Chronology

Many ages live side by side in us, only one of them the one we're seen wearing. When May first appeared to me, she was a woman in her seventies, but she quickly showed her past. Nevertheless, when I tried to see her as somehow progressing from youth to age, the stages--or what absorbed me, the states of mind--refused to line up. They were like slides--not in order in the carrel but lying on a table, overlapping, being spread with the hand. By the time I was writing the last episode I was face to face with the girl who was mother to the woman.

While I enjoy novels with a clear path from some secret or trauma in youth to its resolution later, no life in my own fiction (or the work I most love) goes that way, and it isn't a pattern I see in reality. Existence seems to me more like a segmented balloon: here slack, there taut. Or one of those straw wrappers we used to tear into "legs" at the counter in Woolworth's, and twist and then drip water on. The creature would surge (the war is ruining that word), and weave in and out, and inch forward, and finally lie not quite exhausted, still reaching. That's life. That's May's life.

I like the idea of looking this week at un-chronological novels, although these days it may be more of a coup to bring off an utterly, uncompromisingly chronological one, the way Stewart O'Nan did in The Good Wife. That book made me look around for more. I mean more that are that good, that strangely undiscouraging.

We play with time so blithely now, partly I think because we feel aghast and ashamed--in the U.S. at least--in a scary and shameful present. Novels are running the clock backwards and sideways and inside out; people pop in and out of the centuries, the costume-element comes in, etc. We don't want time to run meanly forward and the dead to be dead.

I wish I could say that when I was writing Seven Loves I had a grand theory about time. But I can see that I too have lodged a complaint against the forward march of life. I did want the ages jumbled, as consciousness is mercifully jumbled so we don't see too clearly exactly where things are heading.

Readers and writers, I hope you'll post more of your thoughts about chronology and how fiction treats time. And any other subjects that might have come to mind as you read the book or the interesting and original entries in the Structure contest.

Comments

[asheresque]

Speaking of time in fiction, I guess "Seven Loves" (decades of life captured inside a slim book) is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" (the entirety of which takes place during a ride on an escalator). Maybe I'll place both books together on my bookshelf and see if I can actually cause a tear in the fabric of time.

More seriously, though, Valerie -- thanks for showing up and posting your thoughts here. Your book is a welcome contrast to the more frenetic books we usually discuss at the LBC.

[Valerie Trueblood]

Thank you! And I hope I can use this space to say how moving your tribute to Richard Brickner was; it sent me to his work.

The book Erin cites in the Structure contest, 253, is another one that could go on the shelf where you're trying to tear time. Do you know the wonderful story by Mahfouz, Half a Day, in which the little boy goes for his first day of school and comes out an old man?

[Anne Fernald]

Half a Day is totally heartbreaking. I can barely stand to think about it now that I have children.

You're all adding heaps to my stack of books to read...

[Dan Wickett]

"Or one of those straw wrappers we used to tear into "legs" at the counter in Woolworth's, and twist and then drip water on. The creature would surge (the war is ruining that word), and weave in and out, and inch forward, and finally lie not quite exhausted, still reaching. That's life. That's May's life."

What a great analogy. Thanks for stopping by today Valerie. I've not read Half a Day yet, and as one with a trio still in elementary school, think I may have to hold on a few more years before I do.

[asheresque]

Valerie, I haven't read Half A Day but I will definitely read it! That's very heartening to hear about Richard Brickner as well ...

[Thalia Syracopoulos]

Valerie - as I get closer and closer to May's age I want to say that reading "7 Loves" gave me solace and pain. I look back and see that while life physically went in a continuum it does not seem that way when I actually reflect on the events and people themselves. Whole sections are blurred and others are in stark relief. It takes time to see the connections among seemingly unconnected events/times over the years and "7 Loves" captured that process and its intricacies and subtleties in ways that opened my heart and mind.

The pain comes from realizing that sometimes it is the smallest, least memorable words and events that over time played a large part and yet I was oblivious to their impacts until much too late to change them.

On "time" - Michael Cunningham's "Hours" and Nazim Hikmet's "Human Landscapes" come to mind as unfoldings that captured how much time is not a continuum in the mind.

Thanks for the gift of your work.

[Valerie Trueblood]

What a lovely comment, Thalia. I do think our minds don't accept ourselves as changing creatures, and some wonderful books show this stubborn, changeless, maybe childish mind. May's mind presented itself to me in this way, hence she wasn't as accomplished or confident as her mother. Eudora Welty shows this mind in her stories, in which the adults sometimes seem to be dressed-up children, and yet some pretty sobering things are going on and they manage them surprisingly well.

I like what Jules Renard said in his Journals, with the balance so characteristic of him despite his awful childhood: "If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more. I did not see properly, and I did not see everything in that little universe in which I was feeling my way."

[Lou Oma Durand]

Seven Loves is a world. A world with its own laws of time, but like ours. The words taking me into this world are transparent, I mean they do not call attention to the writer, but just take me there. I think that Valerie Trueblood has done that rare, extraordinary thing of creating a world so real that plot, chronology, even perfectly lush/spare poetic prose become forgotten abstractions. We're simply in it - May's life, but more - ours. Her and our experience both accumulates and diminishes. Everything matters.

[Valerie Trueblood]

Everything matters! That's a perfect phrase for the reality I tried to get at: "mattering" (alias meaning) somehow winning out even when things seem random. Or when they grow out of mistakes (or out of some small, distant move or misstep). Or when they wing by, as in Grace Paley's little story Wants, in which on the way to return library books she encounters her whole life.

[Lucy]

Hi, I've just discovered you and what a pleasure. Really thought provoking stuff: it quite raises the standard of blogging.
Does Valerie Trueblood (so impresssed I'm now going to search her books out) have a blog? I have just started my own http//www.lucyannwrites.blogspot.com and am now a blog junkie. Unfortunately most are just mindless meanderings, but not this. Thank you. Lucy