In Judith Kitchen’s The House on Eccles Road, the references to James Joyce’s Ulysses are clear: the address, number 7, on Eccles; Molly and Leo Bluhm (Bloom); a child of their own who has died and the birth of another couple’s child;  the disconnect between Molly and Leo; Molly is a singer and has an admirer in a fellow performer; Leo is enthralled with a Stephen, whom he knows to be his intellectual superior; and the entire novel takes place during the hours of the day of June 16th, which is the wedding anniversary of Joyce’s Leo and Molly (sixteen years) and Kitchen’s Leo and Molly (thirteen years).

But the most salient similarity between Kitchen and Joyce is the manner in which the day unfolds: largely through the internal and very private narratives of the main characters (as well as the supporting characters).  The narratives read like our own thoughts,  ideas connecting to ideas and sparking other ideas and everything going off this way and that way but the thoughts really do make sense, in the larger picture of everything that we have thought before.  We do not think in a vacuum and we don’t explain to ourselves what the connections are between our thoughts.  And so it is with these narratives and yet the internal thoughts of Leo and Molly and the other characters make sense to us, even though we are only given one day with these people.  In Ulysses, it is Leo’s voice we hear most, and in Kitchen’s novel, it is Molly’s. Ulysses ends with an intense and rambling monologue by Molly; The House on Eccles Road ends with an intense but less rambling (and much, much shorter) monologue by Leo.  But enough back and forthing between the two.  Yesterday I read The House on Eccles Street and I liked it very much, largely because of Kitchen’s slow and steady creation of Molly through her own thoughts and through the thoughts of others about her.  She is a woman who has suffered so much and is now on the mend.

Kitchen’s Molly blooms for us (no pun intended) during the course of the novel and  of the day.  In the first chapters of the book, taking place in the morning of June 16, Molly is a woman who appears to be placid, passive, fragile, a woman treading water in the drowning pool of her life (drowning is a big theme in the novel).  She waves good-bye to her husband as he drives off to work.  He barely notices; he has forgotten the importance of the date and is deep into his own day, his own thoughts, his own plans.  Molly wants their plans to intertwine, as she wants their lives to intertwine.  The death of their child eight years ago has come between them and there is no physical bond left, and very little emotional meeting between the two.

Molly’s chance encounter with a fellow performer and the early labor of a pregnant neighbor start her on a course towards living again.  But through her thoughts we know this is not a sudden movement to join the coursing of life, it is the result of years and years of her thinking herself through her past, making her internal space safe again after suffering so much.   At first she just follows the course set in motion by her agreement to audition again for a performance and to babysit the neighbor’s children; she is moving like a stick pushed along by the rhythm of a stream.  But then she begins to paddle, and she paddles surely, and with growing strength and conviction.  I loved her as she first started to feel herself pulled by the eddying stream and I grew to admire her as she sallied forth, taking along with her the deepness and clarity in thinking that she achieved through her eight years of mourning.  She is not rejecting the past but using it now to move forward, move on, and open herself up to life.  She took her own time to grieve and now has come back into living, nudged by just that bit of serendipity — a sudden encounter, an unexpected chance — to make her turn upwards and towards the light playing on the water and away from the gloom lurking beneath.

The question of how to go on when a grief is so overwhelming and sorrow so horribly heavy has no single answer. Each person has to reach that place of taking the grief and the sorrow into their lives and not dying, literally or figuratively, from it.  Molly and Leo are not together in dealing with the death of their son; they are very separate, uncommunicative, disconnected.  Molly comes to her place not by accepting the death of their son but by incorporating the fact of it into her life very slowly and through thoughts that we know have been working through her brain for years and years.  We are witness to the coalescing of these thoughts into a space within Molly that allows her to breathe again.  She feels comfort and also motion, motion forward in life: she is no longer waiting, as she has waited for so much, for so long (even before her son died).  But Molly also knows that “the body could never forget its trials.  Its great wrenching sobs that echoed in the empty house with nowhere to go, nothing to assuage them.“  Grief is a memory that can be re-awoken in an instance, a tearing of the heart that can never be fully mended.  She moves forward carrying her memories, less afraid of them now than before.

Leo appears throughout the novel to be self-involved and oblivious to the pain he is exacerbating for his wife, instead of relieving.  But then at the end of the novel he is given his monologue, his time to slow down and think (he has been running running running through the novel and through the years while Molly has been taking things slowly).  His thoughts, paced now and focused, are stark; they are a complete admission of his greatest fears, his love for his wife, and his constant ache for his son. The monologue is written as Joyce wrote his monologue for Molly Bloom in Ulysses, with no punctuation, just thoughts overlapping and growing and turning and reaching such a space of clarity and power that I cried for Leo, a man I had been sneering at only pages earlier.

There is a point in The House on Eccles Road when Molly realizes just how fleeting those moments are when we recognize what we have before us, before what is before us fades to what is behind us.  She is remembering a picnic with her son and stepdaughter and Leo and how she wanted the stepdaughter to enjoy her son “even for a minute because he was here and wasn’t going to go away and it was time to become at least the semblance of a family.”  But “he had gone away.  Nothing was permanent.  But the moment [of remembering] made her pause, because we forget that so easily, forget that what we know today may be gone tomorrow, forget to look it and savor it and hold it in our laps.  Tomorrow, we say, without thinking that tomorrow may not come.  And that was the way it had to be, because otherwise we couldn’t go on living, could we, not with all that responsibility clamping down like a jaw.“  That realization seems almost trite at first — the passage of time and how we never know what we have until it is gone — but then we connect her realization to her years of thinking about these things and the words become deeper, a flag waving to say: see what is before you, in full recognition!  The words remind me of a wonderful poem by Adrienne Rich, “Stepping Backward”, and I will quote only a part of it but you really should read the entire poem, the words are words to live by.  And you should really read this wonderful book, The House on Eccles Road.

From “Stepping Backward”, by Adrienne Rich:

“Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.“