The last two books I read before Pitch Dark were both narratively-straightforward romances—very different in style and from very different times, but they were both the kind of book where the central couple gets a happily-ever-after ending and the reader gets warm and fuzzy feelings. Pitch Dark is not that kind of book at all. Its narrator has been having a multi-year affair with a married man; the affair is ending, or has ended. We don’t really get the story of the affair but we get a sense of how it feels, to the narrator, to be the one who isn’t the wife, the one who spends holidays alone, the one who is tired of how her lover consumes her thoughts, the one who is thinking of “all the little steps and phases and maneuvers, stratagems, of trying to leave him now, without breaking my own heart, or maybe his, or scaring myself to death, or bounding back.”
The narrator thinks maybe travel is the thing: some time alone, somewhere by the sea. Orcas Island, or Ireland, or, as it turns out, both. But a change of scenery doesn’t always change one’s mental scenery, and in Ireland, in particular, the narrator has a weird time. She’s staying at a big old house that belongs to an ambassador she knows; no one on the house’s staff is particularly friendly or helpful; everything is a bit off.
Throughout the book there are bits of other stories and other moments, some repeated and elaborated, others not. I liked a lot of these fragments and vignettes, especially the ones with some humor. There’s this, about a literature class the narrator took in grad school: “Fairly late in the semester, when we were asked what our papers were going to be about, this young man said he wanted to write about the sound of corpses floating through literature. Oh, the professor said with some enthusiasm, after just a moment’s hesitation, you mean Ophelia. No, the young man replied, I want the sound of the sea.” Or this, from just after a story about a political figure who said “Clamsmen” instead of “Klansmen”: “I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism.”
I liked the last section of the book a lot, the way the narrator talks about law and the whole thing of legal precedent, and how in a trial, both lawyers are generally making the argument that the case before the court now is like some other case (and therefore should be decided in the same way), and how that’s different from fiction, where writers are often telling readers that this story is a new one, different from the rest (though of course there are literary precedents, too). But then what about the stories we tell about our own lives, to ourselves or to others? Earlier in the book there’s this: “Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else.”
I’m glad to have read Pitch Dark at last, having been meaning to read it for, um, ten years now. I found the actual reading experience alternately a delight and a slog, but I also find myself, two days after having finished the book, thinking about it a bunch, and wondering if I’ll re-read it in the future.
Leave a Reply