Learning to love the unlovable
Try as we might to love our fellow humans, many of us have someone in our close circle who is almost impossible to love. They disappoint us, take advantage of us or drive us crazy with their selfdestructive behaviour.
This is the territory Lauren B. Davis explores in “Even So,” the ninth book by this prolific Montreal-born author (“The Grimoire of Kensington Market,” “The Empty Room,” the Giller longlisted “Our Daily Bread”).
Angela Morrison is a 40ish housewife whose bad choices make it increasingly difficult for her family and friends, and for us readers, to care about her. But as the novel tries to show us, we can’t give up on her, even after she’s given up on herself.
At the beginning of the novel, Angela has everything she’s ever wanted — or thought she wanted. Living in prosperous Princeton, N.J. (where the author now lives), she has a faithful husband who’s a good provider, a teenage son off soon to college, a stately home complete with greenhouse for her beloved orchids and a volunteer job at a food bank in nearby grotty Trenton.
But she’s bored senseless, desperate to trade her life of comfort for a life of passion.
Her solution is to pursue an affair with a handsome Danish gardener named Carsten. The two revel in good food, great sex and fine wine, which exacerbates Angela’s drinking problem and jeopardizes her family.
Quietly watching Angela self-destruct is a nun named Sister Eileen, who also works at the food bank and who is facing her own personal crisis. She’s been experiencing “the great silence of God,” sensing her prayers disappearing into a great dark void.
Has Angela been sent to her for a reason?
An intriguingly flawed character herself, Sister Eileen wants to help Angela believe she’s worthy of love, especially God’s love. But if that’s true, Eileen knows she has to start the painful task of loving Angela herself. It’s a challenge, particularly after the selfish, careless, messy Angela makes yet another tragic choice.
Both women ultimately undergo transformations and not in entirely predictable ways.
“Even So” gets its title from a Raymond Carver poem: “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?” The book centres on the value of feeling beloved despite our many human failings, but also touches briefly on other themes, such as the unfairness of massive income disparity.
While it’s always refreshing to read about lusty female sexuality, Davis’s writing brims, and sometimes runs over, with hyperbole. “She needed fire, and (her husband) was water,” Davis writes. “With Carsten she would burn, he would consume her. She wanted immolation and saw herself as the phoenix, rising from the ash.”
Davis writes authentically about alcoholism, a subject she’s mined in previous novels. (Davis herself has been sober for more than 25 years.)
It must have been a supreme challenge for Davis to write a book where virtually none of the characters is especially likeable. But then, I suppose that’s the whole point. If you’re expecting deep conversations about philosophy and religion, you won’t find them here. Still, “Even So” raises enough moral questions to prompt some spirited discussion among book clubs.