Revue principale. Avertissement. Cette critique est presque un spoil d’un bout à l’autre. Je recommanderais de ne pas lire ce spoil si vous envisagez de lire ce livre pour la première fois, et particulièrement si vous êtes prêt à commencer à lire très bientôt (vous n’aurez donc pas le temps d’oublier une grande partie de ce que je raconte dans le spoiler).(voir spoiler)
La section suivante est VRAIE
La section suivante est VRAIMENT un spoil, car elle raconte comment tout se passe finalement. Veuillez être prévenu.
(voir spoiler)
Corinne, who after Michael dies eventually gets together with Sable and is happy once again and pulls off the reunion and everyone is there except Michael and that seems to be okay. And we sigh with relief because we so wanted Corrine to be happy, maybe, well at least some of us, more than any other of these six characters because except for Marianne of course it has been Corinne who has suffered the most in this story, surviving in all probability only because of her innate optimism and realism, and because of (or maybe in spite of) the religious ideas that consumed and okay also supported her through all her troubles.
Mike Jr., now at the reunion playing the most solid, non-charismatic role of all the family members, yet a role which we are forced to concede is for Mike Junior, a success story that was not foreseeable early on, a role and a success and a story which we know is worthy of a hard hand shake or back slap and a sincere good work Mike you did good and were we to be honest would even have to say and you did better than your dad, though you had not much more (yet nonetheless some more) to work with.
Patrick, who unbelievably to all his siblings accepts Corrine’s plea to attend the reunion, riding a motorcycle east with, astonishingly to his family, a girl who he is now with, camping on the way. Who is now revealed to be, at age 35 now more boyish than at 15, a person who they never knew or suspected could be Patrick, having found at last what he himself had been searching for.
Marianne, who at this reunion (now in her early thirties, Michael her father dead) appears with two children and her husband Will, having finally found herself in a life that seemed to be taken away from her by the years of separation, infrequent communication with her mother and siblings, and total rejection by her father who in his own mind still loved her but couldn’t bear the thinking of her or of what had happened or of what she had done or of what he had done. And as Judd writes of this reunion, “I saw that Marianne was in the prime of her young womanhood … color restored … a fullness to her face … the liquidy yearning in the eyes eased … and her life independent of all Mulvaneys if she should wish it.”
And Judd, alone and then with Patrick in the dimming twilight, feeling a happiness that reconciles and transcends the pain and anger and sorrow that had been in those fifteen lost years, the years in which they had all found, each in their own time and way, themselves. A happiness that he fears to be like a balloon getting bigger and bigger, fearful of its bursting, and brother Patrick saying “I feel exactly the same way”.
Finally Michael. Not at the reunion because deceased. So in the end he Michael is the only one of these characters that does not find himself, or if he does, and realizes that he has found himself, it is not an uplifting affair at all, since he in most respects has neither found his own salvation nor helped the family his family to find theirs, at least not except perhaps in one thing, but that thing no different in kind and very much less in quantity that Corinne’s contribution to their children finding their way, but nevertheless for all that still important, and all that Michael could grasp; that thing being that after all the years of all of them searching for themselves, they (including Corinne) are able to find that for which they searched in part because of those twenty years that Michael gave to them all (including Corinne) when he did help, as did Corinne to an even greater extent, to bring his children up well. And it was that upbringing that Michael did in fact contribute to (before his own flaw caused him to stop contributing), which enabled all of them, after years of searching to come to that self knowledge and self acceptance and their own version of Truth and thus at long last find against the odds perhaps that they, the (remaining) Mulvaney’s, despite losing him, became again and were again that family whose name he contributed – the Mulvaney’s.
(hide spoiler)]
Et encore une chose. (Quelques commentaires littéraires sans intérêt.) (voir spoiler)
But rewarding because I found the structure of the story, though it reads smoothly, is exciting, and is quite frankly a wonderful sort of book for “Oprah’s Book Club”, is at the same time disconcertingly and unexpectedly complex. (To me, at any rate.)
Judd the narrator threw me a little, when I started the review. There are many things “he” relates in the story which there is little likelihood he could ever have known, even in hindsight. That is, how could he know really anything about what happens in the chapter “The Bog”? True, years later (even after the end of the Epilogue it would have to be) he could have pumped Patrick for all these details. But there is no plausible indication in the novel that he ever did this, despite his statement a couple pages before the end that there were many questions “he would have to ask Patrick”. To my mind, information gained at or after the reunion could not plausibly be written into the “family album”, but whatever. Ms. Oates has put in her time as a novelist, and certainly can do anything she wants and get a pass from me at any rate, she deserves it. Nothing but a quibble really.
But another thing you need to realize about Judd’s narration is the curious way that he is sometimes “I” in this narration and at other times “Judd”. What, is Judd the narrator, or only a part-time narrator with an author standing behind him? I choose to believe that this is just Judd switching between first and third person for some reason which is not clear to me, other than flow of the story maybe? Perhaps when he is “Judd” he is narrating something he is dredging up from memory, and when he is “I” he is writing his thoughts as they occur to him as he is writing? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is done so seamlessly that for this not-very attentive reader, it was something I never even really noticed until I started re-reading.
Here’s a little item that I noticed a couple times as I was reading, then as I went back through the book noticed more and more. Someone in school might want to write a term paper about this little tic, and what it might be used for. Here’s a few examples to show you what I’m talking about:
And Michael would laugh, laugh.
How Patrick had laughed, laughed.
She gave Corrine’s fluttery hand a tap and the women laughed, laughed.(and it’s not confined to laughter)
Mom cried, cried.
I’’ve never seen this construction of a sentence before, the leaving out of the word “and” where it would normally go. Maybe Oates does this all the time, maybe it’s a patented quirk of her writing, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read anything else by her. (Soon to be corrected I hope.)
And here’s something about Michael Mulvaney which might be the biggest mystery of the whole story. Unless I really missed it, there is no indication what exactly it was that caused Michael to bolt from his home at eighteen years of age, after his father pronounced Go to hell then! No son of mine. (I’ll let anyone who wants to find that quote find it on their own.) We are told (and how could Judd ever know this) that Michael resented the way his father had turned his sisters against him, though not his brothers. We know the way that Michael simply cannot think about not only what his daughter couldn’t do (provide evidence against her attacker), but also about simply what happened to her. So a suspicion builds in my mind that Michael may have done something when he was eighteen to a girl, very much like what was done to Marianne. And since his sister Marian is mentioned at least twice in the narrative as causing Michael, in his memory, particular anguish – could the girl he have done this to have been his sister Marian? Incest? And if so, how would one live with that, how would one get any self esteem, except through the eyes of others who (not knowing the truth about Michael Mulvaney) could give him the respect that he had lost irrevocably from his father and family. If anyone wants to see if they can make anything more of this than my maybe ridiculous speculations, the chapters to pay special attention to are “The Lovers” (in which we find that Michael had a pretty cavalier attitude toward women) and of course “The White Horse”, the story of Michael’s demise after leaving Corinne (concluding with the elegantly enigmatic section starting with The white horse. So much more alive, vivid, than Michael Mulvaney who was but smoke. Of course, ending this on a note which it began on, the frustrating thing about putting clues together about Michael is that they can occur virtually anywhere in the novel, not just in chapters that you know are principally about him. (hide spoiler)]