~ Listen to Me, by Hannah Pittard ~
This slim novel has a very simple storyline: Married couple, Maggie and Mark, with their dog, Gerome, embark on their annual interstate drive to Virginia for a vacation with Mark’s parents. Mark has brought forward this annual journey because
his wife must be removed from the city immediately
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Maggie who had been attacked recently and is still in a state of paranoia months afterwards, is deemed not normal by Mark.
Normal people didn’t waste their days reading about other people’s misfortunes. Normal people didn’t take a gross sort of pleasure in keeping up with local crime statistics. Normal people didn’t walk the dog in a robe. Normal people didn’t act like Maggie.
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Mark was also worried about the mace and the switchblade Maggie had brought home, and had found her application for a gun.
On this long drive, they encounter storms, which makes it necessary for them to seek a hotel for a night, delaying their journey slightly. It is not actually what happens which takes forestage in this novel, it is the exchanges between Mark and Maggie, both the said and the unsaid, the memories and regrets and secrets, as well as the intimacy, understanding, support, and space they afford each other, in a nutshell, it is the texture of their marriage, as played out in this drive, which this novel reveals. It is often said that no one actually knows what goes on in a marriage apart from the two in it, but this novel makes a pretty good fist of lifting the lid on this marriage and giving the reader a private look inside. It is fascinating to watch this couple needle each other, stumble and sometimes deliberately trample on each other’s raw nerves, but also accommodate each other, protect each other’s tender under bellies, the push and pull and the tensions of the interactions as well as the relationship.
It is very well written, with the understated exchanges and detailed explanations of what each person thought, backing the actual spoken words and behaviour; both showing and telling. The particular partnership forged in this marriage is illustrated for the reader – but not laid bare – indicative perhaps, that it never quite can be. Mark and Maggie are not always kind to each other, they even have a sense of quiet rivalry, an egging each other on sometimes to do their worst, a sense of one-upmanship over each other at times.
For instance, at one point, Maggie almost wishes her beloved Gerome would be killed through Mark’s fault so that she can hold that over him forever, but she immediately regrets such a thought:
And then for half a second – no, less than half a second, a nanosecond, a piece of time so fleeting there’s no way truly to prove it ever existed except through the memory of the thought – Maggie imagined the satisfaction she might feel is Gerome had a heat stroke and died. She imagined the permanent regret with which Mark would be forever saddled. She imagined the upper hand she would have for the rest of their live. But then immediately – almost immediately because the nanosecond exists and existed – she felt intense guilt for having used the fantasy of Gerome’s death as a way to inflict a make-believe punishment on her husband.
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(Interesting to note, however, that Maggie is not feeling guilty for having wished such a fate on her husband, only feeling guilty regarding the dog’s welfare!)
The novel makes clear these are 2 extremely different people, driven by different motivations, and struggling with entirely different fears. In an oversimplification, the novel states that Maggie realises that Mark is afraid of technology and Maggie is afraid of people. Although they may not be able to identify or even empathise entirely with each other, they can yet forge a strong partnership by trying to anticipate each others’ needs (which they are sometimes sympathetic to, and which at other times, they try to thwart.) They are a couple who love and are in love, in a 9 year relationship and counting.
Pittard works well on combining the internal and external communications, peeling back the layers beneath the surface action and dialogue. The novel also makes clear Maggie and Mark do not understand themselves as well as they imagine they do, discovering new realities about themselves as they navigate their relationship with each other. In all, a fascinating little close up study of a marriage which is by no means dysfunctional, but always being rebalanced, renegotiated, recalibrated.
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