Title: Midnight Clear
Author: Autumn Macarthur
Quote: "Having something so big invalidated with pat, easy answers just made her angrier."
Claire, the primary school teacher in Huckleberry Lake (she has sixteen students in grades one through five), is from out of town and still single. Ryan, who used to work with his father until his father died recently, is also single. When Maddie remarried Brad, that made a total of two single adults in Huckleberry Lake. So why don't they like each other?
(More to the point, perhaps: Why do I feel a need to preach on this topic in reviewing this particular novel? Because this one is well enough written that I feel a danger that readers might take it as a guide for themselves, rather than just another illustration of the difference between the demand that a "romance" be fantastic and the original requirement that a "novel" be plausible.)
Well, one reason is that people seem to be pushing them together, which is a valid reason for anybody not to like anybody. Starting with same-sex friends at age five: If person wanted to be with you, it would be person's own idea, not someone else's.
But in fact, and I want to emphasize to all the churchgoers out there who want the one bachelor who ever darkens your church's doors to be paired off with whatever you can drag in, so that you feel less threatened by the idea that anyone can be happy without being married, that this is extremely rare, Ryan and Claire do like each other. The reason why they're not a couple is that Claire's car was hit by another vehicle, shortly before the baby arrived, and Claire woke up in the hospital with bleeding wounds, a tiny baby who looked perfect except for being dead, and no husband. All she wanted to do was put those memories as far behind her as possible. So she moved from a southern border State (Texas) to a northern border State (Idaho) and took a job in a tiny village where she could spend her time with children and mostly avoid looking at any babies. She doesn't think she wants another husband, nor does she want to adopt another baby.
Of course, given that she originally did want a husband and babies, this is not a real vocation to celibacy. It's an emotional complex that Claire needs to pray her way through. Which is also possible. Though the kind of surgery that we're told was necessary to save Claire's life often leaves real women asexual, and may even cause physical pain if they ever try the act that produces babies. A woman who is sterile because of PCOS may, depending on the kind of hormone imbalance she has, feel hotter than a two-dollar pistol in a car parked in full sunshine with all the windows up, but some women who've been spayed in the way Claire has been wake up postsexual, and this is never going to change.
And never mind that, while widows who enjoyed sex do miss it, many widows have very strong aversions to seeing someone else in the place where our husband (or wife) is supposed to be. Those of us who feel desperate enough to close our eyes and pretend someone else is the one we miss have traditionally been stereotyped as terrible, tacky, even trashy people in whose fantasies nobody would want to participate. Those of us who find it possible to feel attracted to someone else within a year or two have traditionally been suspected of having lusted after that person in our hearts while married, though that seems to get a little more sympathy from more of the people who shouldn't be bothering their heads about what widows are doing anyway.
Maddie, a school volunteer who's worked with Claire, has become one of those insufferable know-it-alls who keep pushing Claire and Ryan together. In the real world this is a good way to make both of the people who have felt pushed, even a tiny bit pushed, LOATHE YOU FOREVER. In the real world there are usually valid reasons why people who seem congenial don't want to become a couple, and when they give being a couple a try and it doesn't work out, IT IS YOUR FAULT. Never drop a hint. Never indulge in a know-it-all smirk. Never pair people off, even inside your own silly head, unless THEY ask you to play matchmaker.
Sorry. I just remembered how an old school friendship that was a wise, mature kind of love, that recognized the benefits of staying in the friend zone, turned ugly when we let other people persuade us to try dating each other. I have always wished I'd lived in a society that encouraged young people to be proud of the high standards that kept their dates in the friend zone, and older people to feel ashamed of the vile perversion that made them want to push happily single people together. Though at least, when another old friend tried pushing another acquaintance in my direction, I am glad that I never spoke to either one of them again.
