This novel is innocently beautiful. It explores the basic feelings of human nature in their most honest form. It starts with overall feelings of negativity which mask the basic human emotion of fear. This middle aged father expresses his resentment over living in a beautiful place, Hawaii, while his wife is lying in a cold hospital bed in a coma after suffering from a boating accident. He mentions how people always assume that the people who live in Hawaii should always be happy, because after all, they're in paradise. His response to these assumptions is fuck paradise. A person isn't "lucky" to live in paradise, because in all seriousness they're still just living, and living is hard.
Matt has two daughters, Alex and Scottie. Scottie is still a "baby" but she's rather messed up. She doesn't know how to react to things so she emulates the actions of her father, or her sister, or her sister's maybe-maybe-not boyfriend. She refuses to talk to her comatose mother, refuses to believe that there's any possibility in her dying, and in order to deal with her feelings she slams her hands down on the spikes of sea urchins, or swims with gigantic colonies of Portuguese Man-Of-Wars. She manipulates boys into peeing on her wounds, she tries to make others feel just as uncomfortable or vulnerable as she feels watching her "sleeping" mother fade away.
Alex gets picked up by Matt and Scottie from her boarding school where she was sent away for being drinking and doing drugs. Really, Alex is unconsciously emulating her mother - her crazy, alcoholic mother who parties it up and who everyone loves. Alex takes on a mother role in the book, trying to help her dad become a dad and get Scottie on some sort of path of normalcy.
This book is filled with dark humor and attempts at dodging the grief that comes with losing someone you love. The book is also filled with the question of what to do when the worst you could imagine is revealed to be true. Matt King has the idea that his wife is cheating on him since the start of the book, and soon comes to find out that his paranoid fears are in all actuality true. So he goes on a journey - a journey to become a real father to his two girls, to forgive his wife, to open himself up, and to find the man that his wife loved, so that he can say goodbye to her. On the family's way to find the man who his wife cheated on him with, Matt once again lets his annoyance come to the surface. At the airport, Matt remarks that the security line is longer than it should be, but most of the people still seem content, which is irritating. "There's nothing worse than being angry and seeing tranquil faces all around you." Then Alex remarks that security, who is checking every person's bags, even though they're just hopping islands, are doing this to just feel like real security, which isn't something to aspire to. Matt reflects that "thank God my daughter isn't a happy person."
I can identify with this invasive pessimism. The irritation at other people's happiness, and the solidarity one can find with other miserable people. This book starts dark and goes to the light. It's like knowing your fate, and just trying to get there in the least painful way possible, and then finding yourself along the way. Like slowly walking in to the ocean, knowing you will drown. You struggle, until you just give up and find some sort of morbid peace in the knowledge that eventually you will sink, and then float up again.
The end of this novel made me cry. Not overflowing sobbing tears, but just a sneaky little wetness leaking out of my eyes, and that tickle feeling you get in your nose when you know you want to let some emotion go, but still you hold back. The book asks a good question, "Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?" We go through our loves hating one another, despising family members, not understanding our children or our parents. We go through live full of criticism, not realizing that it's the small moments where you show love that make life worth all the hassle. And really, revenge is futile. Through the pain of realizing that his wife cheated on him, through the sick satisfaction that her lover didn't really love her, through the forgiveness and crash course in being left in charge of his own children, Matt eventually learns to let love in and let disappointment go. He learns to be an actual father, and though it's hard to say - he discovers that his wife dying may be the best thing to happen to him and his girls, in a difficult and honest way.
When our loved ones die, we can't revere them for being something they weren't. We can miss them, we can still love them, but "we need to come to terms with the dead and the people they truly were." We can't let the dead rule our lives forever. We have to move on.
Part of the reason I loved the novel Paris was that is told the stories of family lines going from the 1200s to the 1900s. It let us see families evolve and grow, change and follow old paths, it let us see how history repeats itself. In this novel, it also talks about how we descend from a long line of people that we can never truly know. Matt reflects on some of his ancestors, and remarks about how "it's funny that I think of them as the beginning, because they were also descendants of somebody, generations of prints on their DNA, traces of human migrations. They didn't come out of nowhere. Everyone comes from someone who comes from someone else, and this to me is remarkable. We can't know the people who are in us. We'll all have our moment at the top of the tree."
Read this book and go on the tremulous journey with the Kings. You will find yourself remembering your own family, your own faults, your own secrets, your own legacies. How did we get here? Where are we going? How do we, honestly and bravely, move on and say goodbye? This book is poetic, it's peaceful, it's sad and funny and disturbing. It's a good reflection on life, love, and yes ... disappointment.
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