ALMOST LIFE, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The land of Almost is a treacherous zone. Quite a few of the inhabitants are star-crossed lovers, but there are also those who nearly got the brass ring, or were just about to make it to the lighthouse, or looked back when they should have been more trusting. It is the land of regret, but also a place where one can get lost forever reaching out in vain, like Tantalus.
In her new novel, “Almost Life,” Kiran Millwood Hargrave traces a relationship between two women who meet in Paris in 1978, when they are both university students, and become passionate summer lovers. Erica is a British aspiring fiction writer, an unstylish naïf who thinks of herself as straight; Laure is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, leftist French lesbian who lives in a squat. As the decades pass, Erica publishes a novel, marries a warm, brainy fellow writer and has two children; while Laure becomes an art professor and eventually settles down with a woman she’s known for years. They each become the other’s Almost. Every few years, Laure and Erica meet up again and renew their blazing affair only to end it once more, but they never leave each other’s minds or hearts.
Hargrave is an English poet and children’s book author who has written two previous historical novels for adults: “The Mercies,” set in 17th-century Norway, and “The Dance Tree,” set in France in the 1500s. The heroines of those novels were up against big, external forces such as plague, witch-hunters, famine, drought and ironclad patriarchal rule. Erica and Laure face subtler, internal forces, with mixed results.
As the two fall in love over the course of that first summer, the novel seems to be haunted by the ghost of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel “Giovanni’s Room” — the squalid quarters of the squat turned love nest, the devastatingly sexy European queer who is bereft when the ambivalent, uptight “tourist” returns to straight life. Once back on the other side of the English Channel, Erica takes up with that warm fellow writer who turns out to come from a very rich family, and the lovelorn Laure drags herself up out of the gutter, gets sober and commits to her academic career.
Hargrave has a great eye and ear for close-focus, intimate scenes. Conversations, sexual encounters and meals are vividly alive. She has done her homework about eras before she was alive, ticking off references to Joni Mitchell, “Crimson and Clover,” Roland Barthes, Jeanette Winterson’s early work and the Agnès Varda films that played in Parisian cinemas in 1985. AIDS makes its terrible appearance in due course. She also shows a keen insight into the slow deflation of a once-promising literary career, as Erica’s creative life peters out while her husband’s soars.
Laure and Erica are richly drawn, in both heart and mind, but as the novel hopscotches through the years, bringing them back together only to pull them apart again, Hargrave seems determined to make their flickering connection a tragedy. Without a pure antagonist like a witch-hunter or a natural disaster to bring the pain, the novel rounds on Erica, who somewhat unconvincingly becomes a latter-day tortured bisexual, unable to be true to any lover, or herself. Her writing, which flowers when she’s with Laure, withers near her nice-guy husband. At 35, she drinks too much, doesn’t write, feels lost, dyes her hair and does Pilates (sure signs of despair), and takes her meds, like an embittered, 1995 Mrs. Robinson, wealthy, conventional and miserable. Laure enjoys a far more realized life, but she is eventually struck down by fate. By the time these women are in their 50s, both of their lives are effectively over.
While I believed in the characters, as the novel went on I had a harder and harder time believing in the grave destinies to which Hargrave was frog-marching them. Most people, after all, don’t end up spending the rest of their lives with the hot foreign strangers they meet one summer. That isn’t necessarily a moral or emotional failure on the scale at which Hargrave usually works. Elder queers like myself might think: Well, wow, they got to hook up several times all those years later and it was still fantastic. What luck. Why is that an “almost life”? It’s just life, full stop.
ALMOST LIFE | By Kiran Millwood Hargrave | Summit Books | 438 pp. | $29
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