Another Anita Shreve: Not Where or When but Why

Because I liked The Last Time They Met so much, almost grabbing strangers in the elevator and telling them to read it, I thought I'd dig deeper into her work and hope to find another love/lust story. And so, the brief description of Where or When sounded like it would also align perfectly with the 2011 blog theme and Paz standards for great love stories. Not.

As I have found with many authors, they have their own themes, their own experiences that they massage again and again in their plots, almost becoming their own self-administered psychoanalysis to make sense of their recollected lives. Shreve again presents two lovers who met as teenagers (here at fourteen as opposed to senior year in high school in TLTTM), and who knew each other only briefly, a mere week in Catholic summer camp with all that attendant structure and chaperon. Both marry, have children, and encounter life's inevitable tragedies. And again, Shreve has the woman be a poet, traveled to Africa. Where to draw the autobiographical line?

Charles sees Sean's (my converted spelling from the Welsh) picture in the Globe's Sunday literary magazine when her latest book of poems is reviewed. (The novel was written in 1993 which explains the lack of the resources of Facebook, etc.). His business is failing as is the entire blue collar fishing town to whom he sells life insurance; he is heading towards foreclosure and repossession land. Sean's husband is also having hard times: crops have failed two years in a row at his onion farm in Pennsylvania. Both marriages are down-turned.

He writes her, reminiscing on innocent first love, with the trite queries about the last 35 years. This is a love story so the inevitable happens, conveniently at their old camp site which has been turned into a quaint inn. The comment in my review of TLTTM, making lustful love dependent on a lengthy separation, is expressed beautifully here as well (if in somewhat a more shallow affair): "...eros is linked with time. It is in the very urgency of time, the sense their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted. But it is, paradoxically, also in the vast expanse of the lost years -- the keen sense, whenever he is with her, of all the days and hours missed, the youthful bodies not known, the thousands of nights he might have touched her easily, without loss, without guilt and anxiety ... he thinks of their hours together as time stolen or salvaged -- time-outs from their separate realities."

But it is these realities that Shreve seems to tilt to in this story. Two parallel threads direct this affair towards being, not ill-fated like TLTTM, but false. They hardly knew each other, except for teenage raging hormones. Neither has a hint of what the other is like when facing difficulties too many ages have passed. One of Shreve's best lines has Sean realizing her periods had not even started when she met Charles and now she is going through menopause. Even more poignant, emphasizing both Charles' and Sean's "real" lives are the descriptions of how both families celebrate Christmas. On balance, those years appear to outweigh their reunion season.

The story anticipates the abrupt, tragic ending in TLTTM, but here it seems forced and mundane: their spouses learn of the affair; Sean's husband shoots himself; Charles has a car accident. The ending seems as adolescent as the first encounter.