Reseña de New York Review of Books
IT'S BEEN MORE than 50 years since "This Is Your Life," the early reality show after which Jonathan Evison's new novel is named, aired the final episode of its initial television run. The concept of the program might seem quaint to the generation that grew up on the Internet - the host, Ralph Edwards, would surprise his guests (some celebrities, some not) with a retrospective of their lives, accompanied by special appearances from friends and family members out of their pasts. Now we have Facebook, which functions as a new "This Is Your Life" episode every time you log in. You don't need a host to narrate the most embarrassing moments of your high school career when you have old friends tagging you in pictures they've found at the bottom of some box and scanned. (Did my hair really look like that? Why did I ever think acid-washed jeans were cool?) Even if you've tried to forget periods of your life, via recreational drugs or intensive psychotherapy (or both), social media won't let you forget, no matter how much you want to. But it's not just the Internet, of course. Consider the title character of "This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!," Evison's fourth novel. Harriet is 78 and not inclined toward any technology of the past few decades. She lives in Washington State, in the house she used to share with her husband, Bernard, who has recently died after a rapid descent into dementia. She keeps herself busy with mundane errands, housework and occasional visits with her best friend, Mildred, and her feckless middle-aged children, Skip and Caroline. It's a bit of a dull life, but not necessarily a bad one. That changes when Harriet receives a phone call from a foundation informing her that Bernard, before he died, won an Alaskan cruise for two in a silent auction. "Oh, but dear, do I have to go?" she asks her husband, or more accurately his ghost. "Would you be hurt if I didn't? You know I'm not a traveler." But guilt gets the better of her, and she decides to go with Mildred. Her children are aghast. They've been told by Harriet's priest that she claims to get visits from Bernard, in the flesh, on an alarmingly regular basis. But she refuses to be dissuaded, even when Mildred bows out at the last minute. She boards the ship alone, blithely unaware of the news that lies in wait for her by way of a letter: Bernard may have had somebody else in mind all along as his travel partner on this cruise. "Only dimly is she aware of the pages scattering as they flutter to the carpet," Evison writes. "She believes in this moment that she's dying." Bernard's infidelity is only the first of many secrets to be disclosed in the novel. Another is that Harriet is not as alone on the boat as she had thought. The others come later, and they are terrible ones; they hit mercilessly like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. But it takes a while to get there. Evison's novel jumps back and forth in time, visiting Harriet at various ages in her life. The main plot, featuring Harriet at 78, sailing from Washington to the Alaska panhandle, is told in the third person; it's a straightforward, though never boring, narrative. These chapters are interspersed with ones narrated by an unnamed Ralph Edwards stand-in, an omniscient host addressing Harriet, recounting the days from her birth to her dotage. It seems random, but the host assures us it's not: "Yes, yes, we're all over the place again, pinballing across the decades, slinging and bumping our way through the days of your life, seemingly at random. And yes, pinball has come a long way since the Spot Bowler of your adolescence. They've added obstacles, pitfalls, bells, whistles, you name it. But look a little closer, Harriet, and you'll see there's a method to the madness, a logic to the game." It's a narrative strategy that could easily come off as gimmicky, but Evison avoids any hint of cheap artifice; this is an intricately structured novel that doesn't draw unnecessary attention to its own framework. That's not to say the narrator never mentions it - he explains the time jumps as the natural product of the way humans think: "Yes, we're getting ahead of ourselves again, but hey, it happens, Harriet. The reflective mind is a pinball, pitching and careening, rebounding off anything it makes contact with." (Evison is perhaps more fond of pinball metaphors than anyone since Pete Townshend.) The structure allows for a kind of slow burn, as we learn how Harriet's life has unfolded through the decades, for better and for worse (mostly worse). This is most evident when Evison chronicles Harriet's relationship with Bernard, initially presented as a stable, if unexceptional, marriage. "Yes, Harriet, for the next 50 years you'll eat what Bernard eats, vote how Bernard votes, love how Bernard loves and ultimately learn to want out of life what Bernard wants out of life," the narrator intones, unpromisingly. Having the narrator address Harriet could easily lend itself to a kind of preachiness, but Evison won't castigate Harriet for her life choices; his tone is compassionate even when it's tough, and he's never condescending. He's also unafraid to make the reader uncomfortable, particularly in the scenes detailing the last months of Bernard's illness, when he was filled with "infantile rage," beating Harriet, giving her "one black eye, which you attributed to the car door." THINGS GET EVEN DARKER from there, and Evison doubles down. "You fantasize about clubbing Bernard senseless like a harp seal," he writes. "Pushing him down stairs, in front of U.P.S. trucks, off of cliffs. ... It doesn't matter that you'll never act on these impulses, it doesn't matter that they're just aberrant manifestations of extreme frustration and grief, the sort of thing that any caregiving manual would caution you against, they are sick and unforgivable, and you hate yourself for these thoughts." The one constant in "This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!" is Evison's brutal honesty. It's an unrelentingly dark book, belied by its whimsical cover, all pastel blue-greens and bright yellow, and by the excitable exclamation point tacked on the end of the title. There are a few moments of comic relief, mostly courtesy of Kurt Pickens, a cruisegoer from Kentucky who befriends Harriet, though she's initially horrified by his sleeveless T-shirts and assertive novelty clothing. But Evison resists every neat resolution, every unearned epiphany. As fanciful as his prose can be - and it occasionally gets away from him - he's not afraid to depict the dark side of aging as it is, and not as we wish it were: "No, this is the worst thing in the world: reality. Trumper of hope, killer of faith." The result is a book that speaks to all of us, whether we're young enough to check Facebook 50 times a day, or old enough to have only a vague idea what the Internet is. The themes Evison presents - disappointment, delusion, redemption - are universal, and he deals with them beautifully in this wonderful novel. "Love grows quieter, Harriet, it's true," Evison writes. "People evolve, or they don't. Either way, they grow apart." The truth is sometimes hard to accept, but we have no choice but to do so. This is your life, Harriet Chance, but it's ours, too. 'This is the worst thing in the world: reality. Trumper of hope, killer of faith.' MICHAEL SCHAUB is a frequent contributor to NPR and The Los Angeles Times.