"Solitude Novels" by Caroline Coleman
During the pandemic, I found a perverse pleasure in reading about characters who want to be alone. My three favorite novels that I’ve read since March all have first-person protagonists who choose, seek out and pursue solitude. Each has isolated him or herself in a metaphorical—and, in one case, literal—cabin in the woods. They shun people. They’re afraid of connections.
As the novels unfold—in deftly handled retrospective—we learn that all of these narrators have retreated from trauma. They use the solitude to mull over their experience: they turn it around in their hands and examine it the way they might a diamond, seeing where it catches and holds light.
The secret to a good solitude novel, I think, is to somehow break free from the navel-gazing that suffering seems, at first, to necessitate. It is this very need for protection, for a shell, or time to process grief, that seems to have driven these narrators into solitude in the first place. And thus, what moved me as a pandemic reader was that the novels depict people who isolated “well.”
On the surface, the three would seem to share little. SALTWATER is a debut novel released last year and written by Jessica Andrews, born in 1992 in the Northeast of England. OUT STEALING HORSES was published in 2003 and written by Per Petterson, a Norwegian writer born in 1952. Tomas Gonzalez, author of DIFFICULT LIGHT, was born in Medellin in 1950 and has been hailed as the “best-kept secret of Colombian literature”—although by now his virtuosity is well known. The novel was released in English in August of this year. Andrew’s narrator is a young woman. The other two wrote from the point of view of older men.
Lucy, the narrator of SALTWATER, leaves her London job to hole up in her grandfather’s “small stone cottage” in a tiny fishing port in Ireland. She says of the Blue Stack Mountains there: “Time alters as you drive into them. They are brown and reassuring but appear blue in the shifting light, dripping navy and indigo into the valleys.” Lucy claims that she left London because it’s “built on money and ambition and I didn’t have enough of either of those things.” We sense that that is a partial truth.
The novel has three timelines. In one, Lucy tells us of her childhood until university, especially her codependent relationship with her alcoholic father and her resentment of her mother for breaking free. In another, her daily life in Ireland unfolds in the present, including a love interest with an unnamed man. The third strings together multiple sensual passages delving into Lucy’s body, inspired in large part by her deaf brother’s relationship to reading lips. Each chapter is short and incisive, like Weike Wang’s CHEMISTRY and Jenny Offill’s DEPARTMENT OF SPECULATION. By the end, Lucy reaches a healthier relationship with herself: she no longer blames her mother for having desires, and she begins to own her own.
Trond, the narrator of OUT STEALING HORSES, has moved to “a small house in the far east of Norway.” He says all “my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this…And now here I am, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined.” He says he is fixing up this house to “use” time: “Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”
And yet he later confesses that one “of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt… a shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.” Time, in other words, holds both potential and danger for the isolated, something the pandemic reader knows full well. Trond is the person to look to when you wonder where you can grow and where you can lose your self.
Trond, like Lucy, suffered trauma. Similarly, he claims his needs are few. He is making himself small, just as Lucy tries to. One senses that a side effect of suffering is to pretend one is barely there. Trond tells us that his wife died three years earlier in a car accident that he “only just survived” himself. He says of shopping—and, we sense, of life—there “is not much I want, just a loaf of bread and something to put on it.”
During the novel, however, vivid, beautiful and terrible memories surface of the last time he ever saw his father, when they lived together in a cabin in this town in 1948. Of the time they spent chopping down trees together he says, “I was forest.” He shows in intimate detail the way time falls away in physical activity: “when you are in the swing, and all of you have fallen into a good rhythm, the beginning and the end have no meaning at all.” Time disappears for the reader, too, as the sentences invoke the rhythm of felling spruce with a cross-cut saw.
When he travels across the nearby border to Sweden, he says that “it felt different although everything looked the same after we had crossed.” So does Trond move toward being able to connect with a neighbor and his daughter, after crossing over into the memories and uncovering some World War II secrets about his father. The border between health and dis-ease, the pandemic reader senses, is just as real and just as delicate.
David, the narrator of DIFFICULT LIGHT, is 78 and lives by himself in a house whose back patio “looks out over a deep, wide valley.” His wife, like Trond’s, has recently died. David tells us: “Some people find it unsettling that beyond our garden, just beyond the orange and tangerine trees… there yawns such depth and vastness that it seems as if it might swallow everything up, like a terrifying symphony,” and we sense David might be one of those “some” people. David is heading into a rapidly encroaching blindness from macular degeneration. So he is trying to finish—before he descends into literal darkness—the part of his memoir that describes how, almost forty years earlier, his beloved son chose to end his life after a taxi accident that left him a paraplegic tormented by pain. David has since become a famous painter, but in the present he turns down interview request after interview request—until he doesn’t. In processing his memories in isolation, he, too, grows into community.
Reading these three novels in my own relative isolation during the pandemic, scanning the pages, perhaps subconsciously looking for a way to make sense of the opportunities—and drawbacks—of solitude, the superficial differences between these novels paled in comparison to their similarities.
Over the course of the novels, all three narrators, in small but lovely ways, begin to emerge from their shells. They make connections: Lucy with a new love interest and with her formerly estranged mother: Trond with a grieving neighbor and with his own daughter; David befriends a housekeeper who has an unfaithful husband. The reader senses that suffering has power: the power to break down walls; the power to enable us to see the other as someone in pain like our self. And all three narrators seduced me with the intimate way they wrestled with time: their release of selfish ambition; their aggressive hunting down of isolation; their grief as they relived trauma in order to heal from it; their uncovering of family secrets that enabled them to replace bitterness with compassion; their delicate rendering of the physicality of life in the now; and their ultimate inabililty to stay alone.
The novels also capture the way time changes in mysterious ways in solitude. Time seems not so much to progress as to waft through each novel. The timelines are braided in each, yes, but more than that: the awareness of time infuses each scene somehow, like light. There is a dreamlike sense in which solitude enables past, present and future to press in like ghosts.
In a Guardian interview, Andrews said that to compose her novel’s three parts, she wrote the book in three separate strands: “I printed it out, then physically cut it up. My neighbor was away and I had the key to their house in Ireland with a very big kitchen, so I spread the whole thing out on her kitchen floor and made little piles of themes that went together.” I love the physicality of that. It seems to encapsulate the life force that infuses all three novels. In each time is something that can be sliced up into little pieces—or “divided” as Trond puts it—and yet also slotted and moved around in a way that makes the sum greater than the parts.
Indeed, in all of these lyrical and lovely novels, time expands and contracts and ultimately moves onward. Solitude, used well, can bring healing in its wings: including by entering into the unraveling and re-raveling of other and of self.
Caroline Coleman is the author of Loving Soren (B&H 2005). Her short fiction has been published in Ms. Magazine online.
