The New Republic

The Light of Day

by Graham Swift

(Alfred A. Knopf, 324 pp., $24)

Click here to purchase the book.The writer who confines his novel to the space of a single day faces
a paradox. The day that he chooses must be somehow extraordinary in
the lives of his characters, a day not like all the others, so as
to justify its selection. But it must also be, in some ways, a day
just like all the others, because it bears the burden of
illuminating the entirety of a life. When this device is
successful, the day seems to respond to its authorial pressure like
a balloon, expanding to encompass all the moments of present and
past that come to bear on the current action. But when it does not
work, time seems to contract rather than expand, and the device
becomes nothing more than an arbitrary gimmick meant to distract
the reader from the novel's otherwise lacking form or substance.

In other words: in order to carry out the one-day form successfully,
the novelist must cheat. Mrs. Dalloway would be of little interest
if Virginia Woolf had taken the formal and temporal restriction too
literally; stripped of Clarissa's longings for Sally or her regrets
over Peter, the novel would be nothing more than the schedule of
errands for a woman of a certain temperament planning a party. But
the longings and the regrets of the past are essential to
Clarissa's being, and therefore to her story. By animating her
thoughts, they animate her life. And this "cheating"recapitulating
the bumps and the valleys of the preceding months and years, rather
than hewing stubbornly to the straight line of the present dayis
much more true to the actual experience of lived time, to the way a
person's thoughts really do range over the course of a day,
lingering much longer on memories and daydreams than on current
activities. This is also why the one-day form fails in Don
DeLillo's recent Cosmopolis: the internal monologue that Eric
Packer unspools in his limo keeps tightly apace with the action
(such that there is), allowing no history and no background, and
therefore no character, to overflow the tight bounds of the
predetermined time limit.

Graham Swift first tried out the one-day novel in his debut, The
Sweet-Shop Owner, which appeared in 1980, and he has returned to it
periodically over the years, although he has also permitted himself
some extreme deviationshis extraordinary Waterland, published in
1983, encompasses more than two hundred years in the history of the
family that it chronicles. But Swift, like Woolf, cheats the form:
even when he holds himself to the classical unity, he stretches its
boundaries as far as they will give. The Sweet-Shop Owner examines
the course of a thirty-year marriage through the reflections and
flashbacks of the title character, wasting little time on the
perfunctory outlines of his routine. And Swift's last novel, Last
Orders, published in 1996, pushes the limits even further: though
it ostensibly records the journey of four men to scatter the ashes
of their friend Jack into the sea, the book changes perspective
among its characters with each chapter, so that the result is an
examination of five lives rather than a memorial to one.

It would be wrong to call Swift's novels mysteries, but not entirely
wrong: he has a quick sense of suspense, and he is stingy with the
details of his plots, revealing key information only gradually en
route to a final epiphany that goes at least some waythough never
all the waytoward illuminating the dark corners of even the most
apparently well-lighted life. His characters, typically, are
middle-aged men who have suffered some kind of psychic blowa
divorce, a deaththat has brought them to the discovery that their
lives are at the mercy of powerful forces beyond their control, a
combination of family, history, and mythology. In Waterland,
Swift's third novel and his most profound realization of this
vision to date, Tom Crick, a history teacher, is about to be forced
into retirement, with administrative cutbacks in his department
conveniently coinciding with a personal scandal: Mary, his wife of
thirty years, has had a mental breakdown that culminates with her
kidnapping a child from a supermarket. As Tom tries to make sense
of the ancient sins and betrayals that led to her act, his lectures
to his students take the form of a meditation on the history of his
family, Fenmen engaged in a centuries-long struggle to reclaim the
land on which they live from the River Ouse, which constantly
threatens to flood it. Though the fundamental mystery at the heart
of the booka question of paternity that spans multiple
generationsis never completely resolved, the truths that Swift
conjures are genuinely moving and deeply satisfying.

Despite Swift's interest in the crimes of humanity, in general his
characters serve not as detectives but as watchmen: Tom's father
Henry Crick, a lock-keeper on the River Ouse; Willy Chapman, the
sweet-shop proprietor, who presides behind his counter during the
day and returns home to stand guard over his invalid wife at night.
The activity of keeping vigil has always seemed to have something
in common with the occupation of the novelist, who strikes a
similar pose with regard to his characters. Swift is among the most
invisible of contemporary writers: each of his books is told in the
first person by a highly idiosyncratic narrator (or narrators),
whose voice is in no way mistakable for that of the author. Yet for
all their eccentricities and neuroses, the attitude of Swift's
characters toward their lives is one of nearly uniformand often
frustratingpassivity. And this passivity is mirrored by their
creator, who adopts largely the same attitude toward them. The
watchman's invisibility can be beneficial, but in the face of a
threat intervention is often necessary.

