Mix Angst, Avoidance, a Dash of Adultery and Serve With Pasta

Henry, a middle-aged literature professor whose career is stagnant and marriage cold, secludes himself in a Vermont cabin to write a book that will restart him. Instead, he cooks, putters, gardens and gets entangled with a younger neighbor who is spending the summer nearby.

The cabin belongs to his recently widowed sister-in-law, Mary. Mooching about the place--anything rather than work on the book--Henry finds a journal in the computer that belonged to Mary’s late husband, Fitz. Also a professor--a biologist--also middle-aged, also stuck in his career and a chilled-out marriage, Fitz was also attempting a book and cooked and gardened to evade it. He too had been involved with the neighbor.

Using a rigorously parallel structure--Henry narrates his own story and reproduces Fitz’s journal--”This Time Last Year” portrays the two men’s marriages, children and states of vital disconnection. It is the disconnection of two privileged intellectuals, living comfortably and losing touch with the painful demands of life, death and human responsibility.

Like fat-clogged arteries, the lives of Henry and Fitz have silted up with evasions and expedients. Moral and emotional gangrene has set in. Fitz, a bisexual, brought only part of himself to his marriage and work and starved them both. Henry, having held himself partly away from a daughter’s long dying from cancer, is undermined by unresolved mourning. It keeps morbidly alive a link with the daughter’s mother, his first wife, and hollows out his relations with his second wife, Elizabeth.

The novel’s dramatic pivot is the symmetry between Henry and Fitz, less fearful than inert, unfortunately. Author Douglas Hobbie has tried for more than a novel of aging yuppie angst, but he has only achieved a little more.

Besides a familiar melange of educated scruple, intellectual rootlessness, sophisticated marital torture, adulterous flickerings, grown-children problems, and lashings of pasta, salads, fresh herbs, salmon and chicken breasts (not one pork chop), there is a moral. We have lost touch with the meaning of death and suffering; we blot them out, and by doing so, we are blotted out.

True enough, possibly; the trouble is that where “This Time Last Year” is not bland, it is didactic; a cautionary tale for the most part, with a note of hopeful uplift at the end (too late to help Henry, though, let alone Fitz).

Partway through, for example, Fitz’s stepchildren and a friend arrive to conduct a nighttime ceremony in his memory. They cook his favorite dishes and sing his favorite songs around a bonfire. The stepson, an extremist with problems of his own, plunges a metal bar in the flames and claps it to his arm: a carnal tribute and lament to death. Sipping malt indoors, Henry thinks purgation and regrets his failure to accompany his daughter’s corpse to the crematory.

There are other heavily denotative events. Groping his way out to life, Henry builds a stone wall; later he deletes the 60 pages he had managed to write of his book. It is liberation by keystroke, an up-to-date though not quite convincing notion, especially since Hobbie has made Henry’s book a worn-out sitting duck: still another study of Whitman, Melville and Dickinson.

The cloudy appearances of Helen, the young neighbor, do not help matters. She has had cancer and lacks a breast. The scar, which Fitz caresses--a gesture that passionately attaches her to him--seems intended to link sex with the deeper seriousness of life and death, but it never gets past symbol. Otherwise Helen’s fuzzy pursuit of Fitz, and the even fuzzier erotic charge between her and Henry, are little more than protracted foreplay, fictional as well as sexual.

The book comes to genuine life at one point. While Henry is failing to find himself by not getting his book written, Elizabeth is failing to find herself by traveling in England. (The descriptive passages are as flat as guidebooks.) When she returns, there is a brilliantly painful exchange of telephone talks and messages as to whether she should come up to Vermont to join Henry. They long for each other; they cannot express it.

It is a vivid drama of marital miscommunication. The rest of the dialogue, though, as well as Fitz’s and Henry’s reflections, are sheer clogged talkiness. It is contemporary talk, in which the talkers are unfailingly considerate, sensitive and insightful, and excruciatingly dull. They reflect unremittingly about their feelings.

In a novel, feelings are condiments to the main course: the transactions of character, plot and language. Catsup is not a meal.