January 1 2007: Review: Love And Other Impossible Pursuits – Ayelet Waldman
Filed under Reviews
This is such a bittersweer novel with very ironic dark humour. With her newborn baby dying of SIDS, Emilia is finding it very very hard to love and care for her precocious five-year-old stepson. Add to this the lingering guilt that she has because of her role in breaking up the marriage of his father and (admittedly controlling and neurotic mother), and Emilia finds it hard to feel anything but contempt for a five-year-old genius whose intention it seems, is to make her life as difficult as possible.
With this resentment eating away at her, Emilia subconsciously begins to do little things to ‘get back’ at William. Knowing his lactose intolerance, she gives him part of her muffin, and lets him have dairy ice-cream. Knowing his susceptibility to colds and flu, she has him waiting with her in the pouring rain for a taxi. In one scene, she even ends up throwing William into the Central Park lake (supposedly unintentionally as an accident, but I personally think that she was hoping for such a result deep inside).
On his part, despite his precociousness, William is really like any child of a split family; all he wants is for his mother and father to reconcile. If it means naming and shaming Emilia to achieve his ends, then he will willingly do so.
With all the mutual resentment aside however, there are some really beautiful scenes in the novel where Emilia and William manage to put their differences aside. She teaches him, a notoriously uncoordinated child, how to ice-skate, and the way they conspire together to keep this outing a secret from his parents is really quite endearing. For a touching moment, they stop being enemies, and become co-conspirators with a common cause.
There’s also an ongoing theme of upper-class parenting in Manhattan. The characters take a special car service rather than taxis. They toil to get their children accepted into premium kindergardens that are regarded as a foolproof way of gaining direct entry into Harvard. The children are all picked up from nursery school by live-in ethnic nannies. The importance and value of wealth is really exaggerated to great effect in the novel.
Dark humour aside, Love And Other Impossible Pursuits weaves a very touching tale of the grief that can follow after losing a child. By the end of the novel, one thing is made very certain: Emilia will never stop grieving for her lost baby Isabel, but grief for one child doesn’t make it impossible to love another child.
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