Was That You at the Guggenheim?

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

Writing is a much-practiced, and often effective, form of psychotherapy,
a means of purging ourselves of unresolved problems, of coming to terms
with a particular aspect of our lives. But why subject the unwitting
public to one’s personal demons?

Whether this novel is thinly disguised autobiography, as one suspects
the protagonist lives for many years close to the “famous
Shakespearean festival,” while the author is the founder of Fanfare
Books in Stratford; and Marie, the “heroine,” is in her seventies,
as is Stafford, or is totally ficticious, it still reads like a “true
confession.”

Briefly, it is the story of Marie, a single mother, who falls in love
with Jay, an itinerant seaman. Jay leaves her; he marries someone else;
Marie is filled with self-recrimination for having missed her golden
chance; and the rest of her life is dominated by his memory.

The tale starts in a breezy, almost flippant tone, abounding in puns
and word play that detract from what is ostensibly a serious story. Then
when Jay shows up, the tone becomes rhapsodic. After he leaves comes the
best part of the book—a comic section of Marie’s affair with a
diffident and deferential English bachelor. And when Marie learns of
Jay’s death from Parkinson’s disease, the reader is subjected to
interminable boring information, including excerpts from a medical book,
about the illness. The changes of tone are puzzling, as are the
scattered references to Marie’s socialist sympathies and to
McCarthyism in the United States. The only unifying element is Marie’s
obsession with Jay—a preoccupation of almost pathological proportions.

According to the chronology of the book, Marie is in her seventies (the
“affair” having occurred some 30 years previously) before she comes
to terms with her loss. She grows older, but not wiser, gaining little
insight. She never questions whether, had he stayed with her, their
“true love” would have survived, despite his track record of two
failed marriages.

With the exception of the caricature of the English lover, which
provides comic relief, this book is one long, dreary whine that fails to
make the reader care about its characters or events.