I am SO GRATEFUL that there was not any more of Dick in there than there was. Speaking of intentional names, ahem!
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I will admit to throwing the book across the room twice in the early part of the book because it was so slow. So frustrating. However, it was after Dick died that I thought the book started to move.
My favorite characters were Polly and Maud. Agnus drove me crazy. I liked her, but she still drove me crazy.
The author had some beautiful passages though that saved the book for me. This is after Dick has died. On page 206 when Polly and Agnus were talking and Polly says âGood. I have to die first. Promise me.â Agnus says âIt will be all right. Not the same, or as good, but all right in the absence of what was better.â
This passage just struck me. My cousin and her husband died recently very suddenly of carbon monoxide poisoning. It perfectly describes how our familyâs life will be going forward and how Polly was going to have to go forward. I liked Agnus better because of it.
I wasnât totally shocked by the Heidi/Nan revelation. I somehow knew that the âSNOW, COLD, BOOTS, ASHES, FURâ that Heidi kept saying had to somehow relate to Fellowship Point, but I didnât catch on right away.
I think that I will keep this book and read it again. I know that I missed things. I am glad that I read it. If it hadnât been for the Book Club, I doubt that I would have finished it.
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@silverlady, Iâm so sorry to hear about your cousin and her husband. How awful.
I was moderately enjoying the book â not loving it, but not hating it â until the scene when Polly came across the dog with the rope around its neck. That was so dark, so scary, and so brutal that I was freaked out. (And of course I knew Dick wasnât going to call. Not only did he have dementia so he couldnât remember, but he never took Pollyâs concerns seriously.) That scene was the point when, for me, the book turned into something significant instead of merely pleasant.
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In Dickâs defense, we never see him at his best. Maybe his best wasnât very good, but there is every indication that he loved Polly and was a faithful husband throughout their marriage. Also, he stood staunchly by Robert and was the first to correspond with him. I do think that speaks to his character, if only in a small way.
The reader meets Dick at the very end of his life, when dementia has made him confused and short-tempered â and incontinent, as we learn later. So many indignities with the progression of that disease.
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I thought this interview was really interesting. Especially this quote (emphasis mine). âBooks Want Things for Themselvesâ: A Conversation with Alice Elliott Dark | Los Angeles Review of Books
Three separate encounters set me on a course to write a big novel. The first was serving on a National Book Award jury a while ago and seeing a wide array of books in a short time period. One factor that made a book stand out was description powerful enough to rival the alluring pictures we see in movies and on TV, and, related to that, world-building. The most persuasive and memorable books created worlds the reader could enter and remember. The second influence was watching the miniseries of He Knew He Was Right, and then reading the book by Anthony Trollope. I was in awe of the twists and turns of the juicy plot and wanted to learn how to do it. The third push came when I read a critic claim that no one is interested anymore in the tropes of the 19th-century novel, and he made a list including, according to my memory, broken wills, inheritances, and so on. I instantly rebelled: those conflicts are evergreen as far as Iâm concerned. I began to develop an ambition of writing a 19th-century-style novel, but with 20th- and 21st-century social concerns.
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I have a hard time giving Dick the benefit of doubt. I have a relative who is very much like Dick and is also now an elderly 80-something man. He is a decent person, but heâs a narcissist and a bit of a verbal bully. His wifeâs importance was centered around how it impacted him. I definitely saw my relative in Dickâs personality, and his wifeâs behavior was similar to Pollyâs. It was actually a bit unsettling to see it in print. A narcissist is still a narcissist when he gets old. In fact, my relative has mellowed a little bit in his 80s, especially since his wife died. So, if this was Dick mellowing as he agedâŠyikes!
@mathmom I think the author achieved some of what she wanted in her book. Her descriptions are very vivid and definitely illustrate her story. I feel her biggest fault was being too wordy, perhaps she thought she needed that to share the full picture she was trying to paint.
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I agree. I never disliked the book. I would have shrugged and called it good enough. Then all of a sudden, Iâd hit a âbeautiful passageâ (including the one you mention) that felt so remarkably right. Those moments saved the book for me too.
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But for every beautiful passage there were some real clunkers. Polly (who never used a computer or a cell phone as far as I could tell!) think about her daughters-in-law as DILs, or âHeidi hinged upward via her strong stomach musclesâ or âtheir speech was as vertical as a good poemâ
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Regarding Dickâs faults â I thought he was a good teacher, painstaking and thorough with his students. Polly finally reaches out to the department chair, Adam, and he replies that there were complaints about Dick, and they didnât want him on the campus any more. Polly doesnât specify what but she says this.
I suppose they canât help themselves, these old men. Too much self-control for too long.
There are some beautiful parts to Darkâs writing as well as some not so beautiful ones. One idea I especially enjoyed seemed to fit Polly perfectly.
Polly had lived her life in manners, and over time had boiled her philosophy down to one precept: in every minute make the world beautiful.
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Very true, @mathmom !
Does anyone else wonder if Agnesâ and Pollyâs friendship would have developed/sustained itself if they had not been in such close physical proximity /shared childhood for most of their lives? They always seemed so formal with each other when Polly was in Agnesâ apartment or house. The epilogue puts it to rest, but it is something I wondered about until those last pages.
