The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart
Vintage, 225 pp., $14.95
The Irish writer Josephine Hart’s first novel, Damage (1991), an international bestseller and the basis for a movie starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, was a slick little thing, a couple hundred propulsive pages of high-society melodrama. Its plot, overblown and solemnly recounted, concerns a British MP who falls inexplicably and obsessively in love with his son’s girlfriend (and later fiancée), the most fatal of femmes fatales. Clothes are shed, lives are shattered, things will never be the same.
It can be a lot of fun, and Hart knows it—or we hope she knows it. How else to explain passages such as the following?
I told her dreams in language she alone could understand. A powerful goddess, she whispered yes, yes, through the hours of her imprisonment. In her omnipotence she ruled her enslaved master.
Or: “The day slipped away. And with it departed the man I used to be.” Or: “I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever” (this last actually spoken by a character in conversation).
We tolerate, even relish, these ridiculousnesses, because they simultaneously amp up the intensity of the novel and reassure us that the whole thing is only a game. And Hart plays it skillfully, seducing us from one brief chapter to the next with frequent teasers, surprising reversals, and a persistent sense of impending violent demise. We take pleasure in the narrator’s fall partly because he lives out a classic male fantasy, partly because he is punished for it. If the writing is sometimes pretentious, it only has the effect of burnishing the smooth surface of the narrator’s world, thereby heightening our pleasure upon its inevitable rupture.
But this is a generous reading, and Damage often resists it. We sense the novel, sometimes, striving to assert and uphold a high seriousness that both its premise and language continually undercut. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the narrator’s tendency to generalize and pronounce. He will interrupt a scene to say something like,
The arbitrary nature of our passion for children, who reveal so little of themselves during their short stay with us, is, for many, life’s great romance. But, unlike the object of our romantic love, we do not choose the child who will be our son or daughter.
The novel is marred by such truisms—they feel inessential, grafted on, and it’s easy enough to dismiss them and hurry on to the juicy bits. Still, there seems to be lurking in this potboiler a novelist of big ideas and real emotions and literary ambition. Maybe.
Eighteen years and five novels later, Hart demands to be taken seriously. The Truth About Love abandons plot almost altogether and invests itself almost entirely in its characters and themes. It opens with a stream-of-consciousness monologue derived from Joyce and Faulkner. A teenage boy in a small Irish town in the early 1960s has just had a terrible accident and lies shocked and paralyzed in the backyard garden of his family’s house. His thoughts are associative—often hinging on language itself—and his sensations synesthetic:
Doctor coming? Good. Because pain is somewhere and it’s coming for me. It’s a little wriggly-saw pain. Pain-saw. Noisy. And big-noise pain further down the pain-shaft is coming for me. I can hear it. Fly me away from the pain which is sawing me, pain—sawing louder and louder. And I’m going into some place of nothing at all only pain.
He is taken to the hospital and dies that night, and here the novel begins to trace the effects of his death in his family and town. The perspective undergoes abrupt shifts. First, the narration is taken up by a German immigrant who observes the events of the subsequent summer with an almost anthropological detachment, and a severity that can grate. The chapters narrated by the German (he is called “the German” by most people in the town) seem designed primarily to announce certain themes: Irish nationalism, national memory, guilt. He is connected to the boy, but by a thin thread: The boy admired his gate, romantically associating it with mythic and mythologized Irish heroism. The boy’s father, in an overlong scene, asks the German if he can buy the gate as a memorial to his son. The German says he will consider it.
The next narrator is the boy’s mother, Sissy, and though her voice is allotted only two chapters (to the German’s seven), it is the most powerful. Unable to recover from the death of her son, she has been committed to a hospital where she reflects on the life she has temporarily given up. A tender and moving portrait of her marriage and family life comes through:
I was always quiet with the hidden thing within me. The knowledge that no woman on earth was more loved than me. That I could guide and protect my children and keep my house and live love all the time. Live love. Just that. What woman would let anyone in on such a secret?
This romantic success is thrown into relief against a backdrop of less happy relationships among Sissy’s neighbors. A rich world emerges, illuminated by Sissy’s charged feelings and memories, and if the narrative still feels capricious and without true direction at this point, it has at least picked up a considerable head of steam.
Then, however, it shoots through the stratosphere, and for the final third of a pretty slim novel we float far above the world we have just begun to know so intimately. This final section is narrated by the boy’s sister, Olivia, who takes us through the 45 or so years that have passed since her brother’s death. Her tone is elegiac, and page after page reads like postscript:
And so years went by for me and for my mother and for my father. Years, for me, of parts and parties, public and private, years of phone calls from them and letters and love floating back and forth between and down the lines, and visits of course, and all that strange surprise that adult life is when one is grown up, as they say, and way beyond grown up, talking to and looking at the man and woman who made you and. . . .
Et cetera. Her brother’s story is all but abandoned so that larger issues might be explored. Historical speeches and scholarly lectures are quoted from at length. Connections are posited between love of country and romantic love; and personal memory and national memory; and Irish guilt and German guilt. But their interest is academic at best. One chapter takes us on a tour of the violent milestones of Northern Ireland’s Troubles; another outlines a book the German has written, a sort of anti-heroic history of Irish nationalism. Olivia does encounter the German on a couple of occasions long after the death of her brother, and little plot points are obliquely revealed (the gate, for example, twice changes hands), but these feel like dutiful concessions to a story that the novel, for some reason, wants badly to forget about.
Could this be, exactly, the point? “I knew our private stories of grief and suffering would, and should, never be told,” the German says late in the novel. “We would have to bury them. We would have to bury each and every individual story within the horror story of our time in history.”
Hart’s novel enacts just such a burial. But in doing so it refutes, rather than corroborates, the German’s thesis. If history is a series of horror stories—which is one way to look at it—their horror surely derives from the plights of individual human beings. As The Truth About Love drifts further and further from the characters that have anchored it for so long, its emotional impact shrinks and finally withers away in a kind of history not far removed from textbooks. We are left to conclude that it is precisely the private stories of grief and suffering—what novels have long done best—that need to be told if the horror of history is to be felt at all.
Andrew Palmer is a writer in New York.