We Came Along with a Hammer

Romantic comedies: Cliches. Ridden with them. Can’t seem to be made without them, it’s built into the DNA. For instance, the heroine’s always hooked up with this straight-laced guy who seems perfect on the surface, but she is secretly or not so secretly tempted by the exasperating, charming, cute slacker hero, and eventually Mr. Straight Arrow reveals himself to be a twerp in some fashion and she runs off with the unsuitable sensitive boy, who may not have a steady paycheck but does possess a heart full of love, etc. That’s nearly always the set up: Cary Grant v. Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. Ben Stiller v. Ethan Hawke in Singles. Mikahil Barishnikov v. Mr. Big in Sex and the City. Etc. I could go on, you could go on. The movie industry has certainly gone on and on and on. Maybe I’m being unfair; maybe it’s just the rules of the road for romance, period, the tragic as well as the humorous: Tristan and Isolde. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Have you ever longed to see a version in which the heroine sensibly sticks with her solid Straight Arrow, where she regretfully doesn’t cheat on her husband but gently shows her potential lover the door, virtue intact, where late in life she absolutely does not get a wild hair and lit off for the territories, an equally gray old roué by her finally-liberated side?

Yeah, me neither.

Yet that, dear readers, is precisely what Years of Grace is the story of. A sensible woman acting sensibly. A woman who looks into the face of her deepest temptation and says, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly hurt my family like that.” Who comes to value companionship, steadiness and probity over passion.

Possibly someone could make an interesting book out of this. But Barnes gave it a hell of a go — Jane is prone to sympathy, capable of subtlety — and she just doesn’t bring it off. For me it was the letter from Andre — when Jane rejects it so soundly, deciding that their feelings were only puppy love after all, I realized that we were dealing with a woman who would never stray. And so there is no tension to her temptations.

It’s interesting to compare this with the Age of Innocence. That was another book where if you’d grabbed my arm as I was about to flip the first page and asked me to give my best guess as to its plot and its outcome, I think I could have come fairly close. Given a bare familiarity with its characters and setting, Newland’s cowardice was always a safe bet. But you don’t feel safe reading Wharton. You feel tortured, tempted, twisted, agonized, just as the characters do. You will then to be better than their natures—for that’s another important difference between Barnes and Wharton, Wharton clearly sees Newland’s cowardice as cowardice. Or at least, she sees his limits as limits, flaws that will forever bar him from true happiness. Whereas Barnes seems to see Jane’s compromises as acceptable, admirable; the passions she rejects flawed, the comforts she clings to a worthy reward. Let’s not forget the title, after all.

Yet in setting up the comparison of Jane’s choices with those of her children — who do seek personal happiness and fulfillment, even at the risk of estrangement from their family and class — Barnes leaves the ultimate outcome of those choices somewhat ambiguous. The kids seem happy for now, but Jane frets over whether they’ll stay that way, and the book doesn’t seem to offer a solid hint. Instead, she seems interested in spotlighting these differences mostly as illustrations of the changing tenor of the times. Jane, child of the 1890s, lives by one code; her flapper kids another. Barnes seems softhearted and nostalgic about Jane’s Victorian era, but does not quite condemn modern mores (particularly as they relate to her Jane’s younger kids, of which more anon). As a reader, I certainly wasn’t longing for a Sinclair Lewis-style broadside against the sclerosis of the upper classes, but Barnes’ periwinkle-to-dove moral spectrum leaves the book a muddle, with nothing much either to root for or to mourn. I admit I found myself skimming in the later sections, just to get the thing dusted, as I’d no longer any stake in learning the outcome. (Yes, she does see Andre one more time. No, it’s not worth waiting for.)

This is not to say that Barnes ever lost me, suspension-of-disbelief-wise; I bought Years, and Jane, till the end. I just wasn’t invested in her. This dishwater rinse of realism seems to be something we’ll seeing a lot of in the ’30s — no wonder Gone With the Wind was so popular.