In the Autumn of Life

Posted 15 October, 2007 in Book Reviews |

October, by Richard B. Wright. HarperCollins, $32.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN: 978-0-00-200689-7.

Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, by D.R. MacDonald. HarperCollins, $34.95 cloth, 366 pp., ISBN: 978-1-55468-063-4.

Two new novels from heavyweight Canadian writers — both of which recently found their way onto this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist — take up the subject of men in the autumn of their lives, albeit from different perspectives and to different effects. The two novels — Richard B. Wright’s October, his second since snagging the triple crown of the Giller, Governor General’s, and Trillium prizes for his 2001 novel Clara Callan, and D.R. MacDonald’s Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, his follow-up to the well-received Cape Breton Road — along with Philip Roth’s just-released Exit Ghost, could easily demarcate fall 2007 as the literary season of old men.

On the surface, these two writers could not be more dissimilar. Wright’s prose is spare and unadorned, virtually bereft of adverbs, flayed to the very sinew and marrow. MacDonald, by contrast, is given to long flights of lyrical description, both of the exterior Cape Breton landscape, and the interior landscapes of his characters’ psyches.

However, beyond the stylistic differences that separate these two writers, the deeper thematic concerns in their new novels are strikingly similar: the dissolution of the body in old age, a kind of wistful pining for the lost or squandered opportunities of youth, and a sense of regret over roads abandoned or not taken.

As October opens, the narrator, seventy-four-year-old James Hillyer, a retired professor of Victorian literature, receives a phone call from Susan, his daughter in England. Susan has just found out that she has breast cancer, the same kind that took her mother’s life twenty-two years previously. James immediately books a plane ticket to England to be with his daughter.

During their time together, Susan tells her father the details of her diagnosis and Wright provides us with a virtuoso dinner sequence — the first of several dinner scenes in the novel — during which Susan confesses that her bedside reading has become cancer memoirs: “It must be a new genre … The bookstores have entire shelves devoted to them. They’re in with the self-help and yoga stuff. Mostly written by peppy women from California who jog ten miles a day and belong to little groups who meet each week and talk about ‘their brush with death.’”

Susan’s descriptions of cancer as a grass fire and a thief come to steal away her healthy blood cells provide a perspective on the disease that is at once unapologetically literary and perfectly apt: “Funny how the only way we can picture cancer is through metaphor. A grass fire. A sneak thief. A little ravaging fiend inside you. But however you want to picture the damn thing, it’s on a rampage, the cells dividing and multiplying, consuming the healthy ones.”

The chapter ends with father and daughter standing together in front of a school chapel while the choir inside rehearses: “For all the saints who from their labours rest, / Who thee by faith before the world confessed, / Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest.” Had Wright stopped there, it would have made a perfect little jewel of a short story. However, the chapter involving James and Susan is merely prologue: the real story has yet to begin. When the scene shifts at the beginning of the following chapter, the reader is brought up hard on the cusp of a realization: the novel isn’t about James and Susan at all; Susan will not reappear in the narrative present until the very end of the book.

Walking through Oxford the day after his dinner with his daughter, James happens across Gabriel Fontaine, an American with whom he was acquainted during his adolescence. As a young man of fourteen, James is sent to Percé, Quebec, to spend the summer of 1944 with an uncle, because his mother has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. While in Percé, James is thrown together with Gabriel, two years his senior and suffering from polio. Gabriel is brash and loud and dying to “get in” with Odette Huard, a French-Canadian chambermaid whom James also fancies.

The story of James and Gabriel in Percé is told in chapters that alternate with chapters set in the fall of 2004. Following their surprise meeting, Gabriel tells James that he too has been stricken with cancer and makes a startling proposition: he requests that James accompany him to Zurich, where he is to be euthanized.

The shifting focus in the book, away from Susan and onto Gabriel, calls forth a series of questions. Why introduce the daughter’s character only to abandon her more or less precipitously at the end of the first chapter? Since the meeting with Gabriel is completely coincidental anyway, was there not another excuse for getting James to England? For that matter, why does the encounter have to happen in England?

Wright is too careful a writer not to have a reason for constructing his story in this way. The alternating chapters featuring James in the summer of 1944 and the fall of 2004 serve as a kind of literary point-counterpoint: the moral education of a young man played off against the grown man’s sense of duty to his erstwhile companion. And certainly James himself finds it easier to cope with Gabriel’s disease than with Susan’s: Gabriel is in his seventies, after all, and is not a figure for whom James felt a huge amount of sympathy during their summer together.

