Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Characters Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Themes
Appearance and Reality
Both of the main protagonists, Vinnie and Fred, are initially deceived by outward appearances. Vinnie eventually learns not to judge by appearances, and Fred learns to value what he already has. Vinnie's personal growth is probably the more interesting of the two, because when she is compared to Fred — a plain, unmarried woman in her fifties, as opposed to a tall, dark, handsome young man — the odds seem so much stacked against her. Because Vinnie is an intellectual and professor of English, her expectations of life have been scripted by books. Since she was a little child, classic English fiction has "suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become." Sadly, the older woman does not fare well in traditional English novels. As Vinnie notes, people over fifty "are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable." Nothing exciting ever happens to them. True to form, Vinnie does not expect to find love at her age. After all, she believes that she has never really been loved by a man, so why should that change now? She also realizes that contemporary culture reinforces this belief. As portrayed in the media, only the young have sex. That older people might also have satisfying, even passionate sexual relationships is passed over in embarrassed silence. Vinnie is quite prepared to accept this situation, telling herself that even though she still has erotic impulses, it is time "to steer past elderly sexual farce and sexual tragedy into the wide, calm sunset sea of abstinence."
When Vinnie first meets Chuck, she cannot see beyond the surface of the man. She thinks of him as a cartoon American tourist who wears a cowboy costume and is loaded up with cameras, maps, and tour guides. He appears to lack everything she values, including an education in the humanities. Education to Vinnie means being well read; it does not mean gaining the knowledge to become a sanitation engineer and earning enough to retire comfortably in one's late fifties.
However, when circumstances conspire to throw her and Chuck together, she realizes that Chuck has some substance to him that she has hitherto overlooked. He has the capacity to appreciate her, to make her feel like a woman, and he is, as she puts it, "wonderful in bed." This gives her a new perspective on what it means to participate fully in life. She is ready to cast away the predetermined script handed down to her by her beloved books and embrace what life brings her. She starts to write her own life script rather than act out someone else's. She learns, to use a cliché, that just as all that glitters is not gold, all that does not glitter is not trash. Behind Chuck's almost comic appearance and Midwestern drawl — which is also all her English friends observe in him — is a solid human being with something to offer her that she desperately needs. In her acceptance of the unexpected, her whole outlook changes. She realizes that "this world is not English literature [there is] plenty of time for adventure and change, even for heroism and transformation."
Vinnie's new openness to life carries over into her attitude toward her profession. Now that for the first time she has found value in a man who is completely nonintellectual, she shows some impatience with the ponderous rituals of her chosen academic profession. This shift in attitude is apparent when she becomes bored at the conference on children's literature. She is impatient with an English professor who drones on about some abstraction he calls "The Child." Vinnie wants to shout at him that "There is no Child there are only children, each one different, unique, as we here in this room are unique." She has discovered that it is an error to pigeon-hole people, whether they are children, people over fifty, or people who happen to go around in cowboy outfits.
The unlikely romance that comes to plain, fifty-four-year-old Vinnie suggests that youth and beauty to do not have all the triumphs in love. Fred, for example, is much younger than Vinnie and is the epitome of a sexually attractive man. But while Vinnie's fortunes rise, Fred's fall. His infatuation with Rosemary almost brings him to disaster. He is so attracted to the image that Rosemary presents that he cannot bear to think of her as embodying any other qualities. He thinks of her as a heroine from a novel by Henry James, not only beautiful and delicate but also "too generous lighthearted and trusting" to see that her friends Posy and Edwin are not true friends. Rosemary does not, in Fred's eyes, "see them as they are." In reality, however, it is Fred who does not see Rosemary as she is. He is blind to the reality that Rosemary is all appearance and little substance. Only finally, after going through all the agonies that a spurned lover endures, does Fred learn Vinnie's lesson about seeing through surface appearances. Then he realizes that whatever the faults of his wife, who is in every way Rosemary's opposite, she could never be false in the way that Rosemary has been. Once he is free of the spell cast on him by Rosemary, he assesses his life and his conduct in a more objective way. He realizes that he was foolish to allow his quarrel with his wife to get out of hand, and he also accepts that the fiasco with Rosemary was in part his fault, since he encouraged her to love him even when he knew he would be returning to America in a short while. With greater self-knowledge, free of the dream of the appearance of love, Fred places his feet on the firmer ground of reality.
