A poignant exploration of a bond that outlasts death
The Light of Evening
By Edna O'Brien
Houghton Mifflin, 294 pp., $25
A Russian proverb told to me countless times during the year I lived in Moscow with my 3-year-old daughter maintains that the truest love affair is the one between mother and child. And it ends, the proverb adds, the way all love affairs end: in separation.
This saying floated like a ghostly banner over my reading of Edna O'Brien's new novel , ``The Light of Evening." O'Brien's 20th book reaffirmed the sense I've had throughout her long, illustrious career of her kinship with the great Russian authors, most notably Chekhov. The mournful sensuousness, the grief shot through with light, the passionate yet clear-eyed attachment to the small, everyday moments that compose a life. There are differences, of course. Country houses with their confining, crumbling beauty are set in the midst of peat bogs rather than birch woods; opposition to art comes from family members as well as from a religious, uneducated peasantry. Above all, there is the difference of gender.
The mother-child bond in ``The Light of Evening " consists solely in the mother-daughter bond. It is at the center of every female character's life, and it seems at first so fierce as to resist all separation. Distance in space, distance in time, psychological distance, even death -- can nothing part these lovers? O'Brien sets out to explore this question with the powerful means that only fiction offers: vivid, concrete, experiential rather than analytical. And she is at the height of her powers.
The novel shuttles between the lives of its two protagonists: Dilly , the mother , and Eleanora , the daughter . Dilly's hospitalization for cancer serves as the novel's frame and sets its slender plot in motion. At the same time, it provides a natural entry into Dilly's past, in the form of sickbed reminiscence. In language that is strong, supple, and hugely pleasurable, O'Brien gives us the young Dilly's immigration to America in the 1920 s. Here is the journey: ``For nearly two weeks a world of water, pounding and sloshing, great waves full of ice crashing against the portholes and a horizon that could have been anywhere, home or Canada, or Timbuktu, or anywhere." Here is the arrival at Ellis Island: ``On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, our tongues pressed, our eyelids lifted with a button hook, our hearts listened to, our hair examined for lice, then our bodies hosed down by foreign ladies who had not a shred of modesty." Here are the streets of New York: `` Noise poured out of the saloons and boys in long overalls were running hither and thither to deliver jugs of foaming beer, and in an alley children in rags and tatters were chasing young pigs with cabbage stalks and bits of stick." O'Brien's vivid, musical prose wafts us into the past, enveloping us in its sights and sounds and smells.
Within the frame of Dilly's illness and Eleanora's flying visit to her bedside, the novel's intricate structure counterpoints opposing narratives. Against Dilly's life in New York is set the life of Dilly's mother back home in Ireland, rendered in her lively, reproachful letters. Eventually a romantic betrayal sends Dilly back to Ireland and a lasting but dreary marriage to the owner of a ruined country house called Rusheen. Eleanora, one of the two children of this marriage, escapes in her turn. After her own disastrous marriage, to a cold, controlling, jealous man much older than she is, she flees to London. Here she parlays the ``secret subversive life" of art, begun during her marriage, into a successful career as a writer. Eleanora's story, rendered as a third-person narrative, is less carefully knitted into the novel's overall structure. But it, too, finds a counterpoint in letters from her mother. These letters are bundled into a single section following Eleanora's story. As the novel unfolds, we see that the love affair between mother and daughter has in fact long since ended in separation. It becomes clear that Dilly and Eleanora are literally worlds apart.
Over and over, the framing plot brings Dilly and Eleanora to the brink of connecting, then veers off. Sitting at Dilly's bedside, ``Eleanora moves, then turns, and the last thing she sees is her mother's arm raised, her nightgown sleeve raised also, sawing the air, the bone of her elbow the loneliest blue and the pity she should have shown earlier has started up in her then." Suspense mounts as the novel's two stories converge. Will Dilly die before she can change her will and leave Rusheen to Eleanora? More urgently, will mother and daughter at last truly connect?
The surprising yet satisfying conclusion of ``The Light of Evening" suggests the little wooden painted doll so beloved by Russians called `` matryoshka, " meaning roughly ``little big mother ," that splits in half to disclose a smaller, identical doll, which then splits in turn, and so on. The price of avoiding separation, O'Brien seems to say, is the inescapable weight of another's life inside you. The price of fully experiencing the present is the past, and the price of the past is the past's past, and . . . and . . . .
Ann Harleman teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her latest book, ``Thoreau's Laundry: Stories," is due out in March. 
