"Marriage is only a boat...a wooden boat...their beauty justifies your efforts." Red Hook Road is a novel about my worst fear, something I never like to think about, much less read about. However, when I heard Waldman reading a section on NPR I knew that if anyone could pull the wool from my eyes, it would be her. After all, facing your fears is the best way to make sure they're not fears anymore...or to ensure you're borderline obsessed with whatever it was you feared in the first place. Lucky for me, the latter outcome was not a side effect from reading this novel. Instead, I lost myself and my fears in the lush and sensual prose, in Waldman's poetic and lively storytelling, in her strong and complicated (i.e. real) female characters.
Set in Red Hook, Maine and told over five summers, this is not a story for the light of heart...but it is a story that left my heart lighter. Centered around the death of a bride and groom on their wedding day, Red Hook Road tells of the aftermath of memories and the challenges of love and life in the face of unthinkable grief. My biggest fear in the world has long been to find my partner, my other half (which I've accomplished) and for him to die suddenly while in the early years of our relationship, much less anywhere near our wedding. I heard a news story years and years ago as a little girl about a couple who were on their honeymoon in Hawaii. The husband wanted a picture of his wife at the edge of a cliff. She protested because it was stormy and the sea was high, but he told her it would only take a second and it would be a great picture. He adjusted his camera for the perfect shot, snapped...and when he looked up from his viewfinder, she was gone. A rouge wave had come up and swept her out into the rolling sea in the seconds his shutter flashed. They'd been married for less than a day and that was the last picture anyone would ever take of her.
So, back to the book. I wasn't sure what I would feel, but as I know my fear, like all solid long-held fears, is totally irrational and out of my control, I figured reading Waldman might make me realize that life goes on. Even if my worst fear came true, I would have to find a way to survive it. So I guess I read this because Waldman's voice seduced me and I hoped for hope. I was also intrigued because I'd learned she'd spent ten years writing this book, the idea for which came to her after reading an obit in a NJ newspaper about a wedding party that died in a car accident on the NJ Turnpike. She'd let the story marinate in her head mostly, writing it fully in less than a year after nearly nine years of mental plotting. I was also wholly impressed that her goal for the novel was to tell a story not about death, but about life. This thought helped me through the tough parts and I kept going and going until I too, loved Becca and John as if I'd been there on their wedding day.
What's left after the champagne glasses are packed away and the stale reception food is put into trash bags are two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, who became one family just minutes before they each lost their oldest children. The Tetherlys are true Mainers - suffering through the harshest winters on the coast and subsisting on little income, few year-round natural resources and a lot of firewood. They're hearty, straightforward, hardworking and serious, none more so than mother, Jane. The Copakens are "from aways" who visit the home they own (which Jane cleans) in Red Hook every summer, coming over from NYC. They dine on lobster, throw an infamous 4th of July party on their manicured lawn, go sailing and mother Iris, a noted Holocaust scholar with a prestigious professorship, renovates and sculpts her home into a magazine worthy specimen. However, as perfect as Iris can get her flower vases, when death rattles her controlled world, it isn't she who spins out of control, rather, the husband she has subverted for years. Jane and Iris struggle to understand their separate yet forever connected worlds as their other two children (Matt and Ruthie, respectively) struggle to live a life without their older sibling as role models. In the end, I won't say a word about what happens, except that it's worth knowing.
Waldman weaves an uncommonly beautiful story full of classical music, ship yards, Cambodian orphans, fireworks, lobsters, tears, wet bathing suits, sex and banana pudding. The culmination of everything is a Microburst and a violin piece played for a dying man. In a story shrouded in death, I did indeed learn a lot about life. Most importantly, that there's nothing a strong woman can't endure.
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