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@mathmom, in your quote from Alice Dark, it was âworld-buildingâ that stood out for me. Usually, thatâs a term I associate with fantasy novels, but it was such an important factor in Fellowship Point. I felt like I was there and could picture the the geography of the place, which helped immerse me in the story. I referred to the map more than once. (Reading the hardcover proved to be an advantage â love my Kindle, but the map was virtually unreadable on that.)
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Thereâs a theory that Friendship = Proximity x (Frequency + Duration) x Intensity.
I think Agnes and Polly had just the right combination to make that formula work for their entire lives (with one notable gap that weâll file under âintensityâ).
Some people youâre friends with because they were your childhood pals and know that special part of you; others youâre friends with because they saw you through a crisis; still others youâre friends with because they are physically present as supports in your day-to-day life. Agnes and Polly had all those elements.
But youâre right; there was still a certain formality. I think this passage is somewhat symbolic of that:
"When was the last time you were upstairs in this house?
They both remembered â the day Dick died.
"I meant before that, " Polly said. She led the way up the stairs. âItâs so oddâwe are in an out of the downstairs of each otherâs houses all the time.â
Agnes shrugged. âOld-fashionedâ (p. 231).
Alice Elliott Dark said in an interview about Agnes and Pollyâs relationship:
I think thereâs always an erotic element of friendship, but I didnât want to explicitly bring that out because they wouldnât have explicitly brought it out. They just didnât grow up that way.
At one point I really loved reading about Victorian womenâs friendships, and how they were always lying in bed together, and embracing each other, and being really physically close. It wasnât necessarily sexual, it was just very intimate. But I didnât want to write their relationship like that. I wouldnât say I was writing against anything. They were so real to me; I just let what happened between them be the way that it rolled out.
Alice Elliott Dark Writes Women in Their 80s Like Men in Their 30sïżŒ - Electric Literature
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I love the fact that she wrote about women in their 80s. As a 75-year-old, I was thrilled to see that. You never see that in novels!!
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@mary13- throughout much of the book, I wondered if Agnes was gay, and specifically thought the Virgil unrequited love element, was proof she wasnât. I thought ok, Dark, youâve put that issue to rest.
Without her attraction to Virgil , and the book ended with â I loved someoneâ would we, the reader, have some doubt about Agnesâs sexuality?â
I believe the word âlesbianâ came up once, Agnes might have reflected her mother may have wondered ? Iâm not confident thatâs when it appeared, but it was used to refute that possibility.
From your article above - Dark mentions she cut four male characters Points of view.
Wow, this is interesting because this is such a female centric novel, and as pointed out all of her male characters were not sympathetic characters, I wonder how those chapters would have changed the story.
HM: Agnes thinks of herself as a steward of Fellowship Point. Steward is a significant sort of Quaker word because it implies care, responsibility, but not necessarily ownership or control. Even though you are the author and the creator of this story, and therefore kind of owner of it, did this idea of stewardship resonate with you in your writing? Did you ever feel like the steward of this story?
ED: Thatâs such a beautiful question. I would say yes. What I immediately think about is the hundreds of pages I cut, and that I still feel that theyâre part of the book, even though theyâre not part of the finished book. The book had four male points of view, which all got cut by the end of the editing process. All of that felt really important to me. Iâm thinking of the word shepherd. I felt like I was shepherding all of these pieces together into one pen, which was a book. I never felt like Iâm a channel or anything like that. But Iâm also not sweating over figuring everything out. Characters come to me, the situations come to me, and it is like being given a piece of land, or given a puppy, or given something where you step into a role of stewardship. Youâre not forcing it. Youâre not making it.
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I am sure that every cut of a word, phrase, or chapter is painful to a writer. But so necessary! Thank goodness for editors. I know in our discussions, weâve sometimes commented that an editor hasnât gone far enough, but itâs probably a very delicate and time-consuming task.
In one of the interviews I watched, Dark referred to something in a characterâs backstory that Iâm sure wasnât in the book. She has so much in her head about these characters â they must seem practically real to her. Iâm glad those chapters from the male perspectives were eliminated.
From another interview:
SD : How did your own relationship with the character Dick evolve as you were creating him?
AED: I like Dick. Many people (laughing) have told me they hateâI mean, they literally say they hate Dick. And I donât hate Dick. I didnât want to make fun of him; I wanted to make him someone who was very average. He was just hitting his marks through life. And he had this big idea: he wanted to write the definitive book on pacifism, and he wrote it in 1938. By the time the United States went to war, it was a book that no one was going to read, so it was a failure. He wasnât a person who could turn that around or be resilient enough to move on to something else.
The Quakers of Alice Elliott Darkâs Fellowship Point - Friends Journal
The pre-dawn revelations by Dick during his decline were bittersweet â and yet still âsolipsisticâ (the word Dark uses to describe him in the interview). âWhat he wanted was to have her sit by him as he talked. It wasnât clear that he even knew who she was in those gray hours before dawnâ (p. 169).
I wondered what Polly meant by that, but my guess is that Dick was losing his temper regularly â just flying off the handle for no reason, as we saw him do at home. He was too much of an ailing old man at that point for the complaints to be about running after co-eds or something. (Besides, for all his flaws, that wasnât his style.)
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You might be right, Mary, in this age of Me Too, I went straight there.
I had a really hard time believing that Polly and Agnes would be best friends, even with a childhood friendship. Because of moving around so much I donât have friends like that, but I do have close friends from high school with whom I remain friends. I am often surprised we are still friends since they are an odd bunch!
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