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“Love is a lonely thing,” Carson McCullers wrote in his 1951 short story The Ballad of the Sad Café. “The lover longs for any possible relationship with the loved one, even if this experience can only cause him pain.”
The peculiar pain of loving an addict is a recurring theme in Susie Boyt’s work, which includes six previous novels and a wonderfully original memoir, My life as Judy Garland. In its debut in 1995, Normal man, the heroine’s mother sheds a long tranquilizer habit. The brother of the protagonist of Girls’ last hope is a heroin addict, and is part of the plot of Boyt’s latest novel, Love and fame, revolves around rehabilitation. In his memoir, we learn that Boyt had a much loved parent struggling with heroin addiction.
“I spent half of my life in a house that housed an addict of one kind or another,” she writes. “I have learned to love and care for people who have these issues.”
In his new novel, Loved and missed, Boyt extends this care to a fictitious family. Ruth, an English teacher at a high school for girls and a single mother of an only child, begins to lose her grip on her daughter, Eleanor, in her early teens. “It was weird to be hailed at school as a champion of the suffering teenager” while she was at sea with one at home, she reflected, calling “living with someone who despised you” “of a particular kind of domestic violence”. Boyt withholds the details of Eleanor’s habit, implying that the substance is less important than the disease of addiction.
Years later, when Eleanor becomes pregnant while still using drugs, Ruth steps in to raise her granddaughter, Lily. She watches over “those long, vacillating nights in the hospital” while the baby is weaning, and “sort of” kidnaps her to protect her from her parents’ way of life. In a triumph of hope over the experience, Ruth valiantly continues to try to build bridges with her daughter. With Eleanor entering and leaving (mostly) their lives, Ruth’s maternal angst is compounded by Lily’s disappointment.
As the story unfolds towards the book’s denouement, we come to understand and understand Ruth’s self-reproach better. Externally calm, his dignified demeanor belies the “waterfalls of hope, the waterfalls of despair” that stir within. Ruth wears her heart less on her sleeve than some of Boyt’s previous protagonists – the reduced expression allows Boyt’s lyrical prose to shine all the more.
The novel is about friendship as well as family ties, with Jean, Ruth’s colleague, playing an important role in Lily’s life. If Lily, who takes the talking stick in the last chapter, seems more mature than her 15 years old, it may be because of the fusional nature of the bond with her grandmother: “Synchronized breathing, tessellated hot limbs. I have sometimes thought of politicians who lambasted single parents for their irresponsibility. . . were just consumed with jealousy that two people could be so close, ”recalls Ruth.
Loved and missed deftly sidesteps the clichés that often plague stories of drug abuse, and it expresses the complexity of loving someone who can’t love you back with remarkable delicacy. When things go missing from her house during Eleanor’s visits, “I should have cared, but somehow I didn’t,” says Ruth. Regarding the schadenfreude of her friends, she observes that “Eleanor has always been considered very beautiful and that was kind of how people were delighted that this was no longer true. Rarely have I had such visceral pain with a character, and yet Boyt’s mind shoots rays of light through the cracks of pain.
“Loved and Missed” is a condolence line – Boyt works in the moonlight as a bereavement counselor – that captures the heartache of loving a living ghost well. Lily sees it one day carved on a gravestone in a cemetery and laughs. “Looks like the person tried to love but the target moved,” she said to Ruth, “or the goal was wrong and the love didn’t quite work… It didn’t quite work. The last heartbreaking hypothesis she puts forward is that “they just weren’t very good at it”.
Loved and missed by Susie Boyt, Virago € 16.99, 208 pages
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