But Come Ye Back: A Novel in Stories
By Beth Lordan
Morrow, 278 pages, $23.95
Beth Lordan’s second novel, “But Come Ye Back,” is a contemporary tale of a sixtyish couple who, after raising a family, sell their house in Ohio and move to Galway, Ireland, to begin a new life. Except for a few glimmers of family friction over teacups and misplaced boxes on moving day, the retirees seem off to a sunny start. Lyle Sullivan, a former accountant, has no close family in America and no reservations, after running the numbers, regarding the economic advantages of plunking down his savings for a semi-detached house in Galway instead of a pricey condo in Ohio or Florida. His wife of 34 years, the former Mary Curtin, is similarly optimistic that Ireland is the right choice, and not just for financial reasons. She is hoping to renew her ties to the family she left behind when she set off for America to marry Lyle:
“Back here, she and [her sister] Roisin would go about together: they’d talk of their parents and the world as it had been when they were Mary and Roisin Curtin, girls together: they’d share their worries about their grown children. The sea would be near, and butter would have a taste to it, and she’d understand the weather; she’d get to know her brothers’ wives, and her brothers, who had still been boys when she left.”
But Mary’s sepia-tinted dream of a graceful drift into old age among her own kind soon fades in the welter of her sister’s cranky rants about the ill effects of cheese, knitting, and the weather on her aching joints. Lyle as well becomes a bit of a drag. Having violated the cardinal rule for housebound wives with newly retired husbands (Don’t make lunch!), Mary finds herself dithering endlessly over Lyle’s midday menu. Turkey sandwich or salmon and salad? Tapping his knuckles on the refrigerator at noontime, the ever-practical Lyle comes down in favor of the salmon: ” ‘Better eat it before it goes bad.’ “
Their story takes a heart-warming turn when Lyle, walking the dog on the promenade along Galway Bay, befriends an American couple on holiday and develops a crush on the charming, dark-haired wife, Laura. Fantasies of deeper, more-intimate contact enliven long evenings by the fire, but in the end Lyle settles for lending Laura maps with which to explore the Irish countryside. Lyle’s dashed hopes are nicely echoed in a subsequent episode in which Laura’s husband, Mark, who is dying of cancer, exchanges his secret hope of finding a miraculous cure in Ireland for a late-afternoon vision of a heavenly resting place during a visit to an old stone cottage in Kerry.
Most of the book’s charms lie in the unframed, episodic stories in the first half that explore the main characters’ inner lives from different points of view. To her credit, Lordan never strains for effect in her deft depictions of senior citizens in love. Descriptions of the landscape–though rather too heavily weighted toward rainbows, thatched roofs, pretty shops and ruddy-faced Irish in tweed caps–ring true.
But, though beautifully written and capable of standing on their own as stories (several of which were first published in The Atlantic Monthly), the episodes in the first half don’t add up to much more than sentimental glimpses into the lives of repressed and lonely figures at an emotional crossroads. Every so often, anger ruffles the still surface of the narrative, hinting of darker levels on which Lyle and Mary and Laura and Mark, like many long-married couples, loathe each other, but Lordan never exploits their dramatic potential. This is a puzzle, because she is so clearly a gifted, sensitive writer.
Having missed the chance to create a central, abiding conflict in the first half of the book, Lordan is left with little to build on in the second half. The writing waxes lyrical, the pace slows, and the characters, having acquired depth and substance, just kind of evaporate. Five years into their retirement, Mary develops pneumonia and dies. Her sons, Jimmy and Kevin, arrive from Cleveland and Indianapolis for the funeral, and Lyle must decide whether to go it alone in Galway or return with them to the States. The quiet epiphanies that work so well to create atmosphere and mark subtle character shifts in the first half of the book do nothing to lend the second half the forward momentum it needs to take on a life of its own:
“They had never expected to find themselves without her. . . . Lyle with his disgruntlements, Kevin with his finickinesses, Jimmy with his irresponsibilities. . . . There was no one and nothing to disturb them, to insist that they were other than Mary had always hoped them to be, and so, in that hour and in the hours that remained of that day and in the decisions and then the rituals that followed those decisions, they acted as she knew they could, appropriately and well.”
With everyone on his best behavior, opportunities for gripping drama fade “as fast as the stream when the flood is upon it,” as they say in Ireland. Readers who have experienced the loss of a spouse or a parent may recognize parallels with their own lives in Lyle’s and his sons’ efforts to protect one another by not parading their grief, but without a main thread of conflict to center even quiet, everyday actions around, interest in their plight is difficult to sustain.
As the novel draws to a close, separate visits to Mary’s grave, followed by pints and sausages in the local pub, Tigh Neachtain’s, climax in memories of Mary and the stories she used to tell. The drinking loosens the flow of talk among Mary’s husband and sons, sounding a hopeful note, but everything is so understated and lyrical that it’s impossible to know, exactly, what is being reaffirmed: “That day in Neachtain’s, it was enough for them to half sense her voice, her talk, hovering nearby as they grew slowly and slightly drunk together in the afternoon.”
No doubt stories are what make our lives worth living, but I’m not sure Lordan is saying this in a very original or surprising way. The Ireland of “But Come Ye Back” is not a new or reinvented Ireland, but more the familiar notion of what Ireland is, a bucolic backwater of witty eccentrics, misty-eyed talkers and storytellers. By not ever quite cracking this facade, Lordan misses an opportunity for her novel to take on an uncanny–even wild–life of its own.
