Fiction, 1979
The onslaught of summer has left me feeling like a pool of wobbly half-set jelly. Life Before Man didn’t particularly help my predicament. In fact, it made my recent inability to concentrate even worse by asking a simple question—strung through three characters and over 300 words—what does one do when loving someone feels so shitty?
The novel is marketed as a story about a love triangle, and subsequent affairs within a married couple. But that’s as if I reduced the swirls of a sunset sky by saying, “it was nice”. The novel opens with Elizabeth reflecting on her affair with Chris while she is married to Nate, who ends up dating Lesje—who lives with William. These are messy characters. They struggle to get through the day, seek violent encounters to feel something, and struggle to find the reins of control over their realities. It seems as if life floats by—and through—them without ever stopping to ask if they are okay. The result of this on the reader isn’t particularly pleasant, but intensely relatable.
The pain of being in a relationship (and there are just so many in this novel) is that you must relinquish so much control. Another person—or several—are each enacting their own agency, through words, silences, betrayals, by staying with you, and by leaving. Elizabeth and Lesje, in particular, can’t seem to reconcile themselves with this fact. Elizabeth opens the novel by talking about how she feels like a peeled snail, and Lesje, towards the end, hits us with this gem of a paragraph. It’s these “gaps” that fill the narratives; Elizabeth crying where no one can see her, Nate pathologically running because he needs to be mid-air to feel human, and Lesje arranging dinosaur bones with the meticulousness and precision that she is unable to apply to the people that surround her. We must really hate ourselves to love so badly, and to do it again, and again, and again.
Song - All Too Well (10 Minutes)
Film - Marriage Story
I have read this three times stop
lovely title and lovely song and lovely movie <3