From Allende: Love in the air and a body
The emotional range of Isabel Allende’s new novel is stretched so wide that it’s a miracle the book’s spine doesn’t break. We’re used to dark comedies, the ironic mingling of humour and despair, but “In the Midst of Winter” is a light tragedy, an off-kilter mix of sweetness and bleakness held together only by Allende’s dulcet voice.
“In the Midst of Winter” opens on a snowy day in Brooklyn. Lucia, a Chilean professor “blessed with the stoic character of her people,” hates the cold weather and feels cooped up in her basement apartment. “She missed sex, romance, and love,” Allende writes. “The first of these she could obtain every so often, the second was a matter of luck, and the third was a gift from the gods that would probably never happen.” Lucia would much rather be upstairs with Richard, the depressed colleague who hired her to teach at NYU, but he’s already rebuffed her not-so-subtle entreaties.
From Chaucer to Shakespeare to Austen to countless funny movies, Allende is following the classic rom-com structure: a vivacious woman and a dyspeptic man who claims he’ll never love again. And “In the Midst of Winter” develops that late-in-life romance between Lucia and Richard with all the humour and charm one could ask for.
The catalyst is a minor traffic accident in which Richard runs into the back of a Lexus driven by a young Guatemalan nanny who works for a New York gangster. She immediately drives off but then shows up later at Richard’s apartment, terrified and begging for help because she didn’t have permission to drive her boss’ car.
And there’s a dead body in the trunk. Ill-equipped to handle this panicked woman (or the body in the Lexus), Richard calls down to Lucia in his basement apartment, and we’re off and running!
If this were the circumference of “In the Midst of Winter,” it would be a delightful madcap comedy: “Arsenic and Spanish Lace.” But every other chapter, Allende interrupts the present-day zaniness with the backstories on each of her three protagonists — and those stories are not zany or comic; they’re scaldingly tragic. We learn, for instance, that Richard isn’t merely a grouch; he’s traumatized by an unspeakable accident that no one would be expected to survive. Lucia, meanwhile, lost her brother in Pinochet’s reign of terror, and the young nanny whom she and Richard are trying to help was subjected to torture in Guatemala that shattered her mind and body.
But can such atrocities be woven into a romantic comedy in which a dead body is sometimes thrown around like a hot potato? One minute we’re laughing, the next we’re weeping, until that jumble of tones feels like watching 99 TV channels spin by. And then, finally, the summer begins: “Enough wallowing in the sorrows of the past,” Lucia demands. “The only cure for so much misfortune is love.” It’s as though Allende has shifted from magical realism to magical feelism, some kind of synthetic hopefulness that asks us to brush off the agonies that her novel’s alternate chapters so indelibly portray.
“In the Midst of Winter” doesn’t challenge our faith in the ultimate triumph of love so much as our credulity about how that love might be attained and how unfettered it might arise. There’s a neatness to this story that the standards of romantic comedy demand but the history of these characters won’t allow.