|
A full life contains millions of choices; some are inconsequential, others have the power to change everything, and sometimes only time and distance show the true impact. In her new book, Penelope Lively examines some of the choices that molded her own life and wonders what would have happened had these choices gone another way. If her mother had chosen to flee Egypt for South Africa instead of Palestine during World War II, would they have survived the trip as so many did not? If she had children at a younger age, married someone else, and pursued a different career, what would have happened?
Spanning the years from Word War II to the 1970s, the period of Lively's youth and young adulthood, MAKING IT UP emphasizes the precarious nature of those years, personally and culturally, and how choices made casually colored everything that followed them.
The theme of alternative endings and the time period will remind many readers of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT. A crucial difference is that ATONEMENT's narrator wishes for a different ending for other characters; Lively's exercise is focused entirely on her own choices. Also, she seems happy with the choices she made, giving the stories in MAKING IT UP a sense of averted crises rather than of destinies unfulfilled.
However, if this book is lighter and more personal, the reader must be impressed with Lively's gifts as a novelist. It seems like she can make a story out of practically anything that has happened to her. She's so empathetic with her characters; she captures her era so well and draws her readers in so easily that each story is entertaining and meaningful.
This is the greatest strength as well as the greatest frustration of MAKING IT UP. The stories feel like the beginnings of novels, but they don't go anywhere and they do not connect with one another. "I should write not one book but hundreds; I should pursue each idiosyncratic path. Not an option, clearly, and to follow a single outcome seemed like a constriction..." But the path is only a path; as it is unchosen, there is no destination.
MAKING IT UP is a good companion to Lively's earlier book, THE PHOTOGRAPH, in which a collection of objects in an English country house illustrate early and mid-twentieth century British culture through the stories of how these objects came to reside there.
--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn (CQuinn9368@yahoo.com)
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
