And They Lived Happily Ever After
RUCKENSTEIN, LEILA
And They Lived Happily Ever After Silver By Hilma Wolitzer Farrar Straus Giroux. 324pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Leila Ruckenstein Free-lance critic, editor In this, her fifth novel (on top...
...Paulie, torn by confusion and ambivalence, postpones her plans...
...He feels like "the youngest son in a fairy tale, the one who has to perform some heroic task to win the hand of the beautiful princess...
...Howard relinquished his ambition of becoming a jazz musician to run a recording studio...
...In fact, Howard was not being so fanciful when he imagined he was a character in a fairy tale...
...She is quick—unrealistically so—to make a life for herself in the city: In short order she finds her own apartment and some work, enrolls in a poetry workshop, and takes a lover—a widowed doctor whom she met at the library...
...Reviewed by Leila Ruckenstein Free-lance critic, editor In this, her fifth novel (on top of several children's books), Hilma Wolitzer writes with ease, charm and humor about a troubled marriage and the failure of love...
...Getting ready for bed the night she has made up her mind to bolt, she notices how waning interest has made them look away from each other's no longer youthful flesh...
...The resemblance between the older couple and the considerably less interesting younger one is established in the opening pages...
...Their marriage has robbed both of them of their dreams: Paulie gave up writing poetry and started doing a household hints column, "Paulie's Kitchen Körner...
...This is a marriage done with mirrors, Paulie humourously tells us...
...Later, when Sara becomes pregnant, Jason wants her to have an abortion—just as his father wanted Paulie to do 25 years earlier...
...Howard learns that his mother in Florida is putting up Jason, and retrieves him as a gesture of repentance...
...Howard, meanwhile, repines, contemplates death, and plays his sax...
...Both Howard and Paulie try to coax him into marrying the girl, but on the day of the wedding he disappears...
...The problem is that underneath the smooth prose lies a contrived story that ultimately fails to get beyond the ordinary and reveal the terrible complexities of the human heart...
...Paulie and Howard Flax, who were the main characters in Wolitzer's earlier novel In the Flesh, have here reached middle age...
...To heal their marriage after that affair, they moved out of New York to the "purgatory" of the Long Island suburbs, where they grew mutually isolated and bored...
...When Paulie first got pregnant 25 years ago, Howard married her reluctantly...
...We tell ourselves that Howard is just dreaming, that of course the author will deflect the lot from such a melodramatic conclusion...
...But the next moveis Howard's...
...Their reconciliation is short-lived, though...
...Paulie herself seems to be laughing at the notion...
...Although his personality is on the bland side, he is compassionately drawn: We do not doubt that he is as forlorn without Paulie, as she was long ago when he left her, and that he would do anything to get her back...
...Disappointingly enough, that is precisely what happens...
...In the hospital, confronted with his mortality, he discovers that he loves his wife after all, and breaks off relations with the other woman, Janine...
...in a noticeably forced subplot, they reenact his parents' rocky beginnings...
...Jason, the son, has a more important role to play: He and his girlfriend Sara are cast as parallel counterparts to Howard and Paulie...
...In alternating chapters they take turns narrating their story...
...four years later, he left her to live with another woman...
...Wolitzer is much less successful with Howard and Paulie's two grown-up children: Instead of breathing life into them, she makes them caricatures...
...Only a few months away from their silver wedding anniversary, Paulie decides to leave Howard...
...She prays that her husband won't die now—partly out of vestigial affection, partly out of a desire not to be cheated out of her resolution to settle accounts with him...
...rather, she rightly suspects Howard of having an affair, and a history of hurts has already diminished their relationship...
...He came back, though, and as Paulie relates, "the children and I made room for him in the kitchen and the bathroom, ready to forgive, if not forget...
...Jason, like Howard, is a musician (he plays the drums), and the two possess the "redeeming beauty of gangsters...
...They practically throw themselves into each other's arms...
...Following an unexpected confrontation with Janine, Paulie reverts to her original intention, leaving Howard and the deadening suburbs for Manhattan, where she moves in with a friend...
...Subconsciously, Paulie reflects, they probably blame each other for their failure to fulfill their aspirations...
...Paulie tells us how she sees her younger self in Sara, who is as obsessed with Jason as Paulie had been with Howard...
...Of the two, it is Paulie who dominates the book—and our sympathy—with her cutting wit...
...On that very night Howard has a heart attack—a rather heavy coincidence...
...Upon his recovery he manages to mollify Paulie, "making [her] believe [her] instincts were wrong, that love always triumphs over everything...
...Silver's last scene, which has Howard and Paulie going to bed after a surprise Silver Anniversary party, is supposed to be a miraculous transformation of the night Paulie decided to leave: Now that their love has been revived, they can look frankly at each other's nakedness...
...The final twist to this hokey denouement is that the baby's birth—an obvious metaphor of renewal—takes Howard and Paulie back to their own courting days by reminding them of Jason's birth...
...Yet even as this character pokes fun at all forms of kitsch and schmaltz, the author lets the plot slip into sentimental and predictable territory...
...I had to get out before Hallmark unfurled the tinfoil in a roll of thunder," she tells us with characteristic drollness...
...Daughter Ann is, in her mother's blunt words, "a shallow little materialist" who lives with her Wall Street husband in a perfect household in Larchmont, complete with a Swiss housekeeper...
...Howard cannot possibly win Paulie back with the heroics of bringing Jason home—or so we reason...
...It is not that some "Mr...
...At this point Howard gets the idea that Sara's pregnancy may be the key to his reconciliation with Paulie...
...Wonderful" has comealong...
...Unfortunately, this is also a book done with mirrors...
Vol. 71 • October 1988 • No. 17
