The Poets' Wives by David Park

Published by Bloomsbury USA on April 1, 2014

The Poets' Wives examines the lives of three women whose husbands have died. The husbands were poets, two of them real. Had the novel offered more meaningful insight into the literary husbands, or had it revealed something more meaningful about the wives, I would have been more taken with it. If there is an organizing theme here, it is that living with a poet guarantees an oppressive existence.

The first poet is William Blake. His wife is Kate, who begins the novel with a visit from her dead husband. Sometimes a ghost works well as a literary device but here it feels contrived. The visit prompts Kate to recall the events of her life. She spends much of that life resting in bed as she responds to domestic and external disasters with bouts of ill health. After Kate suffers a miscarriage, William takes on a domestic helper of ill-repute named Lizzie who inspires Kate's jealousy. William's poem about the pointless nature of Kate's jealousy does nothing to ward off her despair, but the context that the story provides to Blake's poem is a highlight of the novel; I wish there had been more of that. When William is accused of seditious utterings and placed on trial, Kate goes back to bed. Perhaps William would have been better suited for harlot Lizzie, who shocks Kate by advising her to perform the services depicted in the engravings that William has carefully hidden in his desk. That scene is another of the novel's highlights but it leads only to Kate's declaration that there are "two creatures living inside" her husband's brain, representatives of both heaven and hell. Chatting with his ghost gives her a clue about the direction in which his postmortem travel took him.

Quite suddenly, given the novel's languorous pace, William is old and then a ghost. The novel then moves to 1939 and to the difficult life of the wife of dissident Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who keeps her imprisoned husband's poems alive in her memory (the best touch in this section of the novel). The story backs up to 1935 as we see Mandelstam and his wife at the end of his exile (before he again offended Stalin), but we learn surprisingly little about Mandelstam's poetry, apart from its anti-Stalinist slant. We then flash to 1947, many years after Mandelstam's death in a prison camp, only to track Nadezhda Mandelstam's memories of Osip's arrest in 1938. The story resumes in 1952 as Nadezhda contemplates "the true nature of love" and recalls (with some resentment) the love poems that Osip wrote to his mistress. Then we're back in 1934, then 1950, then 1939, then 1956. Sometimes the "jump forward, flash back" structure to a novel works well but here I'm not sure what purpose it was meant to serve. This is the lengthiest section of the novel and, I thought, the least interesting.

The final section belongs to Lydia in Belfast, the wife of an imaginary poet named Don who has just died of a heart attack. Lydia has lived a financially insecure life because poetry doesn't sell and Don, while a notable poet, was overshadowed by his betters. Lydia spends the day after his funeral cataloging Don's failings as a husband, father, and poet. Eventually her daughters join her in that task. Don has left behind an unfinished book of poems from which occasional lines are quoted, but not enough for the reader to evaluate Don's style or ability to construct a complete poem. This seems like cheating to me, simply because it is easier to write fragments of poetry than it is to write poetry. Apart from the fact that Lydia stayed with her philandering husband out of respect for his poetry, we learn very little of interest about Lydia.

David Park's prose is lush but it is also dense. Poets express ideas with an economy of language; Park bombards the reader with words, which seems like the wrong way to write about poets. Park writes beautifully crafted sentences but a third of them could have been omitted without harming the novel. All three sections contain lengthy descriptions of brooding that struck me as tedious. Park made me understand the poets' wives, and that's too his credit, but he didn't make me empathize with their self-absorbed frustration.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

Published by Bloomsbury USA on November 13, 2012

A woman who should be content with her marriage instead feels insecure and makes needless drama for her husband. A man maps the course of his self-destructive downfall and then feels sorry for himself, in part because he has alienated his son. Given the chance to join her daughter's celebration of her forthcoming marriage, a mother instead spends her time moping and brooding and, yes, creating drama for her poor daughter. Awash in self-pity, these gloomy characters from Belfast visit Amsterdam on the same weekend. I'm surprised the city survives.

Marion and Richard are taking a break from the business they own to spend a weekend in Amsterdam. Marion is obsessively and irrationally annoyed by Richard, a form of madness to which she is driven by her feelings of inadequacy. She is convinced that Richard is having, or is preparing to have, an affair with one of their employees. Marion responds to her fears in a way that struck me as utterly ridiculous, the sort of contrivance that would appear only in a novel, never in real life.

Also visiting Amsterdam is Karen, who works as a cleaner in a Belfast retirement home. Karen's daughter Shannon is having a "hen party" in Amsterdam before her wedding, an event that requires Karen to dress as an Indian on the flight and during the first night of partying. Karen might be the most complex of the book's characters, both in her relationship with her daughter (the nature of which she can't quite grasp) and in her inability to understand her own behavior. Karen's bitterness leads her to make the sort of self-indulgent proclamation that has fueled many a soap opera: if Shannon's father is invited to Shannon's wedding, Karen refuses to attend.

Alan is an art professor who lost his marriage over a brief dalliance with a graduate student. Alan's wife Susan wants to move to Spain to open a guest-house (doesn't everyone?), but the weekend she schedules to look at a property is the weekend Alan plans to spend in Amsterdam, attending a Bob Dylan concert. Alan charitably agrees to take their troubled sixteen-year-old, Jack, with him, thus freeing Susan to spend the weekend in Spain with the man Alan and Jack both depise. Jack is moody and withdrawn; he treats his parents with scorn. The sections of the novel that feature Alan and Jack focus on Alan's frustration as he attempts to connect with his son. Although their story is familiar and not particularly insightful, it at least feels authentic.

The characters come within sight of each other at the airport and cross paths from time to time as the novel progresses. The pace slows after the characters arrive in Amsterdam, as if David Park needed to give each of them something to do but didn't quite know what. Alan repeatedly runs into Karen and seems interested in her when any rational man would flee from her at top speed. Their interaction is all that ties the three stories together, yet it doesn't amount to much.

The story is marred by page after page of mind-numbing exposition as Park tells us what his characters are thinking -- and they are always thinking, always about themselves. The characters are introspective to a stupefying degree. They come packaged with soap opera quality backstories and they all seem intent on injecting needless drama into their lives. Perhaps the characters accurately represent the self-absorption of a significant percentage of the population, but the novel has little to say about them that isn't obvious, which makes reading about them a tedious enterprise.

Having vented my frustration with the book's characters, I should note that there are some aspects of The Light of Amsterdam that I admired. Sullen and resentful, afraid of doing the slightest thing that might call attention to himself, Jack is a keen portrayal of a teenager who is the embodiment of angst. Park's prose is lucid and his dialog is realistic. In the end, however, the story seems pointless, amounting to unresolved slices of wearisome lives, and the abrupt ending is bizarre.

NOT RECOMMENDED