SARAH CONLEY
By Ellen Gilchrist
Little, Brown, 259 pages, $23.95
Sarah Conley, the hero of Ellen Gilchrist’s eponymous new novel, is an addition to Gilchrist’s stable of strong-minded and sassy Southern girls (think Rhoda Manning and Nora Jane Whittington)–those girls who grow into equally strong-minded women and whose development is traced through Gilchrist’s breezy prose. Sarah is a small-town Kentuckian turned fast-track New Yorker, a woman demanding all she can from life. The novel begins with young Sarah in all her confident glory:
“Sarah was drinking a Coke and smoking a cigarette. . . . She was fourteen years old and already she was making fifteen dollars a week for two afternoons’ work. She would not always be poor. That much was clear. All she had to do was keep on going the way she was going and she would never, never, never be poor.”
She is soon to meet a kindred spirit, Eugenie, an intriguing new girl in town. Unfortunately, the lovely chapters crisply recounting the girls’ friendship, their habit of sleeping on Eugenie’s roof and looking at the stars, are too brief. From Sarah’s girlhood, Gilchrist jumps the reader forward to New York 1996, where 52-year-old Sarah is an ambitious editor at Time. Her fame and position stem largely from the good reception received by her scathing novel fictionalizing (just barely) her youthful marriage, divorce and unsuccessful child-custody battle. Another jump back in time shows us Sarah and Eugenie’s college years, vital in mapping their futures: They embark on their careers (medicine for Eugenie, journalism for Sarah), and they meet the brothers they will marry, Jack and Timothy McAllen. Although Sarah and Jack are drawn to each other and have a secret one-night tryst, Eugenie has “seen Jack first and staked her claim.” Nevertheless, the two couples form a powerful unit: “(T)he four of them had become an item, a fortress, a subject of envy, a shield.” Despite his feelings for Sarah, Jack feels compelled by his father to marry Eugenie for her money and position a month after Sarah marries Timothy.
This old web of love and memory entangles Sarah when Eugenie dies and Sarah re-establishes contact with Jack. They’ve been out of touch since Sarah’s book appeared 15 years earlier, since she left Nashville for new worlds to conquer. Eugenie’s death throws Sarah and Jack together and forces them to remember the past and face the uncertain future. Complicating that future are feelings of disloyalty to Eugenie, Sarah’s boyfriend, their hectic schedules in different cities and the disapproval of Jack and Eugenie’s unstable, hostile daughter, Elise. To top off the family drama, Elise is unwisely pursuing a love affair with Sarah’s son, Jimmy, who may be Jack’s son from their long-ago night together. Best friends, brothers, cousins, potential incest: There is an excess of messy connection here–a familiar motif of Gilchrist’s, and one she handles well.
Sarah must balance the parallel pursuits of love (a renewal of her affair with Jack) and work (a lucrative, time-consuming opportunity to write a screenplay in Paris). Will family and memory scare the two from their second chance or vault them into the future? Gilchrist loses track of this central question in the last part of the novel as she focuses on Sarah’s efforts to write her screenplay. It’s hard to take this sappy movie seriously (” `I want her to get into a sports car and drive into Paris in the gathering dusk. Park it haphazardly on a street and walk to a cafe and pick up a beautiful mulatto actor and begin to dance with him.’ “) and even harder to believe Sarah takes it seriously; but as presented by Gilchrist, the screenplay seems in earnest. It’s disappointing that when we see Sarah, an acclaimed writer, at work she is working on something so unworthy of her. Though the movie mirrors her dilemma–work or love?–it’s an uninspiring plot device. This section of the book feels rushed, with Sarah and Jack flying all over the place, deaths and weddings happening on top of each other, the author trying to wrap everything up quickly for no discernible reason. The ending is badly paced but thematically fitting–sourness mixed with sweetness.
Sarah is a three-dimensional character, but many of her satellites–her fast-talking agent and handsome young boyfriend–are flat, present just to speak a bit of Gilchrist’s philosophy, show another side of Sarah. They lack her vibrancy and dim her glow slightly. Sarah is affectionate and indulgent with her boyfriend, but we hardly accept that she would have spent five years living with this petulant boy-man. Jack is more realistic, but he, too, is not as strongly written as Sarah. Except for a short romantic defection at the end, he is loving, reliable–and wonderfully sensitive to boot.
Gilchrist’s language has always been distinctive–pragmatic yet high-flown, even slightly baroque. Her characters take the long view; they see the whole of their past, ruminate constantly about their futures. Their speeches mix philosophy and practicality without missing a beat (” `The dead are gone. Let them sleep with the Egyptians. Nothing matters but the present and the memories we keep in our hearts. All the rest is no longer true. We should go to the Swiss Alps if you come to France. We could climb and drink chocolate in thin china cups. . . . We could ride the train to Grenoble.’ “). Their thoughts are lightning-fast bits of deduction and shrewdness, particularly Sarah’s (“I want peer relationships. It’s all I’ve ever been good at having. That’s me. That’s who I am. I have to quit thinking I should be somebody else.”).
“Sarah Conley,” a touching and intelligent story of old lovers carefully inching back into each other’s lives, bravely goes against our current youth-oriented orthodoxy, the belief that passion is only for the young. The love affair of Sarah Conley is hopeful and precarious–like life itself.
