the fiction class

The Fiction Class (Susan Breen)

So Arabella Hicks teaches a writing class on Wednesdays, which is also the day she visits her mother at the nursing home. Her class is a curious mix of interesting people, including a 53-year-old man named Chuck, who is also Arabella's love interest. But this is not completely a love story, more than it is a story about a daughter trying to come to grips with the fact that her mother's about to die.

Will you learn a lot about writing, per se? Well, Breen does provide useful advice about voice and dialogue and developing character and finding the proper motivation to write -- a good deal of the story is set in the classroom, after all -- but not in the magnitude that Anne Lamott does in "Bird by Bird" or the way Stephen King does in "On Writing" but then again she's juggling a love story with Chuck, her mother Vera's own story, and their story as mother-daughter which is particularly affecting, and the book's only about 300 pages long, so you get the picture.

Breen's language is deceptively simple. Deceptive, yes, because at some point she throws in something like, "She feels like a fist unclenching," and I am left staring at those six words for a very, very long time.

Things that have broken my heart in this: Arabella's love-hate-love relationship with her mother Vera, the moment Arabella learns the entire truth about her father's death, and the last few scenes. It was ill-advised for me to have read and finished this in public - at Conti's Greenbelt and then at Coffee Bean - because I would have loved to cry over some parts at great length in the privacy of my own home (in better days, the yearning would have been to read this with alcohol, but yeah. Good times, good times) but in all I am glad to have finished it finally.

One thing that did not work for me though: I wanted desperately to fall in love with this guy Chuck - this older man who is suave and gentle, etc etc but I don't know. I wanted to see what it was that Arabella found so seductive but I just... pfft. He lacked something, he didn't tug at my heart strings despite the fact that I think he was a rather good guy - clean-smelling, good-looking, dashing, well-off, accomplished, can cook, domestic etc etc, but I don't know what it is about him that in the end did not win me over at all. *shrug* He read like a dream guy - I guess that's what didn't work for me. Too perfect. And it's not even because I'm not into boys - I remember liking Henry in The Time Traveler's Wife, after all, and Murakami's male leads, though I may not like them all, at the very least, they affect me. Not Chuck. I needed more tension, I guess? Maybe it felt a bit too rushed to be believable? IDK.

[cut for excessive mother rantage]


But otherwise, the story was solid whenever it dealt about Vera. I liked her. She reminded me of my mother, but then all mothers must all be the same, at some point -- headstrong and difficult. My mother issues are rearing their ugly heads again, but I don't mind having the occasional bout with them these days. I've reached a point in my life that I can gladly wrestle with them without going insane (just weepy, but not insane of the longterm broody moody kind, unlike when I was younger). Reading this, I find myself every now and then envying Arabella for having enough time to sort of wrap it up with her mother -- she was 38 when she learned that her mother was dying and was given until the end of the month.

In contrast, I was told my mother was dying when I was 12, and I wasn't even allowed to visit her in the hospital. She died that afternoon, as we all know, though the upside of it all is that I don't have any recollection of my mother ever being weak. In my head she's still this powerdressed woman with a suitcase. She's still this woman who drove long distances in a white Toyota in the early nineties, her windows rolled down, the music turned up so she won't fall asleep at the wheel while driving home at 3 a.m. This was a time before cell phones and text messaging and her pager was so big I could barely close my hand around it as a child. Yep, my mother was badass; she also never missed any of my quiz bees. The first one she missed was my sister's math competition on the same day she passed. (Krista placed second; she had a small gold trophy.)

So you see, it means so much, or at least for me as a very affected reader, that Arabella manages to make it right with her mother before their time is up. Breen, for all her mush where Chuck is concerned, I think wrapped her story arc quite well where Vera is concerned - soft and muted here, like the quiet of hospitals during the wee hours of the morning when everyone's sleeping. I liked it that way. Even the crescendo of Arabella's grief struck me as sort of toned down, but not in a way that would prompt me to think, She should be sadder -- not like that at all. It's the sort that hits you as devastating long after -- I still feel the lingering heaviness of it, and it's been more than a few hours since I've put the book down. I think, is this how it would have felt, had things been slower? Had they been more expected? Had we known it was coming and had time to prepare for it, the inevitability of loss?

Moot questions now, mostly. For the most part, this book makes me wish I had as much time.