Disposition
Covid happened. Book club fizzled. I was left with a hole. I found The Girly Book Club online (https://thegirlybookclub.com), which had virtual events. I looked through the previous books and almost all of them I have either read, or wanted to read, so I figured I would give it a try! This was the first book I read. I missed reading with a group and couldn’t wait to get started!
Editorial
I look back at this book and while heartbreaking, it still manages to leave me with a warm feeling. It touches on so many complex issues (in no particular order): immigration, marriage, murder, work, infidelity, young love, abuse, alcoholism, parenting, loss, control. It also spans a generation, yet it is refreshingly not drawn out. Overall, this is a book about family, good, bad, and otherwise. Far from perfect, but family nonetheless.
From the very beginning I was highlighting and taking notes. The book opens with Francis Gleeson, a cop living in New York, reflecting on his immigration from Ireland and the happenstance that led him to be a police officer. My first highlighted quote, at 2%, is when Gleeson makes a profound realization about his life.
“He saw his life split up into blocks of twenty, and for the first time he wondered how many blocks he’d get.”
This really resonated with me personally, when I was 20 I felt invincible. I could be anything I wanted to, no barriers, there was still time! But the older you get, and the more obligations that are piled upon you, it becomes more difficult. Every change you want to make for your life, is increasingly harder the older you get. This concept continued to ebb and flow throughout the novel.
On one hand you have Francis Gleeson and his wife Lena (the flawed yet somehow perfect wife/mother); then Brian Stanhope and his mentally ill wife, Anne move in next door. The men happen to work at the same precinct, and the women happen to have babies six months apart from each other (Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope). None of this ties the family together, in fact it pushes the families apart, with one exception… Kate and Peter are inseparable. Kate has grown up with the mostly perfect childhood, while Peter suffers from a range of emotional abuse; which only seems to make the pair even closer (very Romeo and Juliet-esque).
“The quiet of the house when she kept to her room was not the peaceful silence of a library, or anywhere near as tranquil. It was, Peter imagined, more like the held-breath interlude between when a button gets pushed and the bomb either detonates or is defused. He could feel his own heartbeat at those times. He could track his blood as it looped through his veins.”
From here there are predictable plot lines, but many twists and turns along the way, much like life. In the end, I felt content. It felt probable, which is most likely why it has stuck with me. It is not a traditional page-turner, but rather a time-lapse of generations, with the highlights, the lowlights, yet still relatively tied up in a bow at the end.
Distant Bookends 