Is there anything you wouldn't do for a loved one if they were dying? That's a morbid question, for sure, but the dilemma at the center of Some Bright Nowhere, Ann Packer's new novel, makes a reader wonder about such things.
Packer's main characters, Claire and Eliot, are a couple in their 60s who've been married for almost four decades. For the past eight years, Claire has been battling cancer and Eliot has been a diligent caretaker. Caretaking, he reflects, is a daily amalgam of "Helping, soothing, driving, phoning, cooking, listening, tending, waiting, learning, remembering, deciding, forgoing. A lot of forgoing."
When the novel opens, Claire and Eliot have just walked out of their final appointment with Claire's oncologist — final, because there's nothing more to be done. The couple's two adult children visit, as do Claire's long-time close friends, Michelle and Holly, who shower her with self-care presents — flannel pjs, fancy lotions and manicures — causing Claire to joke about the "death spa" she's comfortably ensconced in.
Then, one day when the couple is alone, Claire makes a request to her husband. Here are snippets from that fateful conversation:
“I’d like them to be here with me” [Claire says]. “Them?” “Holly and Michelle. .... What I mean is, I’d like them to take care of me.” “OK.” [Eliot] hesitated. “The more the merrier?” “Eliot. Instead of you.”
Numb, dismayed, Eliot agrees to pack up because he loves his wife and it turns out her deepest wish is that he leave the house.
We're seeing a lot of literary fiction these days about the long goodbyes of aging and terminal illness. I'm thinking of recent novels by Richard Ford, Stewart O'Nan, Elizabeth Strout and, now, Ann Packer. Part of the reason, surely, for this uptick in end-of-days dramas is that many of our novelists and their long-time readers are growing old in tandem.
Packer's best-known novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, was published in 2002; it told the story of a young woman who'd been thinking of breaking up with her fiancé, but then feels obligated to stay after he's paralyzed in a diving accident.
Packer invested that contrived situation with emotional authenticity. She pulls off the same magic trick in Some Bright Nowhere: As a writer, she's deeply alert to the currents of thoughts and feelings that run through even a seconds-long conversation. Take this moment right after Claire has made her peculiar request and shortly before Eliot agrees to grant it. Claire says to Eliot:
“Can I ask you a question? ... How mad are you?" Eliot said he wasn’t mad, which was true: he was sad, confused, a little embarrassed — but not mad. ... "I should’ve already asked this,” [Eliot] said, “but would I be able to come visit?” And [Claire] burst into tears, unable in that moment to bear the rip she clearly felt she’d torn in his self-confidence.”
Perhaps one reason Claire wants Eliot to vacate the house is that he needs to be needed (as we all do) and, as she lay dying, Claire doesn't want to take care of him emotionally. Her friends are easier to be with: They'll survive her death; she isn't their whole world.
Another possible explanation for Claire's strange wish is her memory of being part of a crew of women who tended to a friend in her last days. That friend's house, she tells Eliot, was filled with "female energy, chatter, tears, laughter." Listening to Claire describe her gynocentric model for a "good death," Eliot is bewildered. He thinks to himself that "It was as if [Claire] were speaking a foreign language. As if she lived a secret life he was only now discovering. Secret and preferred. But he couldn't say that."
Some Bright Nowhere is about the things we can't say and don't know about each other, as well as the collateral damage that a terminal disease can inflict on even the best of relationships. It's an odd, beautiful and absorbing little novel about one of the biggest subjects of them all.
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