The Other Side of You: A Novel - Hardcover

Vickers, Salley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374221901 ISBN 13: 9780374221904

Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

For psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. David McBride, death exerts an unusual draw. Despite his profession, he has never come to terms with the violent accident that took his brother’s life, a trauma that has shaped his personality and subsequent choice of career. But when a failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, comes into his care, he finds the deepest reaches of his suppressed history being reactivated. Elizabeth is mysteriously reticent about her own past and it is not until David recalls a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio that she finally yields her story. As she recounts the chance encounter which took her to Rome, and her tragic tale of passion and betrayal, David begins to find a strange and disturbing reflection of his own loss in the haunted “other side” of this elusive woman. Through one long night’s dialogue they journey together into a past which brings painful new insight and uncertain resolution to each of them.  

 

The Other Side of You is a powerful meditation on art, and on love in all its manifestations. In distinctive, graceful prose, Salley Vickers explores the ways both love and art can penetrate the complexities of the human heart, to invade and change our being, and the possibilities of regeneration through another’s vision and understanding.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A former psychologist and professor of English, Salley Vickers is the author of Miss Garnet's Angel, Instances of the Number 3 (FSG, 2002), and Mr. Golightly’s Holiday (FSG, 2004). She lives in London.

Rezensionen

In this hypnotic chronicle of quiet desperation, 45-year-old English psychoanalyst David McBride has an intense and personally illuminating session with a suicidal patient that unlocks his own past. His 40-something married-with-children patient, Elizabeth Cruikshank, is silently tormented by her past love for Thomas Carrington, whom, she slowly tells David, she lost track of before her marriage, but met again in Rome as he pursued his passion for Caravaggio. David is not in love with his wife, Olivia, but doesn't much mind: he's emotionally crippled by guilt at the death of his brother in a street-crossing accident (he was five, his brother six). When he hears all of Elizabeth's story, however, something awakens. Vickers (Instances of the Number 3), a psychologist by training, portrays the therapeutic process in all of its messy glory—its imperfections, conflicts and possibilities—and she delivers wrenching conflicts of love within and outside of marriage. Caravaggio's work, in its own right and as symbolic of the role of art, becomes a lovely third theme, though not as richly plumbed as those of love and therapy. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

In Salley Vickers's earlier novel about love and loss, Instances of the Number 3, she wrote: "Some say this is what is meant by the law of karma, a stepping aside from a moment of possibility only to be forever haunted by its unrealised spectre." That Henry Jamesian sense of a missed life -- of what might have been -- suffuses The Other Side of You and reminds us that Vickers is a novelist in the great English tradition of moral seriousness. Her characters suffer, they struggle to be true to both themselves and the promptings of the human heart, and they eventually accept that a quiet accommodation to one's lot may be the most that any of us can hope for. Yet sometimes, during even the most seemingly drab existence, a moment or a memory of real unclouded happiness may be unexpectedly snatched from the maw of time.

The Other Side of You focuses on a period of crisis in the lives of several people, but chiefly the psychiatrist David McBride and the depressed Elizabeth Cruikshank. For no obvious reason, Cruikshank -- an apparently ordinary middle-aged woman, the mother of two grown children -- has attempted to kill herself. As McBride tries to encourage his withdrawn patient to open up and talk, he finds himself thinking more and more about his own death-burdened past. When he was only 5, his 6 1/2-year-old brother was killed before his eyes in a traffic accident. Forty years may have gone by, but for McBride this is still the central event, in some ways the only true event, in his entire life.

The real problem, the good doctor himself realizes, is "not how to cure or be cured but how to live. . . . The people we were treating were not so much looking for a remedy for anxiety or depression, they were looking for a reason to be alive." McBride soon comes to understand that he and Cruikshank are fundamentally the same. "We are most of us badly cracked and afraid that if we do not guard them with our lives the cracks will show, and show us up, which is why we are all more or less in a state of vigilance against one another." Eventually, Cruikshank does let down her vigilance for a moment but only to murmur a few almost inaudible words: "I was faithless." Not "unfaithful" but "faithless" -- and therein lies the tragedy of her life.

