The World Below

It's been a few days since I finished this book. I liked it. A lot. It was my first (now Jill I hope you won't be too shocked!) Sue Miller. How I could have gone so long without reading While You Were Gone, I don't know. I think Oprah picked it at a time where I was either avoiding Oprah books, or out of money. That's the only explanation.

The Known World is about a woman named Catherine who moves to her grandmother's house after her grandmother dies and her marriage falls apart. While she is living there she finds her grandmother's (Georgia's) diaries that she wrote during the time she was at a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and then during the early days of her marriage. The jacket of the book talks about a marriages being not what they seem, and I suppose that I ought to focus on that. I'll try to talk about it briefly without giving too mcu away. The mystery surrounding Catherine and her marriage is resolved pretty early on in the book. It's a modern day story of two people who have grown apart. One realizes, the other doesn't. Georgia's marriage is where we see the real issues of marriage dealt with in a surprising traditional way. Georgia's marriage is not what it seems because of a serious misunderstanding between her and her fiance. She has struggled with whether to get married because she carries a secret that she feels her husband to be should know before he commits to her. Before she consents to marry him, she wants to bring everything out into the open. As she does so, her husband quickly forgives her, but what she doesn't realize is that he has completely misconstrued what she was trying to say. Later in the book, when they realize what has happened, the narrator comments that she began to love him on the day that he forgave her. Eventually they work through this problem. It ultimately strengthens their marriage, and makes it a picture of the potential that a modern marriage can have.

For me, this real issue is that there is the possibility that we could all be mistaken in our love. Just as the Dr. Holbrooke wanted to see his love in a certain light, which caused him to misunderstand what she was trying to tell him, we see the people we love in a certain way. We idealize them, making them what we want, even if it is more than they really are. The rush of love that leads to marriage blinds us in a way. The blinders can only come off when the relationship changes to one of dating to one of marriage. Marriage changes things. We are exposed to our spouse's bad habits, actions that we view as inconsiderate, but that they have been doing all their lives. In Dr Holbrooke's actions when he finally knows the truth about his wife, we see, I think, one of the ultimate acts of love. In the split second after he hears what his wife really tried to tell him the day she consented to marry him, he is angry with her. He thinks he has been betrayed. But he listens to her, and soon his anger toward her inward. He realizes that the mistake was his. He knew that he had done Georgia an injustice, and not vice versa. Of course, he has to deal with his feelings about the truth, but he also realizes that Georgia has not changed. It is simply his image of her that has changed. Now that he has the truth, that image can be more complete, and so can his love for her. Georgia also teaches us an important lesson. She has also lived with a fallacy about her husband. She thinks that he is much nobler than her really is. But, though her love began on the day of the great misunderstanding, she loves him nonetheless. Her husband proves to her that she was not wrong to give him her love because ultimately, he is forgiving of her past, as she thought he had been a year before. And so their love for each other continues--strengthened by the past wrong into something that will last far into the future. The most valuable lesson that we learn from this is that although we might not really know the people we marry, if we are able to remember the things that initially made us think that they would be a good marriage partner, and not forget the ways that they have proved that they are worthy of our love, the things that we get to know shouldn't matter. Hopefully these things will lead us to an appreciation of who our partners really are, and a deeper love that allows us to accept their faults as a part of the whole that makes them who they are.

Next up: The Vision of Emma Blau by Ursula Hegi