The Last Time They Met
Anita Shreve Little, Brown, 304pp, £10.99
ISBN 0316855960
The covers of Anita Shreve's novels favour seaside scenes in weather conditions from fine to apocalyptic. The muted, misty landscape of her latest book is no exception. Are all her stories set on the same muddy stretch of New England beach, replete with clapboard summer houses and little boats? Or are all her stories essentially the same? As if the titles - Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When?, Resistance - weren't feeble enough, these deliquescent vistas make it clear that we're in for a deeply elemental experience.
Shreve's novels are endemic of a certain dreary, insipid and, one is sorry to say, mainly female fiction. The Last Time They Met begins with a literary festival in Toronto and, through our heroine, the prosaically named poet Linda Fallon, Shreve valiantly defends the romantic writers' patch - love might be unfashionable, but it is "the central drama of our lives".
In a recent newspaper article, Shreve was described as queen bee of the bestseller lists. Since the publication of The Weight of Water, shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1998, she has turned out a novel a year (with sadly predictable results), and her name regularly appears on suspiciously dreamy jackets to puff first-time novelists. She is an accomplished writer, but clever plotting and "lyrical" prose are no substitute for convincing characterisation and narrative integrity.
The Last Time They Met is told in reverse chronology, so that the happy ending is turned upside down: the story begins with the reunion of the middle-aged lovers and ends with their teenage romance and the terrible accident that drove them apart. The long central passage recalls a steamy adulterous affair, after they both unaccountably fetch up in Africa in their twenties.
This exotic interlude allows Shreve to draw on her own experience of living in Kenya, and she duly creates a lively picture of the Happy Valley high jinks. A glib sub-plot about a political martyr is, however, hopelessly out of place. Like the majestic Olympia Biddleford and her impossibly manly physician in Shreve's historical Fortune's Rocks, the hero and heroine must be furnished with a cause. But poor Linda is no Dorothea Brooke. "Oh, Thomas, I am dying for you," she gasps in love letters lamenting the poverty and disease all around her. There is very little room for irony or jokes in this world of trembling emotion.
Shreve is, above all, a "sensuous" writer. Characters don't simply speak, but communicate in meaningful italics and smouldering glances. From the moment Linda arrives at the hotel, the bed, the mirror, the telephone all spark erotic fantasies. So when she meets her old lover, we know it won't be long before things become distinctly "archival and primitive". But, despite Oprah-style bonding between Linda and her gay alcoholic son, there is something uncomfortably reactionary about Shreve's novels. The sexes are different species, capable of "coming together" as the "blood and bone of one person", but fundamentally distinct. Thomas's unfortunate first wife is "voluptuous" (read fat) and therefore undesirable, while our tall, blonde heroine has limbs like birches - her touch is "electric", her presence "like detonating a grenade".
The obligatory twist undermines all that has gone before, leaving the reader feeling strangely cheated, not to mention confused. When was the last time they met? And if, as the ending suggests, the whole novel is "just a dream", who cares?
Lisa Allardice is deputy arts and books editor of the NS
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