As the now older McBride recalls his patient and this period from his past, we soon realize that there has been some kind of rupture between then and now. But what could it have been? He tells us about his marriage to the sexy, fashion-conscious 42-year-old Olivia, who calls him "darling" and has never wanted children. We learn that he was once in love with Barbara, now the wife of his colleague Dan. He introduces us to his various patients, including a man who is convinced that a wolf lives inside his head and a violent schizophrenic on the mend. Above all, he ponders the human condition and his task as a healer:

"My mind darted anxiously to Elizabeth Cruikshank, whom it was my duty to try to perceive. How far did she want me to see her? But then, how far do any of us want to be seen? On the one hand, it is what we fear most, that our shamefulnesses, disloyalties, meannesses, cruelties, miseries, the sum of our hopeless, abject, creeping failures be finally laid bare. But the very opposite is also the case. I believed -- or believed I believed -- that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out. And the deeper truth is that human consciousness can hold two contradictory states at once, and all our unmet longings wear an overcoat of fear."

Elizabeth Cruikshank's story is the central panel of The Other Side of You and I don't want to say too much about it. In essence, she was offered a chance at happiness but, lacking confidence, simply couldn't believe her luck. As McBride observes, "it is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court the opposite. So at the point when it dawned on her how much it mattered that he should stay, she suddenly asked, 'Shouldn't you be going? Haven't you things to do?' " This remark leads to terrible and unforeseeable consequences. There exist, after all, "invisible turnstiles which, having let us pass easily through them, yield to none of our most strenuous efforts at return."

Vickers herself once practiced as a psychologist and has said that her favorite authors are those who explore the tribulations of the heart -- Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. In her own novels -- the most famous is Miss Garnet's Angel -- Vickers often uses works of art as entrées into the self. In this new book, the painter Caravaggio is crucial, in particular two very different depictions of the supper at Emmaus, that moment when the risen Christ reveals himself to two of his disciples. "A real artist," explains an art historian named Thomas Carrington, "knows the other side of himself better than the side he's in at the time. You don't paint as you are; you paint as you're not. But you only know what you're not through knowing what you are."

Much later, McBride stands with Elizabeth Cruikshank before a canvas of Caravaggio's youthful David, who is holding the head of Goliath:

"David also knew those moments of choice when Yes and No collide . . . the comprehension that all our acts have consequences, which we must bear, and with which we must live consciously, if life is not to become a desperate flight from ourselves."

This is, I need hardly say, a heartbreaking novel and, yes, a love story. Some readers may feel that Vickers's diction is outmodedly formal and her observations verging on the sententious. I don't. After all, she is writing about grief and regret and self-knowledge, of how to live with the recognition that one has made the wrong choices and that they are unchangeable. As Dr. McBride says, "It's naive to pretend that life for many people isn't pretty wretched much of the time."

The title for Vickers's novel comes, quite appropriately, from T.S. Eliot ("Who is the third who walks always beside you? . . . Who is that on the other side of you?"). Eliot is, after all, one of the laureates of disappointment, of "the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened." Vickers's prose possesses something of that same still, sad music. "Poor all of us," she writes, "if we but knew it, blindly crawling along our parallel lines, unmindful that all around us are others as much in need of comfort and consolation."

If you enjoy the work of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers. All these authors reflect, with grace and gravity, on life's moments of sorrowful epiphany, so achingly summarized by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood:

O God! O God! That it were possible
To undo things done; to call back yesterday. . . .

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The ties that bind people to each other are often made up of the slenderest of threads, and it is this sense of fragility that Vickers articulates so vividly in her evocative portrait of a psychiatrist and his patient, a woman whose lover has died and who, in turn, has tried to end her own life. Reluctant to divulge just what prompted her suicide attempt, Elizabeth speaks in cryptic phrases and voluminous silences, until Dr. David McBride stumbles upon the key that will not only unlock Elizabeth's memories and expiate her pain but also do the same for him. As a boy, McBride witnessed his adored older brother's violent death, yet never realized the role he played in that seminal event until this patient came into his life. A former psychologist herself, Vickers brings an erudite precision and an elegant perception to her lyrically poetic testament to the vitality of love and the human capacity to both seek out and run from its ennobling grace. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Chapter One
She was a slight woman, pale, with two wings of dark hair which framed her face and gave it the faintly bird-like quality that characterised her person. Even at this distance of time, which has clarified much that was obscure to me, I find her essence hard to capture. She was youthful in appearance but there was also an air of something ambiguous about her which was both intriguing and daunting.

