next reading…
For this post, I just want to talk a bit about Alice’s relationship with Ned, and how it kind of works as an example for the basis of every relationship in this book.
On page 239, when Alice is talking with Clare, she reveals that she was planning on leaving Ned before he died. “I’d made up my mind,” she says. “I was thinking about how to tell him, and then he dropped over dead on his way to the mailbox… I kept thinking, ‘if I leave, this won’t be my kitchen anymore. I won’t have my plates stacked in this corner cupboard, or light coming in at just this angle’… I couldn’t seem to relinquish… those little daily things. And then it would be time to make dinner, and another day would end.”
We know from Alice’s previous narrations that all was not well in Ned-and-Alice land to begin with, but I think it was just impressed upon us with a sad, regretful undertone… like it was more something Alice could mourn but not ever quite change herself. After Ned’s death, it comes screaming out and waving its arms around: Alice stayed with Ned because she couldn’t imagine living her life any other way than she’d started off. Like a tree, she grew roots, and like a tree, she was stuck living exactly where she was, no hope for change. She was comfortable in the familiarity of her life, too comfortable at any given moment to recognize the changes she needed to make for happiness. Ned’s death forces her hand, forces that change, and it’s something she finds she isn’t ready for. She doesn’t know how to be alone, to be without a husband, without someone to cook for and clean for and take care of.
Clare says on page 243 that she was laughing “at Alice, stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard.” She laughs at things in her own life as well, at Bobby, at Jon, at herself, but I think it’s important that the last person she chooses to describe is Alice. We’ve drawn parallels between them in class and I think this comfort that drove Alice to stay, to not break that status quo, is the same motivator for Clare’s own trouble in an opposite sense. Clare is with Jon because it’s comfortable and they love each other minus the sex. She’s with Bobby because they’re in love plus the sex. But these two loves aren’t big romantic affairs; they’re small and only unreasonably because they’re two-sided: they all love one another at the same time. Clare wanted a baby, but gets cold feet because “I’m not this unusual, it’s just my hair.” She doesn’t want to be crazy, she wants to be comfortable. Three adults raising a baby isn’t comfortable. She wants to be in contrl of her own life (like Alice finds herself fearing now that she can be), and sharing a baby isn’t easy.
Jonathan tells Clare to be brave, and I think that’s the best bit of advice he could give any character in this novel. Comfort doesn’t require bravery, but a real, worthy life does at some point.
I don’t think Clare really knows what she wants, and raising a baby with two other people is definitely unusual, especially when they all love each other. I think that Clare having a baby with just one of them wouldn’t be as hard, but she planned it out with Jon, and carries it out with Bobby, so she chooses to share. Good Post