The self-help counseling industry has much to offer on the issue of “aging successfully.” A Google search of the topic yields infinite pages — adding up to a vast unwillingness to accept finitude. Millions are silently asking “Is that all there is?” — while insisting on some form of fulfillment. In the four novellas collected in Where You’re All Going, Joan Frank allows those interior voices to be heard. The book’s title, spoken to her characters and readers, makes her tone obvious: you are all going to die — and so am I — and at the moment I’m the only one who seems to be noticing.
Declining into darkness won’t be easy, either, for anyone in Frank’s stories, because first, they have to deal with being old. And mostly, though male points of view are sprinkled in, Frank’s protagonists are women who are tangled up within their own narratives about aging.
In “Biting the Moon,” the death of a famous musician jolts the protagonist to relive their love affair, if “love affair” is the right term for several encounters marred and aborted by the musician’s alcoholic rants adorned with petty and soul-withering fault-finding, and his relationship with the woman he ends up marrying. The narrator, who is literally itching (“Scratch, scratch. Eyebrows. Clavicle …”) to dive into that not-so-sweet episode of youth, describes herself, and her husband, who are the same age as the dead man, as “Not old, I swear. Not yet.”
“Cavatina for Passenger X” revolves around a young hetero couple and their parasitic male friend. Passenger X is not the friend, but their son-in-utero. Yet again, it’s told as a recollection; Rory, the wife, tripping back and forth through the years, now has hair “more snow than honey.”
“Unsparing” is a word often thrown into book reviews; here, as in Frank’s previous work, it is entirely apropos. Illusions are lopped off by her spare prose which, at well chosen moments, offers vivid details. Similarly, Frank doesn’t spare her characters (or her readers) from their own finitude, not only in terms of life span, but of their emotional limits and the constrictions their pasts exert on them. If they are not utterly hapless or dumbly happy (usually, the husbands), they cannot be other than painfully aware of their vanities and the pettiness of their cares. Resigned, gently patronizing affection mostly substitutes for passion and mutual respect between man and wife, whether or not the marriage endures. Intelligence denies the comforts of even the mildest self-delusion or the vaguest religious faith.
Consider “Open Says Me,” a story about a widow named Frannie who heads out to attend a party. Unlike her late husband, she has never enjoyed these minglings of passing acquaintances juiced by liquor. Frannie enters:
This party, she notices, doesn’t quite match the others. Frannie knows almost nobody this time. But no one she sees — surveying the place — makes her yearn to know them better. What are the laws of attraction now, or even of curiosity? croups oof plumpish women stand together, heads a palette of grays. Some still insist on keeping long hair, parted in the middle — as it was when they were peach-cheeked Renaissance maidens right here in the county, baking brad and brewing yogurt, rosy babies riding on hips. Except now the rosy babies are tall and sweaty and founding consultancy start-ups, and the women’s hair hangs thin and coarse and straggly, like moss. Some have cut their hair like a man’s, or in a Dutch boy.
As she moves aimlessly through the soiree, avoiding the doctors (“they’ll think she’s cruising them”), she says to herself, “Oh, if only I could fix that. Fix everything.” When her husband was dying, she wondered, “How would the world shrink — or loom? How much less herself would she feel. Plenty, had been the answer. Whatever selfhood she may still possess feels more like a membrane. Or so she judges herself these days.” Frank manages to keep us balanced between empathy and critique. Her tart assessments are so acutely observed that one may feel such mundane situations and mentalities are being voiced for the first time. White and affluent and rutted in behavior, Frank’s characters are splayed open for blunt review — and yet, Frank will not allow us to see them merely as certain models of jaded life. For Frannie, “Old means the worst of it, everyone’s nightmare. Pleating. Saggy pouches. Fecal breath. Upper-arm wattles. High-belted pants, stretch synthetics. Leaking eyes, discolored teeth, lipstick clown-like.” Yes, the actual situation. But how should one feel about it?
These are people over the crest, and the ride down is anything but exhilarating. The women in Frank’s novellas do not expect to find beauty or joy unblemished. The women are skeptical — and skepticism is often the result of having converted the human condition into an intellectual conundrum. But sometimes, they break through and get a glimpse of something more vital. In “Biting the Moon”:
You stare at the camellia bush, all broken out in pink buds and shameless, fat blossoms.
And you think: heaven forgive me.
I forgot.
The view “you” take of the flowering bush — “broken out,” like a pimpled face, the blossoms “shameless, fat” — heads off any romantic, Keatsian sentiment of “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Or could truth equals beauty be exactly what the narrator is talking about? And that disregarding what is actually happening amounts to a sin, even with the prospect of — or especially with the prospect of — “where you’re all going.”
Maybe. Frank makes us work as hard as her characters do to extract some significance out their fleeting and flawed lives. And should the struggle yield any beautiful truths, those, too, must be recognized as provisional.
Walking on a beach, trying to grasp the story of dead Julia and her still-living, newly-in-love husband:
No brilliant retro-insights shimmer forth about the Derringers, their lives, about Julia. Instead what you find at Bodega Head, every time, is sweeping agitation. Flux and flushing. No memory, no opinions — certainly no morals …
Restless, selfish mind — whining its ant-sized concerns: What should I thaw from the freezer. Time for a load of laundry. My shins hurt.
But the passage doesn’t end there…
Among these, though, another:
Paint this.
Paint the jewel colors. Paint the shapes. Paint the motion that is the only answer we’ll ever have.
How long have you been avoiding it? Because it’s hard, of course.
[Published by Sarabande Books on February 18, 2020, 242 pages, $16.95 paperback]