Family Happiness
Colwin, Laurie
FAMILY HAPPINESS Laurie Colwin / Alfred A. Knopf/ $12.95 Mitchell S. Ross JL here is dignity as well as amusement in the fictional performances of Laurie Colwin. Her characters hail from the...
...He shrugged it off and held out his arm...
...history...
...The family was the beginning, the future, and the past...
...How tender and handsome he looked...
...Her characters hail from the eastern establishment as reliably as Louis Auchincloss's folks...
...In between there have been several elegant short stories, one of which, "Family Happiness," has now been expanded into a novel...
...A person immersed in the realities of family life did not stop to ponder the meaning of life...
...Usually the table divided into the legal half and the silent half...
...Polly's marriage survives...
...How odd that this did not make her feel any different...
...When Lincoln returns, however, so do the complications, and finally we are left with a Polly "who felt her heart break open to love and pain, and to the complexity of things...
...They fit perfectly, but, then, they always had...
...They have attended the best schools and now send their children to them...
...That person was in life, up to his or her neck and beyond...
...Polly wraps bread in linen towels and does her best to make everything just right...
...Happy All the Time was a delightful string quartet, involving the effort of two attractive young couples to manage their lives...
...Once he and Polly had become lovers, "they were as inseparable as two people, one of whom is married and the other of whom likes to live as a hermit, can be...
...Colwin is as civilized as those linen towels in which Polly wraps her bread...
...Polly (nee Solo-Miller) loves husband and family...
...Indeed, she has married family in the old-fashioned Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...It seemed overwhelmingly clear to him that he could not live with another person, and this made him feel unknown to himself...
...It had been said of Grandfather Solo-Miller that he behaved as if he had chosen God, and not the other way around...
...Henry Demarest, her husband, although a bit too devoted to his job, is much the same way...
...Finally Lincoln departs for a spell in Paris and Polly thinks for a time that he is behind her...
...It was life itself, without an inch to spare...
...Not anyone could be a Jew, and very few Jews were the sort of Jews the Demarests and Solo-Millers were...
...Into this tidy world steps Lincoln Bennett, a painter of similar social background but more hermetic disposition...
...After all, family life was the mortar that kept the bricks together...
...The Demarests and Solo-Millers went to synagogue on High Holy Days...
...It had to do with a sense of aristocracy...
...This book is a trio...
...They manage...
...The metaphors are lovely...
...In the old days Laurie Colwin would have been classified as a "woman's writer...
...Polly Demarest is its central figure, but a husband and a lover are in the picture as well...
...At dinners "the conversation officially began...
...So does her affair...
...Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object was a well-tuned first novel...
...In an age in which marriage is a troubled institution and love is as difficult as sex is easy, this leads to some interesting situations...
...That form suits her trenchant talent...
...How admirably she can shade the distinction between lust and love, and how competently she can convey the uncertainty as to where one leaves off and the other begins: Polly sat on her side of the bed and watched Henry sleep...
...He stirred next to her and Polly covered his shoulder with the quilt...
...He is Jewish but "Henry Demarest's sense of Jewishness was like the Solo-Millers...
...How odd it seemed to her to live so far away, so angry, so troubled, when Henry could make her feel so overwhelmed, so profoundly moved, so deeply satisfied...
...Colwin happily exploits them...
...And yet there is pleasure to be taken from the flow of ambiguities...
...The family is full of lawyers...
...In the age of feminism, however, she is more than that: a graceful temperament, an intelligent interpreter of emotion, a restorative...
...sense in which there is much getting along with in-laws, brothers, sisters, parents, etc., in the context of things...
...She crept beside him and he enfolded her...
...the pitch that made the basket watertight;, the chinking that kept out the wind and the weather...
...Domesticity rubbed against him like a hair shirt...
...Perhaps she forced herself to make a novel of this...
...They attend Conferences on International Limits/Money and ideology are not among their most worrisome concerns and, as with Jane Austen's people, they devote their energies to the pursuit of domestic tranquillity...
...This set a precedent for lesser mortals and reminded God that they had not forgotten Him...
...The supporting cast is amusing...
...Anyone could be a Christian...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
