An extended meditation on marriage
Dear Evelyn the story of a couple who come apart as they stay together
BOOK REVIEW Dear Evelyn Kathy Page (Biblioasis) $19.95 | 303pp
There’s a remarkable, though discomfiting scene late in Dear Evelyn, London-born Salt Spring Islander Kathy Page’s sobering eighth novel.
Married to Evelyn since the flames, explosions, and sirens of London over the brutally cold winter of 1940, geriatric Harry is taking stock.
“This is what we have, now, dear,” he tells his wife.
He’s matter-of-fact, studying her and seeing the thinning hair, the glasses with thick lenses, and the age spots she tries but fails to cover up. Beneath these inarguable truths, he discerns the woman he’s been physically besotted with for decades.
A moment earlier, Evelyn had been asked by her eldest child, a woman on the verge of retirement herself, to consider the needs of frail Harry.
Evelyn thinks: “What about what she wanted? A river cruise down the Rhine, for example. A man who did not drive her crazy. A husband who could walk and fix things, who didn’t wet himself, or need help with his buttons, blow his breath between his teeth, or insist that things that had not happened the way she perfectly well remembered them happening. What about that?”
To state it mildly, this couple’s differences of perspective and depth of feeling have evolved over the years.
When Dear Evelyn ends a short chapter later, a reader is left with the diorama of a long haul marriage, and, perhaps, with questions along the line of “How could they?” or “Why would anyone ...?” or “Why wouldn’t he ...” Maybe also: “How thin should ‘through thick and thin’ become before a marriage is a lost cause and worthy of abandonment?”
I’ll limit Page’s numerous accomplishments across her chapters to an outstanding two.
The first is capturing individuals as they intersect with an era. Evelyn’s management of anxiety (via doctor-prescribed pills, of course), for example, or young Harry’s exposure to war poets through an embittered (and eventually dismissed) shell-shocked teacher. The vignettes are perfectly realized, artful miniatures that convey the complexities of the zeitgeist.
The other is the extended meditation of a marriage, in which two seemingly compatible but increasing divergent personalities remain committed to one another while steadily and inventively undercutting or sabotaging or ridiculing or ignoring the other.
It’s tempting to guess the author experienced every scene firsthand and took ample notes. The detail, the nuance, and the vitality of the scenes, while disconcerting, is also supremely detailed but never overwhelming with pages of minutia. There’s economy in Page’s writing that’s complemented by careful introduction of material that stays locked in mind.
Harry and Evelyn come together for an instant, repel one another over this or that, strive to find their better selves and their compassion and their once rich love; and then, with a harsh word or passing mood, they’re back to marital warfare.
It’s a heartbreaking depiction, if only because it’s so enduring: these two are bound by family, by obligation, by history, and even by a steady if off-kilter and declining love. Faced with their own failings, their dissatisfactions, their growing senses of not having realized something (Harry is a lifelong poet who never gets far beyond jottings in a notebook; for an eventual gravestone, Evelyn could steal “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody”), they lash out at the nearest available set of ears.
It’s a lovely but sad and dispiriting novel, perhaps because cultural messages constantly tell us we can become anything, do anything, or change and renew ourselves. But what happens when we can’t?
Brett Josef Grubisic’s fourth novel, Oldness; Or, The LastDitch Efforts of Marcus O, will be published in October.
The vignettes are perfectly realized, artful miniatures that convey the complexities of the zeitgeist.