Phillip Lopate’s two novellas about marriage in his book Two Marriages (published in 2008) read like writing group exercises gone bad. Both are facile and trivial and uninspired.
The first, “The Stoic’s Marriage”, uses the narrator’s diary (I can just imagine the writing instructor saying: “today we’ll tell a story using diary entries”) to tell us the pathetic story of a “middle aged fart” (an incredibly accurate insult lodged at the narrator) who marries a young Filipino nurse. Everything in this novella is either unbelievable or offensive , and too often, both. There are no flashes of humor to lighten the load of reading, there is no new insight offered into the too-well recorded phenomenon of supposedly intelligent older men going for younger, less educated women. Lopate has his narrator accuse himself often of laziness (maybe he is but his character is so flatly drawn by Lopate that we only know he is lazy because he calls himself so); but Lopate is the truly lazy one, rattling off words to tell a linear and boring tale told many times before. Lopate is lazy in his use of clichés and has his poor narrator apologize for all the clichés: forget the apology and instead give me some genuine writing! Lopate is lazy ( and so predictable) in his treatment of Filipinos and Filipino culture, of women in general, of Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn, of academics, and of marriage. Was this novella supposed to be a farce? Only it wasn’t funny. And why the allusions to Unamumo, and to Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius? I’ve read Unamumo and he has nothing to do with what Lopate presents here. The Stoics are purportedly the reason why the poor narrator is in the pickle he’s in but guess what? I could have grabbed quotes from the Epicureans or the Nihilists or the Existentialists (much as Lopate must have gone to “Idiot’s Guide to Best Quotations from the Stoics” to grab his) and they could have worked too; the characters here are so flat, any philosophy could be rolled over them. It was not stoicism that made me finish reading “The Stoic’s Marriage, it was self-flagellating masochism.
In Lopate’s second novella, “Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage” (come on, Lopate, choose one title, please), he followed the writing maxim, “write what you know” but he forgot everything about making it interesting and alive. For a story to move there must be a threat, an action, the protagonists working for or against that action: in other words, something must happen, and nothing does here. Or maybe I was sleeping when it happened, Lopate’s prose can result in snoozing. When I woke up a pseudo-crisis was splattered across the page but I didn’t care, nor did I care how it was resolved.
Lopate’s characters are flat: we are given names, some physical attributes, and then a few inane descriptions like “smiled mysteriously” or “sat silent, inscrutable” or “with a dazzlingly persuasive smile.” All the characters speak the same way, as if all words were coming from the same mouth, formed by the same brain, but it is not a real brain: it is a badly imagined brain spouting unrealistic dialog. Lopate switches point of view awkwardly and unsuccessfully, and again all the points of view sound the same, the reminiscences of someone much older than anyone in the story. It’s very weird how often a character refers to things happening long ago, and things being different back then, when we are only talking about twenty years ago at most. Maybe the story would have worked better being told from the husband or the wife’s point of view, but I doubt it. There is nothing in this story worth telling.
