"Replay", ("Girl, Woman, Other")

[fiefoe]

Ken Grimwood's well reviewed novel about life's x number of chances turns out to be underwhelming and the opposite of thoughtful.

• The night with Judy had begun pleasantly enough, but that final scene in the car had left him depressed. He’d forgotten how artificial sex used to be. No, not forgotten; he’d never fully realized it, not when those things were happening to him for the first time. The dishonesty had all been masked by the glow of newly discovered emotion, of naive but irresistible sexual hunger. What had once seemed wondrously erotic now stood revealed in all its essential cheapness, unobscured by the distance of time:
• To him, here in 1963, the car was like a fellow voyager in time, a plush cocoon spun in the image of his own era. <> Nostalgic as he’d felt about the old Chevy, this machine evoked an even stronger, reverse nostalgia.
• Gambling was so clear-cut, so soothingly straightforward: win or loss, debit or credit, right or wrong.
• He’d been with this woman for almost a year, sharing everything with her except his mind and his emotions. The thought was suddenly distasteful, her very beauty a rebuke to his sensibilities.
• Precious innocence, he thought; blessed sweet unawareness of the wounds a demented universe can inflict.
• He couldn’t bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a blank slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead.
• “At the end of my second cycle, when I realized I might go through it again, I memorized a list of every plane crash since 1963. Hotel fires, too, and railway accidents, earthquakes … all the major disasters.”
• Thick forests of red cedar and hemlock covered the surrounding hillsides, and around one bend a field of heather trapped between two glaciers suddenly came into view. The pink and purple flowers rippled, shimmered in the soft spring breeze, their ephemeral beauty a quiet rebuke to the impassive walls of ice enclosing them.
• Jeff had seemed so grateful just to have her back again, and she’d put her own worries in the back of her mind as she concentrated on the laborious task of finishing school and the delicate diplomacy of convincing her parents to accept her need to be with him.
• Jeff looked at the pretty, smiling face that he had known and loved so strangely out of sequence: first in maturity, and now in youth. He felt a vague foreboding, as if the closeness they had shared were about to be invaded, their mutual uniqueness shattered by a stranger.
• “We’ve always accepted it, from the very beginning: Manson, Berkowitz, Gacey, Buono and Bianchi … that sort of aimless savagery is part of this time period. We’ve become inured to it.
• he said. “But when you claim our stance in Vietnam is hopeless … What about the death of Ho Chi Minh day before yesterday? Won’t that weaken the resolve of the NLF? Our analysts say—”
  Jeff spoke up. “If anything, it’ll strengthen their determination. Ho will be all but canonized, made into a martyr. They’ll rename Saigon after him, in—once they’ve taken the city.”
• The eyes Jeff best remembered from the past nine years were the dangerous blue orbs of Russell Hedges, staring at him with increasing malice as the world slid into its hellish morass of terrorist attacks and border skirmishes and U.S.-Soviet confrontations of which Jeff knew nothing, could predict nothing.
• he realized at last what he was unconsciously but determinedly developing: a book about himself, using the metaphor of these separate lonely voyagers as a means to grapple with his own unique experience, to explain the marbled tapestry of his accumulated gains and losses and regrets.
• Jeff’s eyes darted rapidly now from screen to screen, trying to take it all in, trying not to miss anything: Chateaugay winning the 1963 Kentucky Derby, his parents’ house in Orlando, the jazz club in Paris where Sidney Bechet’s clarinet had pierced his soul, the college bar where he’d watched Pamela begin replaying, the grounds of his estate nearby … And there on one monitor was a long shot of the hillside village in Majorca; the camera zoomed slowly in to the villa where Pamela had died, then cut abruptly to a blurry home-movie clip of her at age fourteen, with her mother and father in the house in Westport.
  “My God,” he said, transfixed by the ever-changing montage of all their replays. “Where did you find all this?”
• Now that Pamela was gone, the fears and regrets she had expressed came back to trouble him as deeply as they’d disturbed her toward the end. He’d done what he could to reassure her, to ease the grief and terror of her final days, but she’d been right: For all that they had struggled, all they’d once achieved, the end result was null. Even the happiness they had managed to find together had been frustratingly brief; a few years stolen here and there, transient moments of love and contentment like vanishing specks of foam in a sea of lonely, needless separation.
  It had seemed as if they would have forever, an infinity of choices and second chances. They had squandered far too much of the priceless time that had been granted them, wasted it on bitterness and guilt and futile quests for nonexistent answers—when they themselves, their love for each other, had been all the answer either of them should have ever needed.
• “But it was you,” he insisted. “Not with all the memories, no, but it was still you, we still—”
  “I can’t believe you’re saying this! How long has this been happening, when did you start this?”
  “It’s been almost two years.”
  “Two years! You’ve been … using me, like I was some kind of inanimate object, like—”
• The unfathomable cycle in which he and Pamela had been caught had proved to be a form of confinement, not release. They had let themselves be trapped in the deceptive luxury of focusing always on future options; just as Lydia Randall, in the blind hopefulness of her youth, had assumed life’s choices would forever be available to her.

======================================
Bernadine Evaristo's novel was more interesting to see on page, without and periods. But lack of a real plot and flat portraits of all the characters de-motivated me to go on further.

• (she kept her predilection for big tits quiet because it was un-feminist to isolate body parts for sexual objectification)
• Dominique was more selective and monogamous, serially so, she went for actresses, usually blonde, whose microscopic talent was overshadowed by their macroscopic beauty
• two middle-aged women stood at the bar wearing men’s haircuts and suits and looking as if they’d walked straight out of the pages of The Well of Loneliness
• Amma saw it as symptomatic and symbolic of her mother’s oppression
  Mum never found herself, she told friends, she accepted her subservient position in the marriage and rotted from the inside
• her girlfriends du jour, as Dad puts it (hey, why speak English when you can speak French?), are two white women, Dolores and Jackie, although Mum has been with every ethnicity known to humankind (it’s called multiracial whoredom)
• it’s like they actually like each other, Yazz suspects they have gruesome threesomes, and can’t bring herself to ask
  besides, she’s lost count of the women who’ve come and gone to the point that the new ones barely register on her Richter scale of annoyance


• I’ve fallen in love properly for the first time in my life with the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met, who desires me from a position of inner strength,
• Nzinga then launched into the racial implications of stepping on a black doormat rather than over it, of not wearing black socks (why would you step on your own people?), and don’t ever use black garbage bags, she instructed, as for blackmail, blackball, black mood, black magic, black sheep, black-hearted, I never wear black underpants, for example, why crap on myself?
• the problem with you, Sojourner, is that you’re used to leading instead of being led, she’d say, remember you’re my apprentice – in housebuilding, in living a truly radical separatist feminist lesbian life, in steering clear of the enemy, in living free of chemical toxins, in living off the soil and on the soil, it really won’t work if you insist on fighting me at every turn
  so when did our love affair turn into an apprenticeship? I’m a leader myself, aren’t I?
• Nzinga created an atmosphere glutinous with tension