Last week I pulled Laurie Colwin's Another Marvelous Thing off the shelf, a little hesitantly. I had never heard of Laurie Colwin until I got my copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which includes her recipe for Black Cake. (Parenthetically, Nigella Lawson says she changed the recipe only slightly but she actually extended the cooking time from one hour to four. Four hours! I'm intrigued by the recipe but a little scared to try either of them with such a big discrepancy in cooking times.)
I got Home Cooking and More Home Cooking out of my library and enjoyed them both. They're my kind of cooking -- mostly nutritious but with a killer brownie recipe*, mostly easy but not a can of condensed soup in sight. Colwin talks with such enthusiasm about feeding her daughter that I felt an immediate connection with her.
So I moved on to her fiction, and found myself well and truly shocked by a book for the first time in years. Family Happiness is about a woman named Polly who falls in love with a painter named Lincoln. The catch is Polly is married with two children.
I'm going to give away the ending here, so skip to the next paragraph if you might want to read the book, okay? They have an affair which leaves Polly terribly ambivalent. When Lincoln leaves the country for a time, she resolves to end things. Good plan, Polly! When he returns, though, she changes her mind. What's more, she seems to let go of her ambivalence at the same time, and in the last paragraph of the book she's feeling joyful as she contemplates her life. Embrace duplicity! it seems to say. You can have both the cool artsy lover and the reliable husband who brings home lots of bacon!
I think it shocked me in part because I was expecting Polly to be like Laurie Colwin. I should have known better than that -- a character's use of the author's brownie recipe does not make her into a clone of the author (and how do I know whether Laurie Colwin was faithful to her husband anyway?). I was also expecting that an author who mail-ordered organic apple juice for her daughter would write moral books. Not soporifically moral, just principled. Isn't perfidy worse than pesticides?
Maybe I was also shocked because I've read too many nineteenth-century novels. Polly reminded me of Anna Karenina at first, and adultery emphatically did not agree with Anna. Or with Emma Bovary. I wondered if the book's ending might be a feminist response to novels by men about women having affairs, but I couldn't think of happy male adulterers either. (I thought of Agamemnon. Adultery for sure didn't agree with him. Who am I missing?) Maybe I need to read more twentieth-century fiction. Or maybe I don't, if it's going to be like Family Happiness.
Anyway, I liked her writing and her characters enough to read a couple of her other books, Happy All the Time and A Big Storm Knocked It Over. The characters are pleasantly quirky and the dialogue pleasantly snappy, and they do not end with anyone saying, "Yes! I will lie to my husband every day and embrace the lying!" Another Marvelous Thing, though, is another book about a woman who is uneasily embroiled in an affair. I had almost reached the end. I got to the part where she told the lover that it was over. And then I put the book in the stroller basket as we were going to the park and it disappeared.
Aargh! I said. Does the library have it? How soon can I track it down? I have to know what happens next!
I am happy to report that a few days later it turned up mysteriously in the library crate with the kids' books. It is naptime here and as soon as I take care of the naptime necessities (one big basket of laundry to be folded, dusty furniture to be un-dusted, and two books on elephants to be read to one 4yo boy) I am going to finish my book with a glass of iced coffee at hand.
*Because no one should talk about killer brownie recipes without sharing--
Melt 1 stick of butter with 2 squares of unsweetened chocolate. Stir in 1 c. sugar; add 2 eggs and 1/2 t. vanilla. Beat well. Stir in 1/4 c. all-purpose flour and 1/2 t. salt. If you like, add 1 c. chopped walnuts. Bake in a buttered and floured 8-inch square pan for about 40 minutes at 325. Laurie Colwin says this is Katharine Hepburn's recipe. I had hunted high and low for a good brownie recipe, and this is it.
Recent Comments