It is to Wright’s credit that he refuses to portray James as anything resembling a saint; he is an admittedly self-absorbed character who confesses early on to being hurt that Susan chose her best friend over him as the first person to divulge her diagnosis to: “Our absurd vanities. Our desperate need to believe that we are always foremost in our children’s thoughts. And this helpless pandering to self-regard invades everything even at the worst moments in life.”

Still, by afflicting Susan with a terminal disease then summarily abandoning her to her fate, Wright has essentially positioned her as a literary MacGuffin: she sets the story in motion, but doesn’t really have any role to play in it. The reader is left to ponder the extent to which Susan’s diagnosis affects James’s response to Gabriel in the narrative present. Does he agree to accompany Gabriel to Zurich as a means of bringing himself closer to his daughter’s experience, or as a means of distancing himself from it?

For the balance of the novel, we as readers must judge the distance between what we know of James as an adolescent and what we know of him as an adult. The simultaneous envy with which James views the young Gabriel’s sexual success with women, particularly Odette, and the instinctual revulsion he feels toward the other boy’s more cavalier attitudes provide the basis for the antipodean responses he experiences in the present. But the seventy-four-year-old James is stricken by a kind of melancholic nostalgia for his lost youth, a sense that, whatever the difficulties he experienced that summer, life was simpler then, less muddy, if only because he had yet to truly confront the crushing weight of loss.

This same sense of regret pervades D.R. MacDonald’s Lauchlin of the Bad Heart. The central figure in the novel, Lauchlin MacLean, was a promising welterweight boxer in his twenties, until his ambitions were stymied by a weak heart. Now in his fifties, MacLean lives with his aging mother in the town of St. Aubin, “not a village as such anyway but the remnants of a run of small farms laid out down a long road.”

Lauchlin’s heart kept him out of boxing when he was young, and now he has retired from teaching and works part-time in the general store that his mother owns. The store is the locus of town gossip and chatter, the hub around which the town’s social network spins: “Locals knew of course just what they could get from MacLean’s and what not, but for most of them what they got was something not for sale — an exchange of mutual concerns and common interests, a connection.” Lauchlin spends the bulk of his days reminiscing with his old friend Malcolm and pining for his first love, Morag, who has moved to Boston. The two maintain an on-again-(mostly)-off-again relationship, which they pick up each summer when Morag returns for a visit home.

In the meantime, Lauchlin occupies himself by bedding various women in the town, preferring the married ones who come with a built-in escape clause. In the words of his brother, Frank, a successful Toronto doctor, “You don’t love women for the long haul, do you, Brother? It’s just not in you.”

The latest married woman to stake a claim on Lauchlin’s bad heart is Tena MacTavish, the blind wife of Clement MacTavish, an occasional drinking buddy of Lauchlin’s. Tena convinces Lauchlin to read to her and to play her audiotapes of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot; as the two grow closer to each other, they attract the attention of the town gossips, who waste no time spreading baseless rumours around the tiny hamlet. At the same time, Clement has a falling out with his business partner, Ged Cooper, a dangerous man who may or may not be stalking the sightless Tena.

MacDonald has torn several pages from the Hemingway playbook for this novel: the story is a whisky-soaked paean to macho masculinity, with its many scenes of boxing and bare-knuckle brawling, and its insistence on the primacy of male virility (the worst thing that Lauchlin can conceive of for his old age is to retain his sexual urges, but lose the physical prowess to follow through on them).

There is an unmistakably elegiac quality to MacDonald’s novel; what Lauchlin mourns is not just his individual youth and potential, which fell victim to the same heart condition that claimed his father, but also “the glory days when Cape Breton was called the Cradle of Canadian Boxing.” The diminution of the town’s fortunes is reflected in Lauchlin’s own nickname: the promising young boxer who everyone called “Lightning Lauchlin MacLean” becomes “Lauchlin of the Bad Heart” after he is sidelined by ill health.

Lauchlin of the Bad Heart is not a novel that can be read quickly. Its pace is languid (although it tends to come alive during the boxing sequences) and there are sections of the novel that positively drag. It may fit into the loose literary subgenre of “Maritime Gothic” thanks to its frankly melodramatic final stages. But for all that there is nevertheless something painfully human and almost unutterably sad at its core. Looking over a life of missed opportunities and contemplating one last chance for redemption, Lauchlin, and the novel that features him, cannot help but succumb to a kind of sepia-toned melancholy, a longing for an imperfect past as a balm to an unforgiving present.

As Lauchlin’s brother writes in a note toward the end of the novel: “It seems you have to sin like hell first, rack up a lot to atone for, and then come to God and the religious life. Are we ready yet?”

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