So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . . he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for all its material comforts, is not free from the pangs of passion, loss and death. For wherever the God of Love hangs out, in this curious collection of lives and stories, the figure of Death is never far away, dangling a bony and circumspect finger over all human pleasures and attachments. Amy Bloom’s stories provide a sensitive, intimate and commendably down-to-earth exploration of various lives lived under the governance of these twin powers.
In her stories the grand conflicts and affairs of the heart are always grounded in and channelled through a concrete and plausibly humdrum image of reality, a world of children falling over their laces after games of chequers, of CNN, of sprained ankles and methodical preparations for thanksgiving dinners. These ordinary details and accidents themselves become charged with deep emotional consequence and are brilliantly realised in vivid and incisive prose.
Time passes quickly. In the space of a few lines little children have grown into strutting adolescents or mellowing adults with kids of their own, marriages have ended, deaths have occurred. This expansiveness is neatly balanced by the intimacy, detail and import of each episode. But whilst the sense of occupying a given moment is always strong, it is the awareness emanating from that moment of its relation to the broader patterns of time, which helps to shape the overarching elegiac tone of these stories. Many of Bloom’s central characters are passing into their autumn years, reflecting back upon the accumulated loves and losses of life, with a mixture of contentment and sadness. Julia in ‘Light into Dark’ drifts off to sleep by counting through all her ex-lovers and the narrator of ‘By-and-by’ captures this sense of retrospection most directly in the lines –
I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary.
If there is a common idea running through these tales it is perhaps that living with love always also entails living with loss– the two are intimately, perhaps dialectically entangled. But for all the conflicts and painful bereavements that occur, this remains a remarkably good humoured and optimistic collection. Bloom’s characters have the capacity to endure, to remain lucid, sensible, even witty, under great strain. There is a certain uniform spirit of resilience, a sustained composure and eloquence of thought to all of her heroines, which is at times perhaps a little too neat and unperturbed. Even where Clair or Julia might appear to break down they do so with a certain literary poise and no amount of heartache ever disturbs the commanding rhythms and smart conceits of Bloom’s prose.
If I could make one clear – and probably unfairly bitter – compliant then I suppose it would be this. Things sometimes seem a little too smooth and easy. Bloom’s characters are mostly prosperous professional types, more or less contentedly married, with children and lovers to keep them busy. We have set before us a sturdy and assured middle class world of fine foods, familial affections and intelligent people who nearly always know the smart thing to say– a world just a little too at ease with itself. The bright and elegant surface of Bloom’s prose does little to allay this impression. Death itself is borne and ultimately accommodated within the rich fabric of middle class life –it reveals fresh depths to the bourgeois soul, gives a melancholic and immutable aura to all that was and is and will continue to be. Not much less inevitable is the smooth acquisition of worldly success and the quiet fulfilment of social expectation.
There are few characters here who really rub against the grain of life, who find themselves grimly resisting or painfully out of joint with the world they inhabit. There is however one curious exception. This comes in the form of Frances and her final letter to a girl she scarcely knows at the end of the story ‘Permafrost’. In some ways ‘Permafrost’ is the least polished story of the collection, with its unusually abrupt and disjointed feel, and yet in its beautiful closing lines Bloom touches on a bleaker note and a more troubled vision than she has shown us elsewhere– the hint of a life lived wearily and dutifully without the blessings or curses of the God of Love.
Ultimately, this an intelligent and remarkably well crafted collection of stories. Throughout there is a certain elegiac poise, a balance between wistfulness and celebration which gives to this work, in its finest moments, a quiet and moving beauty. But still, I can’t help wanting to hear more of Frances, of the several uninspiring husbands and wives left behind for bolder passions, of those less prosperous and fortunate figures who people the margins of these stories, the places where perhaps the God of Love does not hang out so readily or so often.