San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Together again
In this contentious, polarized age, readers may need an alternative to stories of bitter divorce and betrayal. People who used to get along may come to see each other with virulent hostility...? Well, we know that. The more welcome and surprising news is that divorce is not always the end of the story; after enough time, relations with an exspouse might, like a fine wine, mature into a deeper, wellrounded flavor. Past partners know some part of us that no one else ever will, and sometimes, at a moment of midlife crisis, such familiarity can bring comfort. And relief. There could be no more appealing bearer of this narrative message than Stephen McCauley. Warm, very funny and observant, McCauley has inspired devotion in his fans since his much-loved debut 30 years ago, “The Object of My Affection,” later turned into a film with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. (To measure how far we have traveled culturally since then, consider that the New York Times review of that novel referred to its main character, George, as a “homosexual.”) McCauley produced a string of affable best-sellers thereafter, but in his adroit and affecting new novel, “My Ex-Life,” he revisits the emotional territory of that first novel: the special closeness that may arise between a gay man and a straight woman. Here the man and woman, David Hedges and Julie Fiske, were once actually married — to one another — though briefly, and a couple of decades before this story begins. They married optimistically, on discovering that Julie was pregnant, and split up soon after the pregnancy ended in its early months. Now middleaged, David and Julie are far apart, geographically and emotionally. In a small coastal New England town, Julie is sorting through the latter stages of divorce from her second husband, while trying to motivate their teenaged daughter Mandy to engage with the college application process; David, newly single after being left by his lover, works in San Francisco as a college application counselor. Both face the specter of displacement: Julie is striving to buy out her husband’s share of their ramshackle house, and generating extra income by renting rooms out on Airbnb, while David’s landlady has been persuaded by a ruthless realtor (and former friend of David’s) to sell his rented carriage house, forcing him to move.
It is Mandy who indirectly engineers the couple’s reunion. Helping her mother sort through old books and records, Mandy becomes intrigued by the story of Julie’s first marriage, sensing without being told that it foundered because of David’s sexuality. “There was something galling about the fact that Mandy had apparently surmised in ten seconds what it had taken Julie years to figure out.” In a “Parent Trap”-like move, Mandy provokes her mother to invite David to come out to visit, ostensibly to help Mandy with her applications but also to provide Julie with companionship. The novel explores the way that David, still mourning the fact that he never had children of his own, comes to play the role of a sort of spiritual father to the troubled Mandy, and a husband manqué to the hapless, potaddled Julie.
This is rich territory for McCauley, who has been writing perceptively about modern family since long before there was a hit TV series of that name, on which America watched its first network-endorsed gay wedding. David and Julie shared a fondness for the same novels, a sense of humor, an ease with one another. Julie reflects that she and her husband had never “been friends the way she and David had been,” and she welcomes David easily into her improvised boarding house. When David, overweight and adrift, first arrives, he sees the passage of time in his ex-wife’s appearance. “Julie’s face, in the morning light, had the yesterday’s dessert look he’d grown accustomed to seeing in his peers and his mirror — everything a little melted, fallen, and shiny.” Yet going to work on home improvements and engaging in mild flirtation with a local store owner prove a welcome distraction from David’s own dilemmas back in San Francisco.
The interwoven domestic plots and seaside setting allow McCauley, always a keen commentator on cultural mores, opportunity for witty observations on the Airbnb trend, the predictability of tourist traps — Mandy briefly holds a summer job at a store whose dire name, Beachy Keen, she can’t even bring herself to utter — and high schoolers’ stumbling efforts to write about themselves. (David recalls a student essay “the first draft of which had included the memorable sentence: ‘One of my educational goals is to move away from my parents.’ ”) There are genuine dark notes, too, as Mandy’s path proves more wayward than either David or Julie could have guessed, past secrets are painfully revealed, and the cold economic realities of the real estate market force them both to acknowledge that their dream of non-wedded domestic bliss may prove a wistful fantasy.
Until it does, though, there is the warm fondness these exes have for one another. After all, sharing a taste in fiction is no small thing: “It was telling that some of the happiest times they’d had together had revolved around these fey, campy books, but they’d been genuinely happy hours and romantic in their own way.”
Sylvia Brownrigg’s novel “Pages for Her” will be published in paperback in July. Email: books@sfchronicle.com