Absent without leave

The story that fills a void becomes a truth of its own

Author: By Kurt Jensen

Date: SUNDAY, May 17, 1998

Page: D1

Section: Books

In Irving's world, each of us musters together a story about what we would wish our lives to look like; these stories prompt actions to realize them. We would like to be punctual, and so we set our alarm clocks before dropping off to sleep. The trouble is, of course, that in the modest human drama constituted by the grapple of the world with our story, the world will always take some part of it away. Our lives are never formed as fully as we had hoped them to be. A power outage at dawn freezes the clock at 5:47 a.m., and at least our sleep is undisturbed as we shatter one small hope of what today will be like.

The image of a solitary imagination dreaming up a textured world is as likely to inspire fear as delight these days; our imaginative role models, after all, include recluses sequestered in their treeline cabins among canned goods and explosives, their paranoia unmodulated by the stinging rebuke of the real. It is in precisely this reconstruction of a handful of creative lives, their makings and stories, the rebukes and satisfactions, that the brave, compassionate warmth of Irving's novel flourishes. Here, too, Irving offers an alternative vision of the imaginative economy, something certainly less suspicious, and surely much more fun to read. And while it is true that Irving has written a story populated by professional writers, his graceful fluency with character, and the complete absence of writerly shoptalk, suggest that his people exhibit no more than a universal human lot: We are consigned, it seems, to the primitive business of fashioning stories -- the instinctive activity of making sense.

Irving visits Ruth Cole's life three times, in the year 1958, when she is 4 years old and her mother, Marion, leaves her and her father, Ted Cole, behind; in 1990, when she marries and has a child of her own; and in 1995, when, recently widowed, Ruth marries again and secures, through both premeditation and chance, both an intimation of happiness and the restoration of her mother, home. Ruth Cole must count as one of Irving's triumphs, a fully realized, ambivalent, conflicted, passionate character whose determination to forge a life from the blunted intimacies of her childhood is drawn without the therapeutic pride common to ``strong woman'' types that fungally inhabit much contemporary fiction. She is pragmatically complex, and essentially convincing.

In 1958, Ruth occupies the background of an affair between her mother and Eddie O'Hare, a 16-year-old prep schooler hired to ``assist'' writer Ted Cole with his work. Because Ted Cole writes for children, Eddie's labors are few, which allows him time enough to fantasize elaborately about Marion, by whom he is immediately captivated. As the summer passes and Eddie burrows his inertial way into the lives of the Coles, he discovers they have lost two sons, Timothy and Thomas, to an auto accident some years earlier -- the first of the ``Missing Persons'' of the novel, a pair of absences whose unrelenting resonance shivers a heartbreaking instability into the lives of Marion and Ted. Ted's ``scary'' though successful children's books are polluted with loss and unarticulated melancholy, and Marion's capacity for hope has vanished. Such circumstances ripen the air for an intense affair between Eddie and Marion, an affair whose carnal excellence steals away Eddie's sexual future with its incomparable example. Eddie will remain single to the end, and he will write ``Sixty Times,'' a novel recounting the summer; each of his subsequent novels will vary the theme of young men and older women in love -- Irving's delightful way of demonstrating the action of the crippling tale.

By 1990, Ruth Cole -- now 37 and a successful novelist -- is the center of Irving's attention. Her mother is now a faint memory; Ruth's more immediate concerns include the friendships and dislocations among women, and her researches for a new novel take her to the red-light district of Amsterdam. Here, she interviews a handful of prostitutes and, horribly, witnesses the murder of Rooie, who is strangled as Ruth hides motionless in an adjacent closet, watching. Before her departure for home, Ruth mails her account of the crime, including a description of the murderer, to the police, an act that Irving openly calls fateful. Though not rich in incident, this second section of the novel is a fine example of the maturation of character within a story, for it is not so much the things that happen to Ruth that engage the reader; instead, we are fascinated by the struggle for direction, shape, and meaning.

In visiting Amsterdam's red-light district, of course, Irving risks a great deal: Male novelists who stroll prostitutes and sex acts across their pages are notoriously inclined to purple figuration (Updike and Roth come immediately to mind). Among the many pleasures of Irving's novel is that sex has been kept taut within its meaningful frame, and the few risque moments here are prevented from crossing into garish metaphor.

At the conclusion of 1990, Ruth marries Allan, who dies before we reach the third section, leaving Ruth and a son, Graham. In this section, set in 1995, the murder of Rooie will have been solved, and Ruth will meet the detective who cracked the case, an avid reader of her novels. Completing the story, of course, is perhaps the most potent ``missing person'' of all.

While one might expect the fulfillment of Irving's long and endearing novel would require the leaden prosthetic of improbable coincidence, ``A Widow for One Year'' is written with such thrilling exuberance that the heavy labor of bringing the contraption to a close passes unnoticed, gliding to an easy and unexpected rest one hadn't predicted for a work of such magnificent heart and adventurous imagination.