Book Review : A Story That Gets Lost in the Telling

The Part of Fortune by Laurel Goldman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $15.95)

Liking Laurel Goldman is easy. She has a funny, sometimes cynical way with aphorisms, and she understands the illusions of love.

When one of her characters says, “How do you know I never married? I could be divorced,” another character responds, “You’ve got a look on your face. Hopeful. A little dumb. That goes away with marriage.”

Hope, Goldman often suggests, may be a misplaced emotion. “I don’t like to hope for what can’t be,” one of the tougher women of this novel says, “I’d rather imagine what might be.” “Hope’s a thief,” a man tells his sister. “It’ll rob you blind.”

Reality, however, is always outdoors and right around the corner in “The Part of Fortune,” where remembering the past and imagining the present help to keep a home of old folks alive down South. Clara visits them with stories, making a life out of memory and making things up. Her own father was a storyteller in his time, having once said he didn’t lie, he merely imagined truth: “You got to put in a lot of details.”

Another Condo Complex

The threatening reality is real estate development. The Green Mansions Home for the Elderly has been sold to developers who want to turn the property into another condominium complex. The story, such as it is between flashbacks and fantasies, is about how the survivors try to make room for themselves while the bulldozers are already on the turf, beginning to shove them out of shelter. At ground level, the book is a reminder that one person’s real estate improvement is another person’s eviction.

At a loftier level, the book is about shelter from within. Goldman’s first novel, “Sounding the Territory,” had a crowd of zanies fleeing reality by bus. This time, the inmates put aside their problems in rides of recollection, again creating a kind of Grand Hotel or Bridge of San Luis Rey to explore human differences set in a human commons.

The characters do come alive: Honora, the staunch black director who tries to find new places for her old charges; Johanna, another frequent visitor, who once decided not to marry because, that way, “no one gets hurt”; Hannah, Johanna’s grandmother, who stopped speaking voluntarily because she had decided to die; David, who shaves and showers to maintain dignity.

There are peculiar parallels between Clara and Johanna, each of them having discovered ways to live alone by calling on other people. The trouble is blur, an uncertainty about where the edges--of memory and fantasy and flashback--begin. Goldman uses italics to separate Clara stories from Clara realities, but then, in an italicized story about Johanna, Johanna has a dream, setting up a fantasy within a fantasy. Blur is legitimate in all lives, the confusion between what we remember happened and what really happened, between wishing and waking. But even sympathetic readers resent getting lost along the way, trying to sort out imagined characters imagining other characters’ imaginations.

Goldman has created several inventive flower arrangements, of lives once in bloom now dried, of lives wilting and lives still to be ordered. Her sense of human continuity and shared space is as keen as her sense of mordant humor, always mixed with mercy. But her structure seems uncertain.