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Published: May 15, 2011
Category: Fiction
Mitch Daniels, Republican governor of Indiana, might run for President.
What’s holding him back?
It’s not that he would surely be asked why he now cares so much about cutting the national debt when, between 2001 and 2003, he was George Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and a federal budget surplus of $236 billion turned into a $400 billion deficit.
It’s his unusual marital history.
In the 1990s, his wife Cheri divorced him, married another man and moved to California --- leaving four young daughters behind. Three years later, divorced again, she remarried Daniels.
Gov. and Mrs. Daniels have never spoken of this period, and I’ve learned enough about marriage not to speculate about other couples. But books and films suggest how wrenching it can be for a mother to leave her kids. Like, say, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which starred Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman. As you’ll recall, the wife wins custody in the divorce. But on the day she comes to pick up her son…. well, watch:
As it happens, Tsipi Keller --- the acute translator and author of Jackpot --- had just recommended a novel about almost this exact character: a woman who walks out on her husband and their six- and four-year-old daughters. And I’d say it’s better for being written by a woman ---- except that the author of “The Lost Daughter” is Elena Ferrante, a much-admired Italian novelist who writes under a pseudonym and is sometimes said to be a man.
It’s a simple story, told by the main character. Leda is 47, divorced, an academic, mother of daughters who are now in their 20s and live in Canada with their father. She rents an apartment for a month in an Italian beach resort. She has no lover, she’s completely alone. And so she falls into the habit of going to the same stretch of beach every day.
You know how it is when you’re a stranger in a strange town? You make up stories about the people you see. Leda does this with a woman and her child who also spend their days at the beach. They’re lined up like planets --- Leda, the “bad” mother, then the mother who “seemed to have no desire for anything but her child,” and then the little girl, so secure in her mother’s love that she gives all her attention to an old doll.
One day, the little girl gets lost. Leda --- who, as we know, long ago, lost her connection to her own kids --- finds her. And now the plot starts to circle itself, and tighten, forcing Leda to remember more of her own story. (To buy the book from Amazon, click here.)
On page two, Leda says that “the hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.” For her, that’s abandoning her daughters, all those years ago. Her first explanation, to the mother on the beach: “Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”
Believe that at your peril. There’s much more. But what’s compelling is how little it takes to lose your bearings --- a small burst of attention, modest encouragement, a bout of illicit sex. The next thing you know, you’re a stranger to yourself, you’re a foreigner in your own body. The scene when Leda leaves her kids --- it’s not wrenching like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” it’s one matter-of-fact paragraph. In its way, that’s more wrenching.
Which is not to say that this is a story by a woman who can do nothing but watch and think. Something happens midway through. It’s simple, trivial, blatantly symbolic --- it’s so obvious you grimace. Why is that? Because you haven’t abandoned a child. And you never would.
So it is the astonishing triumph of this simple, short (125 page) novel that, slowly, you come to identify with a woman who has done the unthinkable. And, in the aftermath, you feel a bit unhinged.
“I had left my husband and my daughters at a moment when I was sure I had the right, was in the right,” Leda says near the end of the novel. And as if you’ve been in the sun at the beach all day and have just returned to the shade and a breeze and a cool drink, you blink --- because you’re just not sure if that would be your final answer. And, if it would be, what that says about you.
What a beautiful, disturbing, thought-provoking book.