George Webb, the protagonist of The Light of Day, is in fact a
detective, but the crime that preoccupies him is long since solved.
Two years earlier, George, a private investigator specializing in
"matrimonial work," was hired by Sarah Nash to follow her husband
Bob, who was having an affair with a young Croatian refugee whom
the couple had taken in. With the war in the former Yugoslavia
ended, Kristina was scheduled to return home, but Sarah feared that
the affair was not really over. She charged George to follow the
couple to the airport to see whether Kristina got on the plane by
herself. "Even if that's where they say goodbye, I want to know how
he does it, how they do it," she told George. "I want to have been
therebut invisiblefor that."

The leave-taking at the airport went as planned, but afterward
George, who by then had fallen in love with Sarah, followed Bob
back home. Seized with foreboding, he returned to the house ten
minutes later to find that Sarah had murdered her husband with the
kitchen knife that she had been using to prepare their dinner. She
promptly confessed to the crime and was sentenced to ten years in
prison. When the novel begins, George is preparing for his
fortnightly visit to her there, a journey he has made faithfully
for the last two years.

This much of the story becomes clear in the novel's first few pages.
But the tangle of motivations, conscious and unconscious, that
underlie the action remains for George to tease out. As he makes
his way through the day on which the novel takes placethe second
anniversary of the crimehe painstakingly reconstructs not only the
events of that singular day two years ago, but, as all of Swift's
characters eventually must do, his own personal history, which
includes a failed marriage and an estranged daughter with whom he is
in the process of reconciling.

As befits a detective in George's line of work, the main object of
his investigation into his own past is marriage and its seemingly
inseparable companion, infidelity. The tale of marital betrayal is
inherently trite, but George knows from listening to his clients
that the participants are unable to perceive it as such. " 'My
husband is seeing another woman.' There aren't so many ways of
saying itbut you have to look as if you haven't heard it said in
every possible way. They're all unique: the only one to have to come
to the doctor with this rare complaint." Of course, George knows
well that they are not unique, having witnessed as a child his
father's affair with the mother of a friend. George kept this
knowledge from his mother, who found out about the affair only when
her husband, on his deathbed, repeatedly called the name of his
long-ago lover.

Now George tries to understand the basis for the attraction between
Bob and Kristina, which has resonances for his own infatuation with
Sarah. Both cases, he believes, are a variation on the classic coup
de foudre: "Something happens. We cross a line, we open a door we
never knew was there. It might never have happened, we might never
have known." Once the line is crossed, there is no going back; such
doors, once opened, can never be closed. "Something's come over
you," a line that is repeated again and again in various contexts,
might be the novel's mantra; but George is never able to articulate
what exactly that "something" might be.

Was there a period at least, an initial stage, when [Bob had] felt
himself slipping, sliding, and tried to resist? That sweet good
periodautumn slipping into winter, three years agowhich, for all of
them, seemed to be about something else. This new presence in the
house, this new soft mood. The urge to protect.... Pity and charity
sliding, melting into something else.

Or it was just a single moment? Maybe. One of those moments that
turn everything upside down. No preliminary period of veering, and
arguing with himself, no watching her every day like some
substitute father but at the same time like a spy in the dark. A
moment, an opportunity. They were alone together in the house. The
dead of winter. Curtains drawn. They caught each other like
startled animals. A door left open. A look that passed between them,
a look that wasn't so much like two looks colliding and instantly
bouncing away, but like a single bolt sliding shut.

When George first sees Kristina, as Bob picks her up on the way to
the airport, he looks for "some dizzying, devastating factor that
might, in an instant, explain everything. But didn't I know, by
then, there's no telling how it strikes?" He knows because "it" has
struck him as well. Again, he is at a loss to explain it, but it
happened the moment he saw Sarah waiting in his office.

The bar of sunshine between us caught her knees and gave them an
almost tinselly sheen. They didn't seem like the usual knees of
women that can project from a skirt with all kinds of angles and
meaning. They were just knees caught in the light.

It was her knees, maybe.

If this observation"it was her knees, maybe"seems less than
revelatory, at this point one is still willing to accept George's
confusion as the necessary blindness of a man in love.

But eventually there must be some revelation, and George's powers as
a detective are unfortunately not up to the task of producing one.
Why did Sarah murder her husband after he had given up his lover
and was returning home to her, after she had gotten dressed up and
prepared his favorite dinner? This is the mystery at the heart of
the novel, and Swift characteristically delays its resolution as
long as possible. What "came over" Sarah, George believes, was the
realization that though Bob had given up Kristina, he still cannot
truly return to her. "He's not really there. He hears his wife's
voice. He steps into the kitchen. Yes, this is his house, this is
his wife, but it all seems utterly impossible. She sees it in his
eyes. The smile on her face goes out." Once the door is opened,
there is no going back.

