Exultation Over the Beauty of Life Falls Too Close to Banality

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES

A Novel

By Laura Kasischke

Harcourt

288 pages, $24

*

Carol Kennicott chafed at the conventionality of “Main Street.” Nora couldn’t wait to leave “A Doll’s House.” Jack Kerouac sought a more authentic reality “On the Road” just as, a century earlier, Richard Henry Dana ran off to sea to spend “Two Years Before the Mast.” While the questing heroes and heroines of previous eras strove to burst through the dullness and limitations of mundane existence to find something finer, nobler or merely more exciting, a surprising number of fiction writers nowadays have been singing the praises of ordinary life, which has certainly come to seem more precious than ever in light of the recent terrorist attacks.

This attachment to the quotidian was evident even before Sept. 11, however. Already, in the wake of the excesses and disappointments stemming from the sexual revolution, the drug culture and the pursuit of extremes, a nostalgia for normality was seeping in. The world of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” was making a comeback.

“The Life Before Her Eyes” belongs to Diana McFee. It seems, for the most part, an ordinary enough life, but as Diana sees it, it is nothing short of a continual miracle. In the first few pages of this novel by Michigan-based writer Laura Kasischke, teenage Diana and her best friend, Maureen, are confronted by a deranged classmate with a gun who asks them to choose which of them he should kill. The rest of the book moves back and forth in time, alternating between scenes from Diana’s youth and scenes from her life as a 40-year-old wife and mother. It’s not absolutely clear whether the scenes from her later life are real or simply what she imagines as her future in the desperate moment when she is forced to contemplate the possibility of her death. Intentional or not, the ambiguity in this case is not particularly fruitful.

Unlike many people, Diana is acutely aware of the value of her life, of the world around her and of her individual human consciousness. No one could accuse her of taking the smallest detail of the material world for granted: “She loved the sun on the side of her face, the smell of warm vinyl filling the minivan. She loved being herself in her forty-year-old body ... being a wife, a mother

For Diana, the past is eminently erasable: “The time period in which she’d been a teenager had led to indulgences and excesses no other generation had ever known, and now millions of those teenage girls were soccer moms. Diana had seen those soccer moms when they were teenagers--when they’d been promiscuous, tattooed, pierced in intimate places. She couldn’t be the only one who’d grown up and become a mother and found herself to be a complete stranger to the girl she’d been--but haunted. Definitely haunted. That girl she’d been was her now, although the woman she’d become wouldn’t have trusted that girl with her wedding china, with her car keys, let alone her home, her child, her life.”

Not only does Diana’s past include several affairs and an abortion while still in high school. When cornered by their gun-toting classmate, she begged him, “Kill her, not me,” even after her friend Maureen gallantly said, “If you’re going to kill one of us, kill me.”

Ironically, Diana’s husband, a philosophy professor, is writing a lecture on the theme “Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.” Diana’s conscience, however, only makes the occasional cameo appearance: When a dim memory of the traumatic event surfaces or when she sees a pretty student walking with her husband and fears he may leave her for a younger woman, just as years before he left his previous wife for Diana.

It’s one thing that Kasischke’s protagonist is not tormented horribly by guilt: After all, she didn’t fire the gun, nor can any living creature really be blamed for clinging to its life. It’s quite another, however, that she is generally rather self-centered and shallow--apart from her ability to cherish all the moments of her unexceptional small-town life.

For Kasischke, the author of two previous novels and three poetry collections, her heroine’s rapt attentiveness to life provides the opportunity for poetic writing, but what we all too often get is closer to banality. Here is Diana watching as her husband and small daughter share a hug: “It was a picture of perfect father-daughter familiarity. Family, Diana thought as she stood and watched their embrace. Her daughter’s small arms were flung around his neck. His eyes were closed. A crack of light broke through the green leafiness of their front yard, and it shone all over the two of them.”

Kasischke’s attempts to get us to really see the beauty of ordinary life fall flat after a while: Her writing becomes strained and the people, places and things it describes and celebrates are too generic to evoke genuine emotion. “The Life Before Her Eyes” is a novel that takes on deep matters of life and death; conscience and consciousness; family, love and friendship; but in the end, it only scratches the surfaces.