There is a small chance that, if someone says to us "I'd like to meet your friend X," and we tell X that person said this and arrange for them to spend an afternoon actually doing something that is interesting enough to alleviate the refrigerant effect of the dreaded "meeting for coffee," a mutual attraction may come to exist. Though time, if not money, does need to be invested in making sure that a first meeting is not all about "Is there an instant physical attraction?" because, for women, there probably isn't, and the demand for it would probably kill it if there ever was one. What pretty much guarantees mutual disgust is when a BUSYBODY tells X "You ought to meet Y." When that happens, X knows that Y didn't want to meet X, and Y knows that X didn't want to meet Y, and BLEEP does s/he think s/he is, they don't want to see that stupid face again either.
But this is a Christian romance, so it works. Brad and Maddie have another baby, which is pardonable since the problem of overpopulation is not really felt in most of Idaho. Claire happens to have the skills to help when the baby arrives a little ahead of schedule, because her original career was not teaching school. Though she's avoided being around other babies, having to look at Maddie's breaks down her emotional defenses against remembering how she lost hers. This time, when Ryan tells her his mother's one last wish is for him to marry her, after a little predictable banter about how she always thought he liked Maddie better, and a few warning displays that he's getting close to an Emotional Mess, Claire manages to say that she can't have children and feels bad about it.
Anyway you know where it has to end, so although I find this volume of the Huckleberry Lake series (there will be other single adults, other years) less credible than the first volume, romance lovers won't be disappointed. The only suspense is what they'll say that makes it possible for the story to end with Claire and Ryan adopting a baby together. Which is what people read "sweet, clean" romances for.
You may, like me, feel sort of disappointed that this story ends happily because people need to know that in real life it probably wouldn't...but you'll not be disappointed by the story itself...even if you are disappointed that Maddie, who was easy to like in her own story (Calm and Bright), turns out to be a busybody. Nobody is perfect.
Real friends accept that happiness, for some of our friends, means being HAPPILY SINGLE. Maybe for a few more years. Maybe until the person they're meant to marry speaks for perself. Maybe for life. Romance novels are nice, as far as they go...but we do need more novels about people, especially women, discovering that celibacy can be an effect of mental illness but is never the cause of it, that keeping cats or chickens, or writing poetry, or having a business or going into politics or even teaching in a one-room primary school, can be the true happy ending for some people's stories.
I think Macarthur has spelled out a few of the factors that make it possible, however remotely possible, that Claire and Ryan might (against the odds) be happy together:
1. They are congenial--as acquaintances; they just bristle up and push each other away because neither of them is ready to mate. They are Christians. They love children. They have mutual friends and do the same things. They got acquainted all by themselves.
2. Both of them have expressed some interest in marriage and parenthood. They are, after all, in Idaho. They're not in a place where nature is actually screaming at them, even if they have occasional sexual feelings, to avoid parenthood at all costs. They've not declared themselves "ace" or "gay," or even shown any interest in a church that has celibate monastic orders.
3. Although people they know have said far too much to them about their relationship, Ryan decides for himself to propose to Claire.
4. Repeatedly. Because it's not reasonable to expect that anyone in Claire's situation is going to say yes, or even say why not, the first dozen or so times the man proposes. Actually the traditional rule was that all nice young women were supposed to say no, at least in softened terms like "I'll have to pray about it" or "You'll have to talk to my parents," the first dozen or so times the man even asked for a date. A man has to prove himself if he's going to get any respect at all. A man who waits to be asked is a wimp. A man has to learn not only that NO means NO, but that "I'll have to pray about it" or "I'd rather not talk about it" means WAIT.
5. And nobody's bullied Claire into proposing even so much as a monthly lunch date to Ryan with anything like "If you're not dating anyone, at your age and with your looks, you must be a lesbian, or worse, and you can't teach even Sunday School."
But I still think Macarthur is asking us to believe that they've beaten the odds. That she has the skills to convince me that she's found at least an accurate account of how that might happen, somewhere, says a lot for her writing talent.
No comments:
Post a Comment