I've officially passed the halfway mark of Renate Adler's Pitch Dark, my current NYRB Classic and a book I was afraid I was going to struggle with. After that initial feeling of disorientation, I'm progressing steadily through the story (though I sort of hesitate to call it a story as it is not what I traditionally think of as a straightforward novel). I think this is a book I am going to, when I finish, consider it one I'm happy to have read and been exposed to, but maybe not one that I love in the same way as I've loved my first two NYRB subscription books (the McPherson and the Grossman). And that's okay. It certainly doesn't mean it's not an exceptional book, only that maybe I am not the perfect reader/audience for it.
But then again, a lot can happen in the span of seventy pages! I will say that while I do occasionally feel a little adrift still, I'm not nearly so lost as I was afraid I might be. I've been trying to read a set number of pages every day in order to keep the momentum going, and today I found that when I had passed my allotted pages I wanted to keep going. A good sign that she is pulling me in and keeping my attention and not losing me along the way.
I wanted to give a little update at the halfway mark, and while I'm still not sure of all the 'whys' of the story, I do see a few patterns emerging. This is a book I am reading with pencil in hand and notebook close by. I like to keep notes as I read, but usually I am very lazy about noting more than characters and location details. My notes this time around are fairly scattered and they probably don't really make a lot of sense, but here are some things I've jotted down so far.
Pitch Dark is narrated in the first person. Kate Ennis has been having an affair with a married man, Jake. He's behaving badly--taking Kate for granted and not acting as a lover normally would (or what we consider a married man who takes a lover to act like towards his mistress).
". . . perhaps you never loved me quite enough, and I didn't want to know."
"What you've done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part. No, I don't mean that. It is only that I didn't think I set the price so very high. There wasn't ever going to be a price. Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island. And it's just that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way."
Orcas Island, the first of three chapters, is where Kate is at the beginning of the story--all alone. It has an episodic (Anne Tyler calls them fragments in her jacket blurb--a perfect description) feel to it. Adler throws out lots of bits of information which has to be pieced together to create a fuller picture of just what's going on. Kate is telling this story twenty years after when the events occurred (in the mid-1960s). She was a grad student with a wide circle of diverse friends. Eight years she and this man were together, though they had never had an entire week together.
There is lots of repetition of words and phrases.
"But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life."
And an occasional (and amusing) play on words. She talks about the Attorney General who would mention the Ku Klux Klan but always called them "Clamsmen".
"I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism."
(I found that amusing since she had been on a riff of fishy sorts of words . . . molluscs, bivalves, even crustaceans.
I'm now reading the second part, "Pitch Dark" which is set in Ireland. By now Kate is a journalist and she is staying as a guest at the house of the Ambassador. I'm not sure why exactly, or rather what her relationship with him is, though she is looking for somewhere quiet and by the sea, a place to rest. By now she is a journalist, and Jake, her married lover has essentially dumped her.
It is perhaps easier going as this second chapter is closer to a regular narrative, even though it still has a slightly episodic feel to it. She's run afoul of the law on the road to Dublin driving a rented vehicle which she's dented. Maybe my curiosity has been peaked since there is a feeling of suspense and mystery to her journey to Ireland, I'm not sure. Certainly the people around her now are not so nice and maybe even a little strange, which makes me wonder where this story is going, and wanting to know more than ever the whys and motivations behind Kate's journey.
I've held off reading Muriel Spark's afterword, just a very few pages long actually, though I might cave in and do a little extracurricular reading now before I start the last section, which I hope to do tomorrow. I am determined to finish the book by the end of the weekend. This is a book that is not best read in fits and starts I've decided. Definitely it is more of a challenge than I normally look for, but a good challenge, and maybe not so hard as I was expecting (and I even had more to say about it than I thought--I'll have to do mid-way posts more often with those books that call for more attention and thought).