CONTACT
FILM
Minute by minute our past gathers authority over us. Certain gestures, a glance across a room, phrases spoken under memorable shades of light, all possess the power to call us back. "I can tell you everything about our past," she once said to Jack. "We were angry, running around in the streets, trying to change the world. We were young, very young it seems now-- and don't you remember the old passion and ideals? Everything was alive then, Jack. It was like I'd carried around this ball of red yarn for years, and then suddenly it fell off my lap and dropped onto the floor, and pretty soon there was red yarn spilling everywhere, down the stairs, out the door. It went on and on, and nothing was ever the same again."
Casey Lawrence went crashing through those years of innocence and defiance with eyes so green you had to look again to be sure. She came of age in the late 1960s, and her youth was a time of urgency and discovery and extreme guilt and disillusion. Her youth became a part of the past she would forever try to recover or outrun.
"But we were a different generation," she would declare when looking back. "We were young at precisely the time when the world was saying how fine it was to be young and reckless and pissed off. We didn't have to be careful about things. The time was perfect. I mean, there's no romance in following the American dream-- the job, the pension plan, the house and backyard. The romance is in tearing it all down, and trying to make a new way."
She wanted to believe she had made a new way, and that she had lived out her youth with a particular grace. But when she looked back honestly over her past, she knew that her past had been defined not by ideals and a struggle for righteousness, but by men. Men who, for a little while, loved to hold her face in their hands when they kissed her, almost as if they were worshipping her. Then, soon enough, they didn't bother to hold her face anymore; they just wanted to get on top of her.
One of these men was really only a boy who said to her, "every man wants to be a woman's first love, and every woman wants to be his last." For a while she believed this might be true. She was not much more than a girl when she used to sit with him in front of an old radio that looked to her then, with its scrolled doors and gabled roof, like a miniature church. She knew even then that he would change her life. Waiting for him to speak or to touch her, she would watch his hands fiddle with the lighted dials on the radio until suddenly there were men playing baseball or reading the news inside the little church.
This happened a long time ago, and when she thought back about the way they were in those days she could never be sure she hadn't made all of it up. That was the thing about the past: it was terribly difficult to get an accurate fix on it when you looked back at it to explain how your life had turned out. If, in her past, passion and ideals were no more than a ball of red yarn, then happiness was even less substantial. She had learned that the world turning around her was dark and her happiness was just a piece of this yarn held between her fingers, and if she were to let go of this, she might spend the rest of her life down on her hands and knees searching for something that once promised a way out of the darkness.
REVIEWS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Pining the loss of the present even before it becomes past can develop into a lifetime preoccupation, and in this novel by the author of A Soldier's Disgrace, three children of the '60s spend so much time on melancholy self-examination that, in a sense, they waste away their lives. Casey and Jack grow up together in a New England town. Casey's handsome father is so much grander than her mother that the woman fades mysteriously until she is utterly feeble. Meanwhile, one night her father comes to Casey's bedroom and abuses her. When at last he abandons the family, Casey joins Jack in Boston, where he attends Harvard in the days of the antiwar protests. They are made a threesome by dynamic Ross, who takes them to a cottage on Frenchman Bay in Maine, where they contemplate their lives, soon to be changed by the war and the gradual evolution of society from the '60s through the '80s. Snyder is consistently wistful as he noticeably and, at times, annoyingly attempts to charge his novel with poignancy. His imagery is often effective, however, as when, after many years, Casey visits her father, now dying, and ties sheets across his four-poster as if it were a sailboat and turns it toward the sea. Unfortunately, this everpresent air of introspection into the big questions of life teeters too frequently on the edge of melodrama. "
Ivy Books | ISBN 978-0804103978 | 1988
FROM THE POINT
A Novel
LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Jack, Ross, and Casey, growing up in the 1960s, spend a summer together on Hancock Point. Ross is drafted, leaving Casey pregnant with a child she aborts. Their lives diverge till, in their mid-30s, Jack decides that ``going back to Hancock Point would give them all a chance to see exactly what was left of their past.'' Though Ross is married, Casey decides to have his child. We see mainly Casey ``crashing along . . . with wounds,'' as she indulges in a lot of morbid reminiscing. There is a constant, low-key refrain of the redemptive power of children. Snyder is an acute observer and writes well, giving the reader the feeling there's something profound here somewhere, though it seems to have gotten lost in Casey's depression."
DISCUSSIONS