This is a relatively uncomplicated vision of love, and it is at odds
with the considerably richer attitude toward affairs of the heart
that Swift has taken in his previous novels. One of the
extraordinary things about Swift's writing has always been his
ability to bridge the disjunction between the zeniths of human
passionthe stuff of art and literatureand the much more superficial
way in which we actually experience the primary portion of our
lives. In Waterland, he portrays adolescent sex games as part of the
grand scheme of natural history, as mysterious and primal as the
reproductive habits of the eel; but we also see the romance between
Tom and Mary in all its sweet banality, the shared confidences on
the train rides to and from school and the ruined windmill turned
love nest where they have their trysts. "Do you think people kill
themselves for love?" one character asks in Ever After, Swift's
fifth novel, which reads the early death of the protagonist's wife
against the shadow of his parents' troubled marriage, which ended
with his father's suicide. But again the mundanities of the
couple's courtshipthe late-night taxis, the seedy hotel that they
visitare as vivid as the moments of great passion.

For all the intensity of his investigation into the forces that bind
people together or blow them apart, Swift has often seemed to
regard love as a persistent source of mystery. The marriages his
novels depict are pockmarked by great gaps in understanding;
sometimes the characters are able to circumvent them, but more
often they become abysses that threaten to swallow anyone who steps
near. The relationship at the center of The Sweet-Shop Owner is
estranged from the start, with a wife who seeks to escape her
marriage through the slow suicide of allowing her asthma to go
untreated for years. Even the widowed narrator of Ever After, who
enjoyed a happy (if abbreviated) marriage, is preoccupied not only
by his mother's adultery but also by the failed marriage of a
distant ancestor, a pastor who fled his wife after losing his faith.
All that Swift's characters can hope for is some belated
understanding of the turmoil after the catastrophe has occurred;
any advance reckoning is an impossibility.

The Light of Day takes up many of the same questions as Swift's
earlier work. Do people die for love, and if so what are the
consequences for those whom they leave behind? Can we choose to
fall in and out of love, or are we inevitably overcome by forces
beyond our control? But the book restricts itself to a much more
shallow scope, and so it seems to strain for the sort of operatic
intensity that once was natural. The overlapping circles of the
novel's love affairs swirl around nearly every character: George and
Sarah, Sarah and Bob, Bob and Kristina, George and his ex-wife,
George and his secretary, George's father and the neighbor,
George's daughter and her girlfriend. Yet its vision of love never
advances much beyond the oft-repeated "Something's come over me," a
simplistic and unsatisfying conception. This is not entirely for
lack of trying. "How does it happen?" George wonders at one point.
"How do we choose? Someone enters our life, and we can't live
without them. But we lived without them before..." Sarah will try
to push the idea further: Bob had said that he couldn't live
without Kristina, but "he had lived without her, hadn't he? All the
time he'd never bloody known her. All the time he'd been living
with me.... We can live without anyone. If we have to, we must. "
George feels differently, but either he chooses not to argue his
case or he is incapable of it.

"In my time of doing matrimonial work," he muses toward the end of
the book, "I've seen quite a few couples who've come to grief,
who've gone to war, for no other reason, so far as I can see, than
that over the years of being safe and steady and settled,
something's got lost, something's gone missing, they've got bored."
This plainspokenness is no doubt intentional, but George's
inarticulacy is a disturbing feature in a novel that is essentially
a monologue. Swift used the device of the nave narrator to great
effect in Last Orders, in which a number of the characters speak in
slangy dialect. But George's inadequacy as an investigator of his
own affairs is more troubling for the fact that the book itself is
presented as his written record to Sarah, his "twice-monthly
reports from the world," which he delivers to her on each visit.
"The truth is she's taught me to say things, to say all this, to
put things down in words," he explains. "It's been an education,
really."

There are some wonderful moments in George's account. On the
visitors waiting to get into the prison, he observes: "By and
large, we're a silent bunch except for the kids. We haven't come to
meet each other, and it's only by accident that we look like some
special, picked group, a chosen few." At the end of visiting hours,
"Time's up. A sudden activity. It's like the moment when a ship
leaves. All non-passengers disembark. Where do prisoners sail?"

But the bulk of the novel is related in George's
flatter-than-deadpan style, a near-parody of hard-boiled
detective-speak. "She's reading my face like a book," he notes
early on. "But that's just an expression. I didn't read faces like
books (I didn't read many books), I read faces like faces." More
often, though, the clichs are presented unmediated and
uninterrogated: "we all have to eat," "my bread and butter," "the
girl in her," "fate steps in," "time to kill, " "an old hand,"
"home away from home," and many more. They must be intended
ironicallyit is hard to imagine anything else of Swiftbut the text
itself provides little reassurance.

This novel's exasperating flatness is entirely at odds with Swift's
previous work, which has been distinguished by the density and the
richness of its prose and its psychology. Perhaps with this, his
third attempt at the one-day novel, he has exhausted the form's
potential. Or maybe some questions cannot be answered in a single
day. More likely, though, it is not the form that has failed Swift,
but he who has inadequately risen to its challenge. It is not,
after all, only the addition of the memories and the flashbacks that
makes the one-day novel work, but also the way in which the
accumulating episodes and details coalesce into a full-fledged
character. The unlikely hero of this arbitrarily constricted
romance remains too slight a figure to bear the burden of an entire
life on his thinly sketched shoulders.

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