 When we met she must have been in her forties, but in a certain light she could have been fourteen or four hundred – though when I say ‘light’ I perhaps mean that subtle light of the mind, which casts as many shadows as it illuminates but in the right conditions can reveal a person’s being more accurately than the most powerful beam.

 Once I would have known her age to the day, since it would have been part of the bald list of information on her medical file: name, sex, date of birth. Of the last detail I have a hazy recollection that her birthday was in September. She spoke of it once in connection with the commencement of the school year and a feeling that, in the coincidence of the month of her birth and a new term, she might begin some new life. ‘You see, Doctor,’ – when she used my title she did so in a tone that located it at a fine point between irony and intimacy – ‘even as a child I must have been looking for a fresh start.’

 Doctors are like parents: there should be no favourites. But doctors and parents are human beings first and it is impossible to escape altogether the very human fact that certain people count. Of course everyone must, or should, count. We oughtn’t do what we do if that isn’t a fundamental of our instincts as well as of our professional dealings. But the peculiar spark that directs us towards our profession will have its own particular shape. I have had colleagues who come alive at a certain kind of raving, who perceive in the voices of the incurable schizophrenic a cryptic language, a Linear B, awaiting their special aptitude for decoding. One of my formidably brilliant colleagues has spent her life attempting to unravel the twisted minds of the criminally insane. It’s my opinion no one could ever disentangle that knot of evil and sickness, but for her it is the grail that infuses her work with the ardour of a mythic quest. My colleague Dan Buirski had a bee in his bonnet about eating disorders. I used to kid him, a long cadaver of a man himself, that he liked nothing more than a starving young woman to get his teeth into. I said once, ‘You’re no example, you’re a mere cheese paring yourself,’ and he laughed and said, ‘That’s why I understand them.’ He’s lucky with his metabolism, but his grandmother and his two uncles died in Treblinka. Starvation is in his blood and he’s converted that inheritance into a consuming interest in humankind’s relationship with food. It’s a strange business, ours.

 And what was my peculiar bent, the glimmer in my eye which has in it the capacity to lead me into dangerous swamps and mires? For me it was the denizens of that hinterland where life and death are sister and brother, the suicidally disposed, who beckoned. Like is drawn to like. Alter the biographical circumstances a fraction and my colleague who worked with psychopaths would make an expert serial killer: she had just the right streak of fanatical perfectionism and the necessary pane of ice in the heart. And for all his badinage, Dan had a hard time keeping a scrap of flesh on him. I saw him once, after he’d had a bad bout of flu, and I nearly crossed myself he looked so like a vampire’s victim. But despite the concentration camps, death wasn’t his particular lure. That was my province.

 It was a landscape I knew with that innate sense which people call ‘sixth,’ with the invisible antennae that register the impalpable as no less real than a kick in the solar plexus from a startled horse. To some of us it can be more real. It is said that the dead tell no tales, but I wonder. When I was five, my brother, Jonathan, was killed by an articulated lorry. It was my third day of school and our mother was unwell; and because our school was close by, and my brother was advanced for his six and a half years, and was used to going to and from school alone, she allowed him to take me there unescorted. The one road we had to cross was a minor one, but the lorry driver had mistaken his way and was backing round the corner as a preliminary to turning round. Jonny had stepped off the pavement and had his back to the lorry to beckon me across. Although he was mature for his age he was small, too small to figure in the mirror’s sight lines. I was on the pavement and I watched him vanish under the reversing lorry and I seem to remember – though this could be the construction of hindsight – that it was not until the vehicle started forward that I heard a thin, high scream, the sound I imagine a rabbit might make as a trap springs fatally on fragile bones.

