[La Vienne] Le Divorce

Le Divorce (by Diane Johnson) is a nice middle-brow book about Californians in Paris. I wonder if we can trust its generalizations of both Californians and the French. With the exception of character, they might be sound. I like the book’s layers of concerns from the personal to the international. While the ending is a bit facile, it is happy. You’ve heard me say it many times: I prefer a happy ending (to a deep one?).

Here are my favorite lines from the novel:
“I was coming across Place de la Concorde on the 24 bus, at dusk just when the lanterns went on, and flakes of snow drifted down in this pinkish gray half-light, and it was so beautiful, tears sprang to my eyes. Then I realized they weren’t tears of beauty, they were just tears. It was I who was sad, just under the surface, where the sight of something fragile like a snowflake seemed unbearably to predict its loss." (Diane Johnson, Le Divorce, pg 180-181)

I have written about the moment before, it must have been February or March of 1998, 6 or 8 months after Grayson moved out, when we were walking together in Golden Gate Park and the double cherry blossoms were out in full, extravagant, cream-puff force. The trees looked like light pink cotton candy with tiny petals falling away in the pleasant spring breeze like snow. Their beauty made me short of breath, and then I felt overwhelming disapproval of them. Who did they think they were, looking like that public? What kind of a crazy world has trees that look like pink meringue in the spring when children are starving and hearts breaking everywhere? Someday, I hope to be able to see beauty like that without reacting in some shade of despair.

I have started reading Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, from my mother’s shelves. Coincidentally, I found similar sentiments on page 37: (the main character, Nazneen, is seeing figure skating on TV for the first time "Her (the figure skater’s) chest pumped up and down as if her heart would shoot out and she smiled pure, gold joy. She must be terrified, thought Nazneen, because such things cannot he held, and must be lost.”

Johnson quotes Proust (The Past Recaptured) later in the book: “But whoever it is who has thus determined the course of our life has, in doing so, excluded all the other lives we might have led instead of our actual life.” Years ago, I wrote a poem about this idea, likening it to the place in China where they have unearthed a life-sized, stone-carved army. Each solder is unique, like all the other lives we might have lead, people we might have loved or been.

Today my mother and I took a canoe down the river. Very beautiful. This evening I take the train to Paris for my flight tomorrow morning to Mallorca. I do not expect to have internet access while I am there.