Hanner children is particulary skillful and endearing. In the
end, a crisis situation with Joe, the eldest, forces all in the family
to rethink their priorities. While it's true
that the author probably didn't need subplots involving madmen, foster
children and tornados, and while it's true that this reader would like
to have known more about a cipher named Carol, who is cited as the reason
for the breakup, only a mean-spirited critic would second-guess a story
as richly rewarding as this one. "A sensory
projection and rich, impassive strength," says an art dealer of
one of Molly's paintings. "Your images do not fade under scrutiny."
The same might be said of Elizabeth Cox. ©Chicago Tribune 1991 |