Here she is,brooding on the wrongs done to her by her novelist husband:“I think he’s lying to me. I said,‘If you don’t tell me you’re seeing her,if you sneak behind my back and I find out accidentally,it makes me feel mad. It makes me crazy …’ The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know;of knowing that he’s lying to me. The clumsiness of the lies,the humiliation of being clumsily lied to.”
How to End a Story runs from 1995 to 1998 and is an extraordinary portrait of the breakdown of a marriage with all the duplicities and rage and horror of two people who have been extraordinarily fond of each other who end up (sounding the depth of the cliche) unable to be on the same page. You can have known the outline of this story for a quarter of a century and have been fond of the people depicted for years before that and still be shocked and awed,filled with pity and terror to experience the bludgeoningly fearful ferocity with which Garner presents two nice people tearing each other to pieces.
It’s not made easier by the love and gentleness in the midst of this world gone awry. She says of his new novel – a masterpiece,by sheer power of design:“If I could write anything half as good as that,I’d be thrilled.” And “He touched my arm and said,‘You’re a good person.’ Later he said,‘I care more about what you think of it than anyone else. Isn’t it funny how different we are?’”
Needless to say she comes to resent,in one of her moods,the “warmth” she’s managed to inject into his work just as he can’t stand the way she “despised the ‘rational’ and worshipped ‘feelings’”. Nor does he have the faintest inkling of why someone who is an artist should take a bath in psychoanalysis.
And we get sudden disconcerting glimpses of the man she once loved,still loves,can’t stand loving. “Once,10 years ago,he said to me humbly,‘Am I getting any better?’ which shamed me then and the thought of which shames me now.” At the nadir of everything there’s this:“‘I’ll look after you,’ he says,in a small voice. ‘I’ll be glad to look after you,if you’ll let me.’”