 I doubt there was a bone left unbroken in my brother’s body when the lorry drove off, leaving the mess of shattered limbs and blood and skin which had been Jonny. I believe I saw what was left of him, before I was whirled away in the big, freckled arms of Mrs Whelan, who lived across the street and had heard the scream and rushed me into her house, which Jonny and I had never liked because it smelled of dismally cooked food, and terrified me by falling on her knees and dragging me down with a confused screech, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the blessed lamb, may he rest in peace.’

 Afterwards, I didn’t know where my brother was, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t with Jesus, Mary, or Joseph. The belief I clung to was that Jonny was still in the pine tree he had assured me was ‘magic,’ on whose stately curving boughs we used to swing together in Chiswick Park. I heard him more than once, when I was allowed back to play there. He was singing ‘He’ll be coming round the mountain when he comes,’ which was the song our mother sang when we were fretful, the two of us, on long car journeys. Later, when Mother had my twin sisters, born one behind the other within the hour, she sang other songs to them.

 From that time onwards, it was always ‘the girls’ and ‘Davey.’ I, Davey, was the wrong side of the unbridgeable fissure that had opened up in our family, and although I’m sure my parents loved me, I was a reminder of that small bloody mess they’d left behind. The lorry driver never recovered and had to be pensioned off, unfit for work. But my mother was made of sterner stuff. She had in her a fund of life that was not to be defeated even by life’s only real enemy. She was not a woman who lived on easy terms with her emotions. She was the daughter of a judge, and her upbringing, though liberal, had not bred in her a place for the easy expression of the finer shades of feeling. And I knew, too, though nothing in her outward demeanour ever gave this away, that if she could have chosen which son she had to lose, it would not have been Jonny.

 I didn’t blame her. After that, I was never going to be right for her again. I was the living witness to a calamity, the deeper reaches of which she could not afford to acknowledge if she was to continue to hold herself, and our family, together. Very likely she blamed me for the catastrophe. Why wouldn’t she? I blamed myself for it.

 My mother, for my father’s sake, for them to go on together, and for the family to survive, had to set her shoulders and turn her back on the disaster. She faced a choice, and she made it by abandoning me and jumping the ravine which had opened with Jonny’s death to the other side. It was a leap to the side of life, and the proof of this came in the form of my twin sisters, apples of my father’s eye and each other’s best companion.

 For a long time I was expecting my lost brother to come round that mountain, with all the confidence with which he had stepped off the kerb of the pavement and into the lorry’s fatal path. He was my closest companion, my hero, my single most important attachment to life. And when he didn’t come, and I heard only the echo of his voice in my ear, as I swung alone on the low pine branch, pretending, for my mother’s sake, that I was enjoying myself, a part of me wanted to go after him, for company.

Chapter Two
At the time I am speaking of I worked in two psychiatric hospitals in the south of England: a big red-brick, mock-Gothic pile in Haywards Heath, and a cosier, less oppressive place near Brighton on the south coast. In addition, I had a small private practice, where occasionally I saw some paying patients.

 From her appearance Mrs Cruikshank might have been one of those. She had the voice and mannerisms of someone born middle class. But I came to learn that this was part of a well-crafted veneer – like a piece of good furniture, she had a discreet sheen which was far from ordinary. In fact, she was the child of two immigrants, her father an Italian communist, who had come to England before the war; her mother, a refugee from the pre-revolutionary Yugoslavia, the illegitimate daughter of one of those two-a-penny Eastern European counts, or so she claimed. When I got to know her better, my patient told me she thought this may have been a compensating fantasy for the fact that her mother worked for a time as a dinner lady in the local primary school, the one her own daughter attended. Possibly the idea had conferred on the child a tincture of the aristocratic. Fantasies, if they are convinced enough, are also an element in the reality which shapes us, and there was a tilt to my patient’s narrow nose which might have given an impression of looking down it.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374221901
• ISBN 13: 9780374221904
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar