MARY AND O’NEIL
By Justin Cronin
Dial, 243 pages, $21.95
The majority of the space allotted to any book review is given over to plot synopsis, a brief sketch of what happened to whom. At the end there will be a summation and a few lines that will tell us if the reviewer thought the just-outlined plot was any good or not.
But a review of Justin’s Cronin’s new novel, “Mary and O’Neil,” can’t follow this pattern because, frankly, little happens in this book. So little, in fact, that the very ordinary things that do happen–birth and death, love and marriage–take on enormous resonance. The question isn’t, Who are these people and what happens to them? The question is, How did Justin Cronin fashion such an astonishingly good first novel while working with what appears to be little material?
The title page tells us that this is a novel in stories. In fact, it is neither a novel nor a collection of stories, but there is no easy way to explain that on a title page. Instead, this book seems to be based more on the narrative structure of the Frank Capra film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The characters are revealed to the reader by someone who has seen the bigger picture. We are dropped down into the lives of Mary and O’Neil, but especially O’Neil, in a way that might at first seem random. We gather our knowledge about these people where we can, weave together the pieces we are given, and then are left to fill in the rest. The picture ultimately rendered is vastly larger and more complex than a more-traditional, linear plot line ever could have provided.
Some of the moments are small: a victory in a cross-country race in college, dinner in O’Neil’s childhood home. Some of the moments are huge: his sister Kay’s battle with cancer (Kay is a character so complicated and deftly drawn that I was sorry the book wasn’t called “Kay and O’Neil”). The shutter of the camera opens, the moment is recorded, and then we leave that moment of their life completely. While one may wish at the end of every story/chapter for more information, Cronin is a writer who trusts himself and the intelligence of his readers. He gives us a look just long enough for our imagination to flourish. He makes us work, and through that work we become deeply involved in the lives of these characters.
For example, we don’t attend Mary and O’Neil’s wedding. Instead we get the grueling prewedding jog O’Neil takes with his old friend, last night’s alcohol still pulsing in their veins. Instead of the tenderness of a wedding kiss, we get perhaps the greater tenderness of another friend of O’Neil’s coming in to shave him before the ceremony because O’Neil’s hands are shaking too much to do the job. Despite these struggles and the rain that surely will prevent the wedding from taking place outside as planned, all the omens for this union are good. Without our being told, Cronin guides our intuition to understand these people are in love, they are serious, and things are going to work out fine.
Not that everything works out fine. Both Mary and O’Neil have their sad histories. There are struggles after the marriage as well, most notably Kay’s cancer. But part of the book’s enormous strength is that what they endure is, in some way, what we all must endure. Mary and O’Neil do not set themselves apart. They are schoolteachers, parents, members of a family. They are decent people trying to make their way in the world. They are us.
So how does a story about average people leading average lives turn into such a good book? It is the writing, pure and simple. While so many books need 20 or 50 pages to set themselves up, to get their stories going, “Mary and O’Neil” is fully engaging from the first paragraph. Go to your local bookstore, stand among the shoppers, and read the first page. You may well be standing there an hour later. (If you have a great deal of personal discipline, I suggest you forgo the jacket copy, which gives away too much of what little plot there is.) The book seems to have some kind of internal tuning fork that keeps the pitch perfect, and yet one is not drawn back to the writing, to thoughts of the author’s putting down gem-cut sentences on a page. This is the kind of writing that leads you into the story, puts you in the skin of every character. Consider the scene in which Miriam, O’Neil’s mother, dances with her son at her daughter’s wedding:
“How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there? She hadn’t cried during the wedding but now it seemed she was about to; it was possible she would begin to cry and never stop, so she let him take her to the dance floor, place his hand at the small of her back, and steer her into and through the music–when had he learned to do this?–then spin her out to the ends of his fingers, catching her before she flew away. She saw herself, as if from the corner of her eye: a blur of blue dress, arcing like a comet’s tail away from the sun’s bright heat and light; the boy in his gray suit, taller by far than she, hurling her outward and reeling her in again.”
There is a real generosity in a writer who takes his minor characters as seriously as he takes the major ones. There are people in this book who make brief appearances but are every bit as fully drawn as Mary and O’Neil–most notably O’Neil’s parents, who start the story out, but there is also Sandra, O’Neil’s college sweetheart, whose survival of childhood cancer left her with a penchant for hats, a huge will to succeed and a sixth sense for the suffering of others; Russell, Mary’s flour-dusted roommate, who appears to be a gruff sort but manages to come through with compassion and practical assistance when others fall short; and Mia, Kay’s Nordic au pair, who serves the family well through Kay’s first bout of cancer and then, later, exceeds her job description. I would have been glad to see a whole book based on any of these people; instead they gracefully play their parts and move on.
For all its beauty, its unassuming characters, its lack of a driving plot, “Mary and O’Neil” somehow manages to be a page turner. I became so engrossed in the lives of these people that I couldn’t put the book down, because I wanted to see what happened next, even if the only thing that happened was that someone looked out the window and watched the snow falling. I felt real joy in their happiness, and when there was grief, especially in the beautifully executed ending, I wept along with them. In short, this is a book that can be entered into fully. What a gift: to be able to live alongside these people for a while.
