~ The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve ~
We start this novel with Grace and Gene in a pretty little house on the coast of Maine, with their toddler Clare and baby Tom. It seems a perfect little family – Gene goes out to work, Grace stays at home with the children, and has a wonderful friend next door, Rosie, who also has two young children and a husband, Tim. The women contend with the weather, the chores, the normal things which make up ordinary life, until one day, the elements change their lives entirely.
Drought brings a huge fire, which sweeps through devastatingly. Gene and all the men are away firefighting, but the fire comes to where Grace and Rosie live, unexpectedly. With tremendous courage and presence of mind, Grace helps save all of them, but the community is in chaos, because almost everyone has lost everything, homes burnt down, possessions lost. Grace is given a chance to rebuild her life, and for now, it is a life without Gene.
Shreve writes beautifully without needing to actually disclose much – showing, not telling – of the intimate relationship between a husband and wife. In this novel, she shows us the fraught relationship between Grace and Gene, buried beneath the normality of daily living. There is a dark undercurrent there, which Grace feels she has escaped, when Gene is lost after the fire.
Grace is helped by many kind people and particularly by her mother, to rebuild her life. Gene’s mother had died shortly before the fire, leaving her house to her son, and although Grace had not liked the house or her mother-in-law, she now moves into this huge empty house. There, she finds a pianist has moved in, also seeking shelter and finding a piano most unexpectedly. The music and the man kindle in Grace feelings she had somehow known she ought to feel, and had never felt with Gene. She finds another possible life companion in the doctor she begins working for, and although this novel is not about Grace trying to replace Gene, it is about Grace unfurling as a person, growing, developing, and the men who attract her are part of that self-realisation.
It is a lovely read because the protagonist is a lovely one. The entire novel hinges on Grace’s stoicism, resourcefulness, courage, and personality. When Gene unexpectedly returns, it is as if the storm clouds overhead have gathered, and the reader finds themselves as dismayed as Grace herself must have been. There is a weak point in the plot when Grace’s mother chooses this juncture to move out – a narrative device to leave Grace and Gene on their own and therefore enable the showdown – but a barely credible one. That said, it is one small weak spot in an otherwise well paced, well told story.
It is basically the story of how a woman learns to stand on her own, as a single woman, somewhat in defiance of the conventions of the time and place, and to be a full and complete person in herself. She shakes off the limitations and constraints her husband would have placed on her, and finds a bigger, more fulfilling life than that she would have had, tiptoeing around him. Shreve is very skilful in drawing Gene as monstrous as Grace must have found him, without actually having done things that are all that terrible. She is a writer who addresses her reader simultaneously on 2 levels – the facts she presents, and the emotions that run in parallel. It is perhaps this dual level of consciousness that makes the deceptively simple, straightforward narrative such a satisfying read.
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