Book Review : Starting at End of a Broken Marriage

The Last to Go: A Family Chronicle by Rand Richards Cooper (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $16.95, 279 pages)

Rand Richards Cooper has taken the sag out of the family saga by limiting himself to two generations and an easily manageable 30-year time span. Reading this lean and elegant contemporary novel, you may wonder how you ever had the patience for its ponderous stylistic predecessors, where nothing much happened between the swashbuckling ancestors and their dissolute descendants. The middle generations were always a bore; prospering, marrying and dithering over their wills for 300 pages.

Physical Detritus

How much more sensible to begin at the end of the story, as Mary Ellen Slattery is rummaging through the physical and emotional detritus of her 25-year marriage to Daniel, packing up the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys for the Salvation Army, rolling up the Oriental scatter rugs and taking down the Constable and Brueghel prints; consigning the brocade settee and “the armoire resembling nothing so much as an ogre with rickets” to permanent oblivion in the basement, where it won’t clash with her chaste Scandinavian decor and her new status as Dr. Slattery’s former wife.

The Mexican sombrero from Nogales, saved from some 1950s masquerade; the reels of home movies, made on an idyllic Canadian vacation, and on the cellar walls, the scores of 10-year old Ping-Pong matches between father and son, can’t be disposed of so easily.

The memories flood back, heightened by her son, Toby’s, return from college; a Halloween visit neatly timed to coincide with Mary Ellen’s exorcism of the ghosts and goblins of her marriage.

Transported back in time by the sight of these chattels, we’re not surprised to be present at Dan Slattery’s first date with Mary Ellen Matthews, hearing about the evening in the young and eager voices of the principals themselves. By the next chapter, they’ve already been married long enough for Dan to have spent a few years after medical school working as a doctor among the Navajos in Arizona; for the children Lydia and Toby to have been born and a Dalmatian puppy acquired.

Start a Real Life

The family is on its way back east to start real life in Connecticut where Dan has a residency in neurosurgery. They move into a decaying apartment near the university, acquire a circle of friends in similar circumstances (the Nogales sombrero fits into this era) and the long honeymoon is finally over. A third baby arrives, the practice flourishes, and now when the Slatterys go skiing, it’s just Dan, the two older children, and an old friend whose wife also stayed home.

“Tell me something,” the friend says, “You ever wake up in the morning, glance over there at the other side of the bed, and find yourself taking a good long look?” Until that moment in an Aspen bar, with the children sound asleep in the condo and the night still young, Dan had never given the matter a thought.

In subsequent chapters, we learn a bit about the working life of a neurosurgeon, which Dan dismisses as “just glorified plumbing. I could teach you to do it,” until one day, he realizes that he’s told the joke so often that it isn’t a joke anymore, but an attitude.

Full Flower

A section called “The Yardman” provides an oblique but piercing look at the Slatterys in the full flower of mid-life prosperity. In the following chapter, the youngest child, Sharon, has become a highly articulate and precocious adolescent managing her first difficult relationship with an unsuitable boy, a segment that demonstrates how subtly and intricately the seemingly free-standing parts of this novel are connected to one another; the passage of time marked seamlessly, events fused by internal momentum rather than by obvious devices of plot.

Young Adults

At first seen directly, the Slattery’s later lives are perceived by the young adults their children have become, just as we would observe the family as neighbors, colleagues and friends of both generations. Cooper provides all the essential evidence, but we draw the conclusions and fill in the gaps.

Though there are various voices here, the son, Toby, emerges as the unifying force; the ironic and affectionate product of his own particular upbringing and a spokesman for countless others who grew up just as determined not to relive their parents’ lives.