"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford: a reader's journal (5)

Character building: Clarissa

I've skipped a handful of quotations I had wanted to leave here. Reading has become more intense as the plot unfolds. I had wanted, for instance, to leave the portrait of Marguerite, the most unusual "sponsoring" episode. I found it unsettling, the hairdo totally knocked me out of balance, I still can't get it out of my head. And there were several other things. But coming on to the beach walks with Clarissa, Ford's thoughts became more profound and closer to a naked, crisp awareness that is really striking. I would like to quote the whole unveiling of Clarissa, his daughter, that runs through pages 176 - 180. To me, it demonstrates (a stupid expression, there is no need to demonstrate anything at all) that a few sentences can convey a whole life and the invisible bond between two people, in this case father and daughter. Capturing the essence, maybe. In today's quest for anchors, Frank and Clarissa's relationship might well be what is still possible, much beyond ideas of "traditional" familes.

I often tell my daughter that her generation is a boring one, those were the days. She answers me from the confidence of her "sixteenhood": "Yeah, we have to look after you guys", we the undefined eighties generation. Frank and Clarissa are older; in ten years time I will know how this all "looking after" turned out.

"... Clarissa has told me, her life seemed to grow more and more undifferentiated, "both vertically and horizontally". Everything, she noticed, began to seem a part of everything else, the world becme very fluid and seamless and not too fast-paced though all "really good". Except, she wasn't, she felt, "exactly facing all of life all the time," but was instead living "in linked worlds inside a big world". (People talk this way now). There was school. There was a group of female friends. There was the shelter. There were the favorite little Provençal restaurants nobody else knew about. There was Cookie's many-porched Craftsman-style house on Pretty Marsh in Maine (Cookie, whose actual name is Cooper, comes from the deepest of unhappy New England pockets). There was Cookie, whom she adored (I could see why). There was Wilbur, Cookie's Weimaraner. There were the Manx cats. Plus some inevitable unattached men nobody took seriously. There were other "things", lots of them - all fine as long as you stayed in the little "boxed, linked" world you found yourself in on any given day. Not fine, if you felt you needed to live more "out in the all-of-it, in the big swim." Getting outside, moving around the boxes, or over them, or some goddam thing like that, was, I guess, hard. Except being outside the boxes had begun to seem the only way it made sense to live, the only "life strategy" by which the results would ever be clear and mean anything. She had already begun thinking of all this before I got sick."

And another very significant quote on pain (life angst?) or how different people deal with it:

"And of course I know what Clarissa does not permit herlself to be fearful of, and is by training hard-wired to confront: making the big mistake. Harvard teaches resilience and self-forgiveness and to regret as little as possible. Yet what she does fear and can't say, and why she's here with me and sometimes stares at me as if I were a rare, endangered and suffering creature, is unbearable pain. Something in Clarissa's life has softened her to great pain, made her diffident and dodgy about it. She knows such fear's a weakness, that pain's unavoidable, wants to get beyond fearing it and out of those smooth boxes. But in some corner of her heart she's still scared silly that pain will bring her down and leave nothing behind. Who would blame her?"