HERE is a moving story of a devastated marriage of love and disappointment between a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectations of themselves and of each other.
The protagonist of the novel is Gary, who is married to Irene and they have a daughter Rhoda, who is about to get married to a dentist named Jim, while their son named Mark is living with Karen. Gary has been an impatient man right from the day Irene had met him: “impatient with the larger shape of his life, with who he was and what he’d done and become, impatient with his wife and children and then, of course, impatient with all the little things, any action not done correctly, any moment of weather that was uncooperative.”
Irene had lived with his general and abiding impatience for over 30 years. Driven by 30 years of diverted plans, Gary decides to move to Caribou Island, hoping for a better future. He plans to build a log cabin there. It is raining cats and dogs but he, persistent and impatient to get the job done, slogs to cart huge logs of wood in his truck to the boat, though Irene wonders how they would push the boat on the lake, weighed down with the logs.
Just as Irene had feared, the boat, when lowered into the lake in the heavy downpour, prevents them from venturing out.
Gary builds the cabin but Irene has her troublesome headaches and she hates it inside the log cabin. She shoots down Gary and then commits suicide just as her own mother had done by hanging herself.
Meanwhile, unknown to Rhoda or Mark, Rhoda is busy visualising her marriage to Jim and her parents attending her wedding ceremony. She is left fantasising about a perfect wedding day while Jim is busy with other plans.
(Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110017; www.penguin.com) -MG
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