Word: colwin
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...felt in the body itself." John Updike's celebration of a summer holiday omits one delight: reading John Updike. It can be experienced in the pages of Summer (Addison-Wesley; 252 pages; $35), a collection of seasonal bouquets by 37 writers including Mary Cantwell (To a City Breeze), Laurie Colwin (How to Avoid Grilling), Wallace Stevens (Sailing After Lunch) and Meg Wolitzer (The Summer Reading List). Herewith another summer reading list to beguile the hours spent in hammocks, grass and sand...
...Frank is an investment banker turned consultant with a wife and two grown sons. Billy is a considerably younger economic historian with a husband who works for a think tank. But what these two do, and who they are, could hardly matter less. Frank and Billy are employees in Colwin's full-time business: love...
Love may well be life's most blinding obsession, but Colwin is so obsessed with her subject that for the first six of her eight stories she actually neglects the players. Flesh fades before wordplay as he, elegant in his tweed coat and paisley scarf, embraces her, a slob in worn corduroys and ratty sweater, on the way to the frowsy couch in Billy's study. Readers can scarcely hear Billy's battered loafers thud to the floor for the detonations of insights and definitions...
...Colwin's prevailing theory--that love is at best a paradox--leads her to a symmetry as incongruously formal as a minuet played backward. Frank and his wife are perfectly partnered in their taste for English cars, Early American sideboards, houses in the South of France and dressy parties. Billy and her husband are a matching pair in their indifference to all of the above. It is the adulterers who are incompatible, an irony at once deliciously comic and far too tidy. When the lovers finally sneak off to an idyllic week in a Vermont cottage, subsisting on passion...
After Billy ends the affair-- to borrow from Colwin's belatedly accurate title--a marvelous thing happens. "You're my child substitute," Billy had told her lover. Now she gives birth to a son, replacing metaphor with life. Love, no longer a dance, no longer a word game, connects to the rest of life and death and takes on the weight of destiny. As the blood flows, bringing little William into the world, Colwin does not abandon her chosen theme; she movingly fulfills...