Word: ballards
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...plot is straightforward. Professor Paul Ballard and his student Beth Sieverdsen have an affair, but a tragic accident separates the two for more than two decades. Unbeknownst to Ballard, Beth bears the couple's daughter and gives her up for adoption. Through this daughter, Ballard and Beth are eventually reunited...
...grand passion between Ballard and Beth scarcely seems strong enough to last a semester, let alone 25 years. When the couple meets, Beth is a bored and beautiful undergraduate at a small Vermont college; Ballard is her instructor in a vague brand of philosophy. Beth fires double entendre after wildly provocative double entendre at the defenseless Ballard, her devoted tutor. The two rather quickly become lovers--but in the physical, not emotional, sense of the word. Delbanco incorrectly assumes a few lurid encounters between Ballard and Beth are sufficient demonstration of their timeless love. The tenuous emotional bond between...
...When Ballard is severely injured in a hit-and-run accident quite early in the book, his romance with Beth is obviously doomed. Delbanco faithfully lists Ballard's injuries, yet writes absolutely nothing about his reaction to the accident or his recovery from the accident. One day Ballard is nearly dead, several pages later he seems quite well. Still later Delbanco dismisses 15 years of Ballard's life in two paragraphs and then mentions that Ballard has only now nearly finished working through the various stages of grief that follow a loss...
This lack of precision is maddening, especially where emotions are concerned. "Renouncing her calmly, [Ballard] sent [Beth] away," Delbanco notes when, after the accident, Ballard distances himself emotionally from Beth. No other explanation for his sudden termination of the affair is given. Equally inexplicably, it is shortly after the accident that Beth discovers she's pregnant and chooses not to tell Ballard but to give the baby up for adoption. Delbanco explains that Beth "was twenty-one, an adult...[who was] in control of things and could make up her own mind...
...this is just fun and games. The real show begins when Ballard's car jumps a barrier and head-ons another car; the driver is killed, but his wife, a doctor (Holly Hunter), survives. Ballard meets her at the hospital, and in a trice they are having urgent sex in an airport garage. The doctor tells of her other sexcapades in cars: "They felt like traffic accidents." She loves making love to men with scars; to her, each wound is an orifice, and auto eroticism is an aphrodisiac. It is more--a sacrament--to Vaughan (Elias Koteas), whose obsession with...