Non-Actionable Puffery

I first read Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved at eleven or twelve, and I hated the protagonist Louise with such an incandescent rage that it blotted out just about everything else about the book. But nonetheless a few scenes stuck with me for years, along with a gnawing sense that there was more to the book than I could see around my rage, so I’ve always meant to reread it.

And I finally have reread it, and I’m glad I did because there is indeed more to the book than I noticed the first time. Both place and time are beautifully evoked: a fishing village on a small island that is crumbling away as successive hurricanes wash it into Chesapeake Bay, during the years of World War II. The sea, the weather, the process of making a living catching crabs and oysters - these things are all described in lovely and compelling detail.

The character work is also well done, and the decision to make our heroine Louise a sulky, self-centered girl who is cripplingly jealous of her sister Caroline who genuinely is better than her in every way is certainly a bold one. However, the reason that certain artistic decisions are described as “bold” is because they may alienate the audience, and let’s face it, I still feel pretty darn alienated from Louise.

This time around, I did feel somewhat sorry for her. It really has to be hard to have a twin sister who is a beautiful musical genius with good people skills, when you yourself are a girl of average looks, average musical talent, and the people skills of a particularly sullen barracuda. However, my ability to feel sorry for Louise frayed in the face of Louise’s boundless capacity to feel sorry for herself without, at any point, even trying to make her own life less miserable.

Perhaps the peak moment comes when Louise’s twin Caroline is offered a scholarship to go to mainland for boarding school to further her musical gifts. Louise (understandably) is jealous, and her loving mother suggests that perhaps, with scrimping and saving, she and Louise’s equally loving father might save enough money to send Louise to boarding school in the nearby town, which incidentally has been Louise’s secret goal for years…

(Side note: despite Louise’s determined years-long pity party, even she has to admit to herself that her parents have always loved her, just as much and perhaps in some ways more than they love Caroline.)

Where were we? Louise’s mother has just offered to undergo great sacrifice to give Louise the chance to fulfill her dream of going to boarding school in Crisfield. In return, Louise bitterly accuses her mother of trying to get rid of her. She orders her mother to leave her alone, then feels extremely sorry for herself when her mother, in fact, goes away.

For God’s sake, Louise, go to boarding school at Crisfield and be happy. But no. Instead Louise quits school to work on her father’s boat, which she describes as the happiest time in her life, not because she was actually what anyone else might describe as “happy” but because she was too worn out to feel anything.

This part in particular made me scream because the conceit of the book is that Louise is writing the book retrospectively, as a young mother who has found a loving husband and also has a thriving career as a nurse. You might imagine that the life she built for herself might be the happiest time in her life! Might in fact have helped heal some of the acid jealousy she feels toward Caroline!

But no. She’s left home (with the loving encouragement of her parents, I might add), she’s gotten a nursing degree, she’s married and made a career, but she hasn’t gained an iota of perspective on anything. She has her own husband now, but she’s apparently still outraged that Caroline married the boy who Louise never particularly liked in the first place. She always looked down on him, and never laughed with him because they had completely different senses of humor, and just generally considered him a second-rate sort of person. But she hung out with him before Caroline did and apparently felt she had dibs.

To be honest, I think the book might work better for me if it weren’t told retrospectively. If Louise were telling her story in real time, as it were, if she were a teenager reacting to her life in this laceratingly self-defeating way, I might find her less frustrating. I can understand a seventeen-year-old telling herself that she’d consider accepting this second-rate boy she doesn’t particularly like (after all, the island offers a pretty limited dating pool), and then exploding with rage when the second-rate boy doesn’t even ask her. And instead asks her sister! Who took her chance to go to boarding school and is now studying at Julliard and has presumably met MANY boys, but nonetheless ACCEPTS THIS ONE, which suggests maybe he was never second-rate in the first place?? Enraging. I get it. That is, I see why it’s painful, although if I were Call I’d definitely want to marry Caroline rather than Louise, because Louise treats him like dirt.

But the fact that Louise hasn’t gotten over it even after she has her own husband? Louise. Please. You didn’t even want Call. PLEASE. Please please please TRY to see things from anyone else’s point of view, ever, just for a couple of minutes. If you happened to meet yourself and Caroline as a stranger, I bet you'd like Caroline best too.

At the beginning of Post Captain, right on the cusp of a big sea battle, peace is inopportunely declared. Fortunately for Jack Aubrey, he is extremely flush with prize money, so with his particular friend Stephen Maturin he rents a country house, enters local society, and meets a family of pretty sisters (plus one beautiful young widowed cousin).

I had just settled in for a reverse Austen novel, told from the point of view of the naval captain rather than his young lady, when Jack’s prize agent absconds with all his money. Jack, eleven thousand pounds in debt, flees to the continent with Stephen in tow - just in time for war to begin again!

This is all in the space of about four chapters. At this point I concluded I had better not settle in for anything at all, as we were clearly in for an ever-shifting picaresque novel.

In this book:

Stephen disguises Jack as a bear so they can flee from hostile France to still-neutral Spain.

Jack is subsequently so ill that Stephen has to nurse him back to health, which takes place entirely off page, because O’Brian could not care less about hurt/comfort.

Other things O’Brian can’t care less about? Spy plots. Stephen has become a hotshot spy for British intelligence and spends months in Spain gathering intelligence, which entire trip O’Brian disposes of in three paragraphs.

However, Stephen’s spy shenanigans allow O’Brian to skip the entire sequence during which Jack gets not-engaged with a girl whose mother won’t let her enter an engagement with a man who is eleven thousand pounds in debt, but emotionally they’re basically engaged.

So if O’Brian has cheerfully skated over hurt/comfort, spying, and romance, what IS he writing about?

Well, at one point Stephen declares that he has “a horror of appearing eccentric,” and asks worriedly whether it would make him look weird to practice swordplay on deck. (It will not, the captain of the marines assures him.)

(A few chapters later Stephen, the man who has a horror of appearing eccentric, shows up on Jack’s new ship wearing a wool onesie and carrying a glass hive of bees. The bees promptly invade the morning cocoa.)

Stephen and Jack almost have a duel but then it just kind of fizzles. They seem to have simply forgotten about the duel without, at any point, formally deciding not to duel.

The debt collectors catch up with Jack but fortunately he’s out with a bunch of officers from his ship so they turn the tables on the debt collectors and impress at least two of them into the navy. Ha-HA, take that debt collectors!

Oh, and obviously we DO finally have a sea battle at the end. We may not need spying or hurt-comfort but we MUST have a sea battle.