Lessons

This is the fictional life story of an unambitious, unfocused man who chooses not to face his trauma. We follow him from the 1940s to the the 2020s, from the piano lessons of his childhood through the life lessons provided by being a single parent and finally to lessons in death by the woman he loves.

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Long drives usually settled him into sustained reflection, somewhat grim and plodding like the traffic itself, but usefully detached. His little car, nimbler and more spacious than he expected, was a thought-bubble pushing north through a country he no longer quite knew or understood.

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I’m ambivalent about this novel. The writing is undeniably good and epic in scope; some of the language made me stop and reread it several times. But the female characters in this are, 9 times out of 10, horrible people and there isn’t a moment of levity or light-heartedness. Instead there is a lot of musing on aging, death, health concerns, and political scares of various colors.

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Just as heat bled out into cold and not the reverse, so order bled out into chaos and never in reverse. A complex entity like a person eventually died and became a disordered pile of disparate bits which must begin to move apart.

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We are pulled along by the life events and internal musings of the main character, but those things are put in context by the major world events that happen over the course of his life - from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the storming of the US Capitol building.

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Wrapping a life up like that, not just in the brackets of one’s familial context, but also in greater, world events gives this story real depth. It shows how we are affected by layers of context whether we realize it or not.

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Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.

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Ultimately, this book felt long and depressing. There’s no denying that the author put in the work and wrote a substantial tome but I didn’t enjoy reading it.

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