A Month of Novellas, Book 18: The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley (1987)

matchy, matchy library lamp ;o)

I don’t usually like novels about infidelity. Not sure why, but just like stories about addiction, be it alcohol or drugs, stories of infidelity usually bore me to tears.

They seem to me to often be about selfish people who need ‘novelty’ in their lives and who don’t care about whom they hurt and leave in their trail. And most often they’re from the point of view of the one who strayed, which usually makes them even more galling to me.

So I didn’t exactly have a great deal of expectations before starting The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley…but I was surprised, very pleasantly surprised.

The Age of Grief is about a young family of dentists, Dana, Dave and their three little girls. The parents are in their mid-thirties and have been together since dental school. They even have a practice together where they each have an assistant as well as two receptionists hired from the local college. They’re struggling with parental tasks that prove to be universal. Dana speaking about their youngest Leah:

“Dana was overjoyed but suspicious. She would say, “No one grows up to be this nice. How are we going to wreck it?” p.130

Yours truly – I have a 2-year-old - struggles with this same thought as I often wonder how in the world will I be messing up this kid?

They have a contented life together or so Dave thinks until he suspects that Dana is having an affair.

Well…he doesn’t know for sure, nor does he want to know, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to keep Dana from ‘confessing’ or confiding in him.

Dave senses that she loves someone else but can’t bring herself to tell him…and he wants to keep it that way. He’s become morose about life in general:

“I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. (…) It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling their lives were meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later.” P.154

Although I myself have lately been going through my own Age of Grief, I think it has nothing to do with my age (I'm a bit older than Dave). Simply circumstances have made the last six months a sad period. So although I think this is to be a very powerful paragraph, I also can’t help to think that maybe he needs to move to a town that has a less high death rate. Of course everyone dies eventually, but if you’re 35, you shouldn’t have lots of people dying on you and everyone else about to. It’s a bit of a ridiculous and fatalistic statement to make. But then again, this shows where his head is at, at this particular moment.

There are definitely moments of pure sadness in Dave’s attempt to smooth everything over and ignore all the signs of Dana’s betrayal. He seems to think that if he can keep her from articulating her thoughts and feelings out loud, then he can keep their family together. But sometimes the pretense gets to him:

“(…) Oh, God! Dana, I’m sorry I’m me!” That’s what I said. It just came out. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me down on top of her and hugged me tightly, and said in a much evener voice, “I’m not sorry you’re you.” p.166

This was a wonderful and intimate portrait of a marriage about to self-destruct. I loved all the little details of family life and about each of their little girls. The writer took time to flesh them out as real human beings rather than just treat them as addendums to their parents’ marriage.