She turned her face to the racing water. Even now, in midsummer, it crashed over the rocks, but somewhere, a mile beyond this place, or three miles, or five — beyond the old people sitting in their cars listening to the radio, beyond the men with their fishing poles, conferring among themselves whether the Red Sox had a chance in the playoffs, and the young couples kissing or smoking weed, and the mothers nursing babies; beyond the teenagers daring each other to jump off the rocks, and the ones, like Eleanor and Cam, just standing there taking it all in — all those human beings, figuring out how to live their lives the best they knew; count the ways — the brook would keep on running. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but the water never stopped moving. It flowed all the way to the dam in town, and beyond to the river, which flowed to the ocean, which reached far as the horizon, and even farther than that.
If Count the Ways hadn’t been a book club selection, it would have been one of my very rare DNF’s: I found the writing to be clunky and amateurish at both the sentence level and at the overall plot level; and with unrelatable characters, aggravating repetitions, and no discernable deeper meaning, if I were author Joyce Maynard, I’d be taking my name off of this one (and asking for any editing fees to be returned). Just look at that quote I opened with — featuring the book’s title and, arguably, its essence — it is just so much bafflegab and annoying punctuation; I am rounding this up to two stars only because it is not the worst book I’ve ever read and will continue to reserve my only one star rating for that particular waste of time. But this was close.
In no other way that she could think of would Eleanor be called a superstitious person, but there had been a time when she could not round the final bend in the long, dead-end dirt road that led up to this place without saying the words out loud, “I’m home.” Maybe some part of her actually believed that if she ever failed to speak the words, something terrible might happen to one of them. How would she ever survive if it did?
Only, she had
As the book opens, Eleanor is returning to her former home in the country for her son’s wedding, and by the cool reception she gets from her two eldest children, it’s obvious that she hasn’t seen them for years. This opening bit includes the line, “Sometimes you leave a place because you don’t like being there. Sometimes you have to leave because you love it too much.” Although that is stated as some kind of truism, it made zero sense to me and I will acknowledge that I kept reading this overlong book, in part, just to see if Maynard could prove it to me. She did not. The basic premise: Eleanor’s parents died when she was sixteen, and despite her age and her family’s apparent wealth, she was left without guardians or an inheritance. Happily, she was a self-taught artist, and while finishing up boarding school, Eleanor sold a children’s book for a lot of money, and by the time she was twenty, she decided to buy herself a rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She marries a hot woodworker who never worries about money (because Eleanor pays all the bills), and when he ends their marriage ten years and three children later, she agrees to move off the farm and let him stay there? And when their children refuse to be taken away from the only home they’ve ever known, Eleanor agrees to let them live with their Dad? Knowing from the beginning that Eleanor must eventually do something that causes an irreparable rift with these children, I was mildly interested to learn what it could possibly have been — but the answer to that was incredibly annoying. Nothing of the plot or characterisations made any sense.
As for the writing: The storyline takes place over four decades, beginning in the mid-sixties, and Maynard makes countless annoying references to anchor her timeline. At one point she writes, There was a music festival going on somewhere in upstate New York that week. “Bunch of hippies,” Mr. Hallinan said. “Probably pals of that nutcase that murdered the movie star.” And that made me roll my eyes, but worse is a character (an old guy who was a neighbour of Eleanor’s) coming to her house and saying, “Remember those boys they had on Ed Sullivan a while back? The ones with the hair, that all the girls used to scream about? You know the one with the Japanese wife? Somebody shot him last night. Dead on the spot.” Maybe he would have reported it to his wife that way, but if he just heard that John Lennon was shot on the radio, no way would he have put it this way to a younger woman who had been a teenager in the sixties. Every anchoring event was reported like this — from the moon landing to Princess Di’s car crash — and every one of them made me twitch in annoyance.
As for the repetitions, at one point, about a third of the way in, I read:
Most of their best times took place right here on the farm — putting on plays, making valentines, building snow forts in winter, sailing their boats with their homemade cork people every spring...Three nights a week, in softball season, they headed to the ball field.
And I thought to myself: If I have to read about making valentines and cork people and going to softball one more time… And then two pages later, in the same chapter:
There was a rhythm to their lives now, marked by the seasons in part...In winter, they stoked the woodstove and shoveled the car out, made valentines, stayed in their pyjamas all day with a stack of library books. At the first sign of spring they made cork people. Then came softball season.
How about simply illogical writing:
He loved showing them artifacts from the natural world: he’d put his hand in his pocket and, when it emerged, set down a strange, mysterious pellet that turned out to be animal scat — coyote, possibly, or fox, or moose even — that, when you picked it apart, contained small pieces of bones and fur from whatever the animal whose scat it was had eaten for dinner the night before.
Again, that’s more than a bit clunky, but why “moose even”; why not “bear even” or some other carnivore if the point is looking for fur and bones in the scat?
Or weirdly unspecific writing (and this, coming at a moment of high drama):
None of them had any sense of time as it was happening, but Cam probably kept pumping Toby’s chest for many minutes.
“Probably” for “many” minutes, eh? Glad you noted that. There are way too many moments of high drama (including rape, underground abortion, infidelity, domestic abuse, murder-suicide, drunk driving causing death, a hypocritical Republican with an eye on the White House, a dog shot dead by the Sheriff for chasing deer during hunting season) and I felt vaguely uncomfortable about the way that Maynard approached a gender transition — I don’t think that she really captured the struggle (everything is reported from the outside and off the page) but I guess I applaud her for trying to include the experience as just another part of a domestic drama — but I was definitely made uncomfortable by a scene with Eleanor meeting two little boys, one of whom had “mild” cerebral palsy. When they meet, the older brother explains, “His umbilical cord was tangled up around his neck when he was born. That’s why he walks a little funny. He’s not retarded or anything.” And from Eleanor’s POV we then watch as, With that odd, slightly spastic gait of his, he was clearing a space in the middle of the living room now, his floppy puppet arms flailing. Nope, didn’t like that. Also didn’t like that Eleanor knew at a glance that she would never again spend time with these eager little boys and their sad, slope-shouldered — but totally decent — father.
I didn’t understand any of the decisions Eleanor made and I certainly didn’t understand why Maynard wrote her that way. Clunky beginning to cringey ending, hard pass.
