It seemed the older he grew – and he had grown old – the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.This idea of confusion and misunderstanding – and especially between people; and especially between family/spouses – is prevalent throughout Anything is Possible. Anyone who has read My Name is Lucy Barton will remember that a lot of that book revolved around Lucy and her visiting mother gossiping about the folks back home – whose marriage broke up, who went squirrely, who got fat – and this novel revisits these folks from Amgash, Illinois; putting flesh on the bones of rumour. Although the nine chapters of this book are considered self-contained short stories, as with Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, they combine to paint a clearer picture than any one alone could provide of a flagging small town in America's Heartland. But while there is certainly debauchery (rape, incest, voyeurism, adultery) and sadness (self-doubt, broken homes, poverty, and unremitting shame), I wasn't as emotionally involved in this book as I was in those other two Strout works, and yet...I was intrigued by the confusion and misunderstanding, which built to a perfect resolution in the last lines of the book. This is four stars in my mind, if not in my heart.
Strout writes beautiful passages, and I could have pulled quotes from any chapter to illustrate that fact, but I'm just going to share the ways in which these stories illuminate and expand upon each other. Not incidentally, Lucy Barton herself figures throughout this book – not only has she released a memoir (which I assume is My Name is Lucy Barton) that several characters have read or are at least aware of, but she also makes a brief appearance in town – but she's not the one I want to focus on. We first hear about Charlie Macaulay – a Vietnam vet who strikes a respectable if troubled figure about town – when Patty Nicely (of Pretty Nicely Girls renown; now known as Fatty Patty) confesses to a friend to having a crush on the older man in Windmills. Later, in The Hit-Thumb Theory, we get inside Charlie's own brain:
Because he was Charlie, who years ago had fouled himself profoundly, because he was Charlie and not someone else, he could not say to his son: You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; but you came through it, that childhood that wasn't all roses, and I'm proud of you, I'm amazed by you. Charlie could not even say a watered-down version of whatever that feeling would be. He could not even clap his son on the shoulder in greeting, or when saying good-bye.Charlie ends this chapter having a PTSD-induced panic attack that the owner of a B & B he's staying at eases him through. He will never know that in a later chapter, Dottie's Bed & Breakfast, the proprietress soothes her own hurt feelings thusly:
She took from the far back of her top drawer the slip of paper with the lovely man's name on it: Charlie Macaulay. Charlie Macaulay of the Unspeakable Pain. Dottie kissed two fingers and pressed them to his signature.(Charlie will also never know that far away in Italy, in Mississippi Mary, a mother and daughter will deflect from the runaway mother's shameful behaviour by gossiping about Charlie's own.) Dottie's feelings had been hurt by another guest, who had earlier been hurt by Dottie's lack of sympathy for a story she told her about her old acquaintance; an actress named Annie Abbleby. The next chapter, Snow-Blind, is about Annie and her hard-scrabble childhood in northern Maine; a rural community that might be the faraway twin for Amgash, Illinois; Annie's return to visit her siblings echoing that of Lucy Barton's earlier return to visit her own.
And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger – simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.So many characters are depressed or repressed, and those few who do decide to escape – to be near the white dazzle of the sun – are despised in their hometowns, the focus of constant gossip: Can you believe he was a raging homo the whole time? Can you believe she'd leave her husband of fifty-one years, and when he had brain cancer? Can you believe that after she moved to New York City she thought she was too good to visit back home for seventeen years? It takes Abel in the last story Gift – Abel, who was Lucy Barton's cousin, and who, with his sister Dottie, used to eat out of Dumpsters – to recognise that while he escaped unimaginable childhood poverty and now enjoyed comfort and a happy marriage, his daughter (raised with money and now married to a never-home rich lawyer) is probably miserable in her own way and desperate to escape her circumstances. As Abel is being taken away on a stretcher, he has the epiphany that closes out the book:
He had a friend. He would have said this if he could, he would have said it, but there was no need: Like his sweet Sophia who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend. And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything – dear girl from Rockford, rushing above the Rock River – he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.The journey from “maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth” to “anything was possible for anyone” – the ultimate understanding that comes too late for most of us to act upon – is a profound one, but it takes the entire collection of stories to make that clear. As a result, I like this book much better in the assessment than I did in the moment. It's worth sticking with to the end.
