LITERATURE: A Perfect Stranger

Catching up with Roxana Robinson’s A Perfect Stranger:

Blind Man:  We are along for a rough traffic drive on a highway, with a man who has someplace to go, and worries to think about on the way.  Backstory gives us the problem:  A daughter who has come home from college because of drug use.  The family goes to a long established home in the country for the summer vacation, and things go well enough.  Then the girl leaves to stay with her older sister and the problem resurfaces.  Robinson sets the story well, gives us the full dynamics of what parents go through, the handling, the reacquaintance, the careful trust filled with misgiving that must be established. The crux of that point is relayed in almost too preaching a manner:  We’re back on the drive and the man sees a blind man and his dog walking dangerously close to a busy highway, stops, and despite the man’s protests, helps him and the dog safely across.  One thing bothered me:

Roger couldn’t stop as he drove past; the traffic pressed him too hard, too fast.  He watched the harnessed dog trying to lead the man away from the road, toward the fence  He saw the man stumble against the fence, then jerk the dog, heading it back toward the traffic.  (p. 104)

Blind, yes, but the man is not deaf.  Why wouldn’t he be aware of the traffic, the danger?  That one little quirk, and the lesson that’s a bit too obvious made this one of my less favorite stories.

The Treatment:  This was my least favorite story.  And not because of the story itself, which was a powerful account in first person point of view of the rigors of illness and the emotion of both the protagonist’s reactions and the reaction of those around her.  I well understand the fear, the helplessness that changes how we interact when death looms.  But what bothered me is the very realistic manner in which the character is immersed in the process of "the treatment,"  the tubes and IV feedings of drugs meant to cure.  Patients do tend sometimes to get overly absorbed in marking things down, watching over it all to make sure it’s precise and precisely noted. 

However, though I can handle death and blood and such, the one thing I’m schkeevitz about is anything that goes into the veins. 

This repulsion that has me bending my elbows and knees shut in protective mode has been with me since as long as I can remember, and I’ve never been able to tie it in with anything; no traumatic incident I can recall or had told me by parents. But I could not read every word written, often because the book was being held at such a strange unreadable angle by twisted up arms. Talk about your reader input…

Assez: The title is the French word for "silence" and it figures into the ending of the story of this couple going on a vacation to France in the supposed hope of refinding each other after the husband’s admittance of an affair. Told in the first person pov of the wife, it is again a fairly intense view of the anger, depression yet love and hope after betrayal:

We were attached to each other, we were like climbers on a mountain, out of sight of each other, but with the long rope between us. We were struggling, each of us alone, chipping with hammers at the implacable stone, setting our feet into narrow crevices, but held together, each one knowing the other was at the end of the cord. That knowledge was holding us onto the face of the mountain, keeping us moving upward. (p. 132)

Robinson’s analogies are wonderful, as are her intimate images. But the following paragraph seems to overexplain, as if the reader didn’t catch the connection and instead follows the metaphor too closely and too long along:

Of course, if your partner really falls off the mountain–a dead weight plummeting toward the earth–you cannot save him. In fact, the reverse: his velocity, the absolute plumb-line insistence of gravity, will pull you down too. But you can save each other from minor things, an ill-considered handhold, a crumbling rock, a loosened piton.  Slips, not plummeting falls.  (etc.)  (p. 132)

Robinson also is meticulous in leaving no loose ends–much as Marquez’s carefully remembered episodes in 100 Years of Solitude that all see closure by the end of the book, and also uses recurrence for stress of a point.  An example:

I wanted to know what day he first looked up at Alison, as she leaned over his desk and as he smiled up into her face.  I wanted to know what he first said to her, intimately, that changed everything–How do you know things like that?–and what she answered–I know lots of things.  (p. 131)

"You know how to use the French pay phones?" I said, surprised, impressed.  "How do you know things like that?"

"I know lots of things," Steven said and smiled at me.  (p. 139)

This last particular excerpt also foreshadows the outcome of the story, and it is where I suspected the ending.

Intersection:  This story is almost essaylike in its perception of suicide.  One of Robinson’s finest talents lies in her imagery via description that makes it seem as if you are reading instead one of her letters to a friend.  The settings are most likely something familiar to her–using the experience of reality and describing it creatively to put it to use in a story.  That is why the understanding of the protagonist’s feelings upon thinking of a suicide that is relayed in the story is disturbing.  It is real because the setting is so real and distinct.  Excellent insight into the subject and excellent portrayal of the depth of depression and sense of separation from reality that has been so carefully crafted by the author.