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A Last-Chance Life
| Article
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20103 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
3,292 Words |
| Author
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Cathryn Hankla
Cathryn Hankla is the author of a collection of short
fiction, learning the Mother Tongue; a novel, A Blue Moon in
Poorwater; and two collections of poetry, the latest of
which, Afterimages, was published recently by Louisiana State
University Press. She teaches at Hollins College in Roanoke,
Virginia. |
Cathryn Hankla is the author of a collection of short fiction, learning the Mother Tongue; a novel, A Blue Moon in Poorwater; and two collections of poetry, the latest of which, Afterimages, was published recently by Louisiana State University Press. She teaches at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.
Driving the twists of old U.S. 11 near Natural Bridge, Virginia, in deep contemplation of Saint Maybe, a novel that traces the reclamation of Ian Bedloe's life, I pass a billboard that bears only two words, "Last Chance." Just beyond, I sight the only remaining items from the disassemblage of a miniature golf course: a crane-sized Stegosaurus tail and a man-sized human skull.
I grip the wheel and try, as I drive on, to read this juxtaposition of signs--Last Chance, Extinction's Tail, Human Mortality--in a world either so bereft of or so replete with meaningful signs that choosing among competing interpretations seems a far less possible path of sanity than choosing deafness over inundation. Rounding the next curve, I nearly hit a fawn that has wandered too close to the shoulder. I am relieved when another turn in the road makes it impossible for me to watch the fawn in the rearview mirror, impossible for me to know for certain whether or not it will be safe from the next car. I drive on, affected by the fragility and interconnectedness of all outlives, but I cannot say exactly how my life is changed; if I had struck the spotted fawn. Or seen it struck, my memory might have taught me the answer.
In a novel that essentially celebrates, with awe, the fact that lives change, that lives affect other lives in endless combinations approaching the heart until it can be truly transformed, Anne Tyler has given us Ian Bedloe, a protagonist whose memory of an adolescent outburst serves as the catalyst for his search for forgiveness in a world where truth and goodness are often estranged. Saint Maybe is told mainly through the consciousness of Ian, but in a flexible, limited omniscient narrative voice capable of moving us by chapter turns close to the consciousnesses of Agatha, Thomas, Doug, and Daphne. When the novel opens in 1965, Ian, aged seventeen, has already become aware of the "hitch in his thoughts" that prevents him from the easy obfuscations of "unquestioning delight" over uncomfortable truth at which his mother, Bee, seems so adept. This "hitch" constitutes Ian's first intimation of a fierce yearning after truth and simplicity that will set him in opposition to the world and force him to look within in order to live in the balance of goodness and truth. Until Ian's beloved older brother Danny brings home Lucy,
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