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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The rekindled romance turns out to be a bust; Rebecca realizes that not only has she lost any scholarly inclinations but she also can't be bothered to read past her horoscope and Dear Abby in the newspaper; and ultimately she embraces her life as she has lived it. At the birthday party she throws for her husband's uncle she watches some old home movies that have been transferred to video, witnesses her own face from years ago, "merry and open and sunlit," and sees "that she really had been having a wonderful time."
Fair enough. After a generation of "you go, girl" novels in which misunderstood, frustrated women jettisoned their families to find themselves, there's something to be said for Tyler's pragmatic embrace of ordinary domesticity and lasting attachments. The honorable midlife task of reevaluating choices made and dreams abandoned all too often degenerates into the embarrassments of tacky sports cars and bimbo girlfriends. So why not sing the praises of self-acceptance and loyalty, of aging gracefully, as Tyler has been doing for years?
Because some lives really do cry out for change, and Rebecca's is one of them. Tyler does such a good job of convincing us of her heroine's unhappiness that the conclusion of "Back When We Were Grownups" just doesn't convince. First, there's Rebecca's family, a pack of unregenerate narcissists who barely acknowledge her existence and have certainly never considered the possibility that she has an inner life. Tyler brings all her writerly brio to this novel's many boisterous, funny party scenes, each meant to convey the message that family life, God love it, is a chaotic, imperfect, but somehow glorious human muddle. This adorable mess, however, conceals some painfully sharp objects, as the occasional blithely unthinking barb directed at the blameless Rebecca demonstrates.
Some of the slights Rebecca endures are meant to be humorous asides about the self-centeredness of children. One of her (grown) stepdaughters, while kvetching about the aggravations in her recent marriage, tells Rebecca, "You don't have the least idea what it's like, being saddled with somebody else's kid when you're basically still on your honeymoon," for example. (The ever-circumspect Rebecca's reply? "Is that so.") But Rebecca's invisibility among these people to whom she has devoted her life goes beyond the occasional thoughtless remark. Perhaps the most piercing example of how little they think of her comes when she's watching that home-movie video and, as the tape ends with a list of mock "cast" credits, she realizes that she's the only family member whose name doesn't appear.
Even if you don't believe that the human spirit craves appreciation for its efforts and shrivels a little every day that they go ignored and unvalued -- even if you think, as Tyler apparently does, that the reward of emotional labor is simply to have done it and that Rebecca doesn't need to get credit (in the case of the video, literally) for what she has created to feel she's had a "wonderful time" -- it's still hard to see this woman as happy. From the beginning of "When We Were Grownups" Rebecca espouses the philosophy that "if you fake a smile, your smile muscles somehow trigger some reaction in the brain and you'll start feeling the way you pretended to feel, happy and relaxed." Hers is a life of bitten tongues, lived by a woman who lies awake fantasizing about what it would be like to say what she thinks.
Like Delia, the heroine of "Ladder of Years," who abruptly deserts her ungrateful family only to return to them a year and a half later when she realizes that the second life she's made for herself is a replica of the first, Rebecca reconciles herself to the idea that, in the words of her step-uncle, "your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be." We might fantasize about freeing ourselves of all emotional ties, but our character is our destiny and we will re-create the same shackles all over again. Might as well get used to them; might as well convince yourself that you enjoy them. This is a fatalistic variation of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about there being no second acts in American life: In Tyler's world, no matter how long you live, it's just the first act over and over again.
This is, when so baldly stated, a depressing vision, and furthermore it's not true, as quite a few middle-aged people quietly prove every day. Even the extremity of the choice, as Tyler frames it, rings false: There's a lot of ground between severing all connections and commitments to others and settling for a life of selfless, thankless and endless giving. And if you have to go so far as to leave your family in order to get a shred of respect, then, really, the experience might do them some good.
I used to think of Tyler as the bard of the world's unsung nurturers -- many of them mothers but not all of them women, by any means -- a novelist who enabled them to discover the dignity and rejoice in the rewards of their chronically uncelebrated lives. But reading "Back When We Were Grownups," I began to suspect that she really writes for those of us who feed off them, for people like Rebecca's selfish children. If it ever crossed their minds to feel bad about having taken so much from her without ever recognizing that she had her own human portion of dreams and desires, then surely they'd find this book ever so reassuring. What a relief to learn that she really had been having a wonderful time after all.
