Examining the Simple Life
GRAY, PAUL
Examining the Simple Life By the Lake By John McGahem Knopf. 336 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Paul Gray Former senior writer, "Time" magazine Irish author John McGahern's new novel, his first...
...Kate: "I remember the storm...
...But he seems in several ways a strange choice as the central consciousness of anovel...
...Even more annoying is the exposition masquerading as dialogue...
...Joe agrees to write a letter to the brother, for Jamesie to sign, that will resolve the problem with no hurt feelings...
...When Joe realizes that his uncle means this literally, he volunteers to act as the go-between in brokering the deal...
...The slow swelling of melancholy in a passage that begins so festively has echoes throughout the novel...
...Isn't this a pretty argumentative snippet of portraiture, telling readers what to think about Jamesie rather than dramatizing his virtues through his actions...
...It is hard to imagine a creative writing instructor anywhere who would not circle this passage and demand that the hapless student try again...
...There is, for openers, the opening: "The morning was clear...
...Grass grows...
...He is almost totally immune to introspection...
...The hayfields are mowed, the lambs are taken to market and later the cattle...
...An intense vividness and sweetness of nature showed in every quick and expressive movement...
...it will take the reader nearly 60 pages to discover that the husband is named Joe...
...The Shah responds, "We don't talk...
...They both gave up jobs in a London advertising agency some years earlier—he wrote copy, she did artwork—and bought a farmhouse on 20 acres with the help of Joe's uncle, an aging bachelor and the village's richest man, known locally as the Shah...
...A man called Bill Evans appears at the house, takes tea and biscuits, cadges some cigarettes and departs...
...Although he will always remain an outsider, having not, after all, been born there, he has surrounded himself with people who are temperamentally like him...
...There was no wind on the lake...
...The waves were washing across the lake wall, pouring down the windscreen, blinding the windows...
...Children get old...
...Is the simple life, close to nature, a salvation or a prison...
...The wildness could only be heard...' Along about here, the urge to close the covers and give up on By the Lake may strike some as overwhelming...
...There was also a great stillness...
...But Ruttledge's puzzling emotional impassivity may explain why he voluntarily renounced a London career to live in a place vaguely recalled from his childhood...
...You nearly have to be born into a place to know what's going on and what to do," Jamesie likes to say, and he enjoys dispensing "news," i.e...
...With this garrulous Virgil as a guide, Ruttledge is the Dante through whom most of the events of the book's year-long journey are perceived...
...Joe provides a similar service for Jamesie, who is in despair because his bachelor brother, who has worked in England for many years, has written that he wants to return home and live with the Murphys...
...When the bells rang out for Mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves...
...We were in the Shah's car, following Jimmy Joe McKiernan's battered little red Ford...
...But readers who decide to be patient with this novel's introductory awkwardnesses and with McGahern's blithe breaking of contemporary rules of fiction ("Never open a book with weather"—Elmore Leonard) will not be sorry they made the effort to persevere...
...Some palaver between Jamesie and the Ruttledges follows...
...The time, similarly unspecified, seems to be fairly close to the present...
...Next, a character named Jamesie sneaks into the house of a couple called the Ruttledges and teasingly reprimands them for their insufficient alertness...
...Joe knows that Jamesie, for all his protestations of love for his brother, truly can't abide him (nor can Mary) and quickly grasps the dilemma: "They could not live with him and could not be seen— in their own eyes or in the eyes of others—to refuse him shelter or turn him away...
...Kate and Joe Ruttledge are unique among their neighbors in having chosen to live there...
...These personal crises flare up and subside against the cyclical progression of the seasons, the repetitive rhythms of rural life...
...By the Lake may be the antithesis of the shrewdly polished, attenuated novels now so much in critical favor, but the narrative oddities that at first seem offputting soon become unsettling and then intriguing and finally haunting...
...Oh, an already restive reader may respond, so it was not a dark and stormy night...
...At Christmastime Ruttledge walks around the village: "All the bars had a lighted Christmas tree and holly and looped strings of tinsel...
...Ruttledge agrees: "You do know the whole world...
...Mary: "People we know come and go in our minds whether they are here or in England or alive or dead...
...Reviewed by Paul Gray Former senior writer, "Time" magazine Irish author John McGahern's new novel, his first since the well-received Amongst Women (1990), gets off to a decidedly unpromising start...
...And you have been my sweet guide...
...When Jamesie makes his first appearance, he announces: "I've never, never moved from here and I know the whole world...
...Its precise location is never specified, but various hints suggest it is in County Leitrim, where McGahem was born in 1934...
...Her name is Kate...
...By the Lake sets out a central mystery and then has the courage to leave it unresolved...
...Can people know the whole world without knowing themselves...
...The strangeness of McGahern's telling mimes the mystery of his tale...
...The two of you will have to talk...
...Never mind the mystification of someone in the Irish countryside called the Shah...
...Jamesie Murphy and his wife Mary, who own a house and small farm a short walk away around the lake, have befriended the Ruttledges and helped them cope with the legendary insularity and standoffishness of Irish village life...
...and there were people wandering the town who had no people to meet, who did not want to be alone and were not noticed...
...A description of Jamesie ensues: "In his dark Sunday suit, white shirt, red tie, polished black shoes, the fine silver hair brushed back from the high forehead and sharp clean features, he was shining and handsome...
...In the midst of the natural beauty of the lake, trees and distant blue mountains, bitter fatalisms are suddenly blurted out...
...If so, is it worth anyone's while to overhear them...
...Joe replies no, "quietly but with an edge of steel...
...In fact, he can, as an outsider, make himself useful to them...
...Edges were softened, ways found round harsh realities...
...Subject closed, both for Ryan and the reader...
...The novel can be simply, if inadequately, described as a year in the life of a rural Irish village...
...The Shah: "The rain comes down...
...Somehow, the stratagem works...
...We're no more than apuff of wind out on the lake...
...That's it...
...He either doesn't think much about his past or about his marriage with Kate, or doesn't choose to share those thoughts...
...When his uncle says he is thinking of retiring and selling his storage business to Frank Dolan, his assistant for many years, Joe says, "You'll have to have a word with him...
...it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all...
...Pages were pinned up beside the dart boards, on which lines could be purchased for the Christmas raffle, with prizes of a goose and a turkey, hampers of ham and whiskey and port and gin...
...In all this feast of Christmas there were some shops that were almost empty, the assistants or owners looking out on the busy street to the passers-by who were all shopping elsewhere...
...The timid, gentle manners, based on a fragile interdependence, dealt in avoidances and obfuscations...
...Do the Ruttledges really fill each other in, from time to time, on all the details of their shared past...
...Near the end, he says almost exactly the same thing: "I may not have traveled far but I know the whole world...
...local gossip, as much as he does hearing it...
...At one point, after a walk by the lake, Ruttledge finds himself thinking that he is happy and grows alarmed: "The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness couldnot be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped...
...Regular customers were served a Christmas round of drinks on the house...
...At one point Patrick Ryan, a local handyman, presumes to ask Joe why he and Kate are childless: "Was she too old when you started...
...After Jamesie leaves too, the Ruttledges reminisce to each other about how they came to buy, in an indeterminate past, the house by the lake where they now live...
...The reader may want to withhold assent while reconsidering everything that has gone before...
Vol. 85 • March 2002 • No. 2
