94
PARTISAN REVIEW
jobs and comfortable homes, without anything more distressing in their
lives, it would seem, than an exasperating mother. Yet they tumble
guiltily into adulterous lover affairs without for a moment wanting to
break up their more or less contented marriages. As Jane Louise, the
heroine of
A Big Storm,
ruminates: "A husband was someone you could
hide behind. You could cover your head with a marriage.. .. You could
stamp out unnecessary or wayward emotions. You could dispel untoward
thoughts. You could pretend that all of your life was all of a piece and it
was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. ..." (Note the word
pretend.)
Colwin can be incisively ironic - and very funny - about oppressive
parents, pretentious poseurs, and the philandering snakes that crawl into
the most orderly gardens, and she harbors no illusions about the price
most people may eventually have to pay for their willful self-deceptions.
But neither her irony nor her comic sense is tainted with acid. What she
captures with finely nuanced precision and generosity of spirit is the way
perfectly sensible human beings, seemingly without any cause for anxiety,
become fretful about the direction their lives have taken, and berate
themselves for their fretting. In Colwin's hands none of this ever smacks
of self-pity or self-indulgence.
In her scrutiny of the domestic scene, she is particularly astute about
the meaning of marriage and its awesome disturbances. As
A Big Storm
opens, Jane Louise, a successful book-designer in her late thirties , has just
been married ("In sickness and in health, and in confusion"), and she
can't stop gnawing at an invisible hangnail:
Had she changed? Was there now some new creature named Jane
Louise Parker who was older, wiser, more grown-up? Did married
people look and smell different? ... What an odd thing it was to have
a husband. This person who was almost like a household object - a
pillow or a lamp - who transformed you from a single entity into a
unit, whose breathing at night was as reassuring as a clock, to whom
you could, of an evening, pay almost no attention at all, and who in
one minute, with one look, could turn into what a husband actually
was: a sexual being.
Jane Louise's plaintive agitation about the metamorphoses of marriage
stems from her own and her husband's childhood traumas, which make
her apprehensive about the giant step she has just taken. Neither of them
has entirely recovered from the long-ago rancor of their parents' divorces
and remarriages, and when they plan to have a baby, she is tormented by
the thought that two "unprepared humans," of unhappy background,
"were supposed to create some unswerving, stable, and dependable
