Tale of Love and Worry Set Amid the Troubled Days of ’68

It is the summer of 1968: “the last summer of ... dresses in those colors just short of gumdrop in shade, closer perhaps to Necco Wafers or tiny Valentine candy hearts: pink, green, lavender, turquoise ... yellow.” It is also the summer of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and brutal violence against protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago. And it is the summer when William Lowry and Emily Byrne, the teenage protagonists of Robert Clark’s novel, fall in love.

Their romance begins mildly and conventionally enough: He takes her to a coffeehouse where they listen to folk music. But their combined innocence, idealism and naivete lead them to imagine they can start a new life by running off to the northern woods, far from the general evils of society and, in William’s case, the specific threat of having to go to college or be drafted into the military.

“Love Among the Ruins” is Clark’s third novel and, like its predecessors “In the Deep Midwinter” and “Mr. White’s Confession,” takes place in Minnesota. Once again, Clark is concerned with evoking the special landscape, atmosphere and mind-set he associates with this region.

It is evident even in the folk music that William and Emily hear at the coffee house: “The music ... had a kind of melancholy air that reflected the place they lived in, or perhaps a place a little to the north of it. It was music ... that evoked refrigerators and wringer washing machines sitting derelict in fields ... things forsaken and unseen, yet achingly real .... a particularly northern view of things

William’s mother, Jane, a divorcee, is deeply involved in the antiwar movement but not fully aware of the effect that the political situation is having on her impressionable son. Shocked and angered as she is by what is going on in the country, she has no idea that William, his head full of half-digested notions, is terrified of being drafted, equally unhappy at the prospect of going to college and vaguely convinced that America is becoming an unlivable police state.

Emily’s parents, Edward and Virginia, are good Catholics: The more devout Virginia is a homebody, while Edward is a pharmaceutical salesman. Emily herself is religious, not in the sense of being priggish or holier-than-thou, but in the sense of having a reverence for life and love.

Clark explores the emotions, actions and consciences of all five characters, including the closeness that develops between William’s mother and Emily’s father in the months when both families are trying to cope with the immense anxiety of not knowing where their children are.

Perhaps the best thing about this novel is Clark’s ability to depict the many little shifts in perception and feeling that his characters undergo.

He portrays with precision and insight how a parent may feel on seeing condoms in a child’s room, or how a young girl may feel on being seen naked by her boyfriend for the first time.

More problematic is the narrative voice that Clark has adopted: elegiac, omniscient, sententious, sometimes almost preachy. Undoubtedly, this voice lends shading, depth and tone to the story: “Jane is, of course, no stranger to anxiety--the Age of Anxiety, dating from around August 1945, is twenty-three years old this very month--and her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its seas and their tides. But this is worry, and it is a little different from anxiety .... it arrives unannounced, without anxiety’s harbingers, dread and foreboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry simply turns up on the doorstep, the overbearing, passive-aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he ‘won’t be any trouble’ even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end ... “

But other of Clark’s musings are almost as vague and mushy-headed as the teenage William’s notions of politics and philosophy.

Considered in the context of his previous two novels, “Love Among the Ruins” can be seen as an attempt to distill something essential about the year 1968, as “In the Deep Midwinter” did for 1950 to ’51 and “Mr. White’s Confession” for 1939. But the characters are less interesting and the narrative voice less convincing, perhaps because it is too busy telling us what to think of the characters.

Clark also strains to incorporate chunks of Roman Catholic dogma in a manner that is anything but subtle. Yet, despite its flaws, “Love Among the Ruins” is a memorable novel: sharply observed and keenly felt.

Clark has an intuitive understanding of how to pace the story he tells, and the events he describes so movingly unfold with the calm, grave inevitability of tragedy.