The Life Room
By Jill Bialosky
Harcourt, 337 pages, $24
Eleanor Cahn is of two minds about her impending trip to Paris, the event that kicks off poet and editor Jill Bialosky’s introspective second novel, “The Life Room.” A scholar and professor at Columbia University in New York, Eleanor is eager to attend an international conference on world literature, where she has been invited to give a paper on Tolstoy. But she’s a wife and a mother, too, one who has been feeling squeezed by the demands of life with her two young sons and her solid, stolid husband. She’s thinking about past lovers and wondering what parts of herself she has exchanged for her secure — Or is it suffocating? — life.
Here’s Eleanor, describing her husband, Michael, a heart surgeon. What she’s really doing, though, is explaining how she has come to this precipice:
“He liked to run, sometimes five or six miles in the park, and when he returned he was more energetic than when he had left. She wondered what he thought of when he ran, what absorbed his attention when it wasn’t the activity at hand. Once she asked, and he said he counted his paces.”
The 10-day trip to Paris looms large on many levels. Even Eleanor isn’t sure which perspective — career advancement or selfish, guilty pleasure — wins out. That Eleanor’s paper is about Anna Karenina, the doomed Russian hero whose love affair causes her to throw herself in front of a train, gives more than a hint of what’s to come.
Bialosky flirts with cliched territory here. But instead of sending her character right out into a soap-opera world of lies and lust and marital infidelity, she weaves the story inward. She rifles through Eleanor’s mind and mines her memories for clues. She gives us Eleanor as an obsessive, both in her actions and her inner life. Even Eleanor’s looks make it clear this won’t be a predictable journey:
“She had been born with different colored eyes. One blue and the other green. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she felt as if she were split down the center, divided, as if one part of her were competing with the other.”
A hero so plainly divided that her very facial features telegraph her confusion must have a past to match, and Bialosky lays it on liberally. We learn that in her youth, Eleanor repeatedly chose the same sort of weird, wounded and unavailable man, one who built his life around his own obsession with Eleanor.
There was her high school boyfriend, William, whose retreat into an ascetic’s austerity Eleanor seemed all too ready to follow. In college there was Adam, a self-centered painter for whom Eleanor acted as model and muse. Though Adam proves to be the story’s most solid and active character, he’s also pretty annoying. He pontificates about the nature of art in sentences so florid, they seem almost self-mocking:
” ‘As a painter I see with my eyes first. When I begin a study, the model possesses my childhood, my struggles. My obsessions. The person you see on the canvas isn’t the original subject anymore. She becomes my metier, my compass.’ “
It’s around Stephen, however, a former childhood friend, that the real story turns. Just days before her departure for Paris, Eleanor learns that Stephen, now a journalist, will be there as well. The two friends meet and, in the romance and possibility of the Parisian cityscape, something gets rekindled. What that may be seems to confuse Eleanor, though even the most casual reader can see the signals from afar.
You find yourself wishing for a bit more action and a little less self-examination as “The Life Room” plays out. Bialosky takes us through Eleanor’s mind and memories, seemingly in real time. By the third time Stephen exhibits a certain kind of behavior (to say anything more would spoil the book), why is Eleanor the only one who’s surprised?
Eleanor’s quest is the search for her lost passion, Bialosky tells us, and at times, her poet’s gift for language is up to the task. Too much of the book, however, takes place in Eleanor’s inner world. By the time the overwrought finale plays out, with Eleanor somehow lost in a wintry New York park, she’s not the only one hoping for rescue.
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Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles-based writer and book critic for NPR’s news magazine “Day to Day.”
