Good books, old friends

All her readers agree she is unparalleled in her ability to evoke time, mood and place with mesmerizing prose that will hook you from the opening sentence regardless of its subject matter.

Unfortunately, like so many other talented writers who never get their due, very few of you are likely to have heard of Roxana Robinson. And, much as I aspire to someday write as well as she does, I almost wish I had not either.

Don' t get me wrong. I derive a great deal of pleasure from the substantive stories she so effortlessly spins about men and women in conflict with both their world at large and their inner world of best-kept-secret yearnings.

The seemingly unfair tradeoff is I recognize far more shades of myself than I wish to acknowledge in her flawed, realistic characters. Likewise, although I hardly belong to the same upper middle class demographic as those characters, I frequently find myself in the same unenviable position of having to confront uncomfortable truths about the complicated, unpredictable nature that has been arbitrarily assigned to myself and every other member of the human race.

I am especially haunted by one of the entries in Robinson - 2005 short story collection, A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories, published by Random House. It is called Assez, the French word for enough.

Regrettably, I can easily see myself at some point in the near distant future being claimed by the same less than desirable fate as the heroine and narrator of this flawlessly constructed cautionary tale.

But, curiously enough, I really don't mind.

I very well may not get the storybook happy ending every woman dreams of. Yet, again like this heroine, I have had enough happiness in my lifetime already. I know I can survive without the white picket fence.

I will spare you the messy details of how I arrived at this conclusion. But, since finding out how a Robinson story ends is secondary to studying the technique she employs to get to that end, I will gladly tell you how this heroine learned to accept the inevitable.

Of course, no woman wants to believe after 19 years of marriage her husband has suddenly stopped loving her, that he has betrayed her by having an affair with a younger woman. So, who can blame our nameless heroine for hoping her traitorous husband will fall in love with her all over again during their summer vacation in a rented farmhouse in Provence?

Only naturally she prays she can achieve a genuine rapprochement with her mate in this magical cottage where the smell of lavender is "sharp and heavy, almost medicinal."

The husband has admitted the affair and promised he would never stray from his marriage vows again. And, the heroine reasons, "surely in this place where we'd never argued, in rooms where we'd never run out of oxygen," she and her spouse could make a fresh start.

With the help of their old friends John and Nina with whom they are sharing the house, the couple do manage to have good times again, to be contented once more in each other - company.

"It was a lovely month, and it seemed that everything I'd hoped for had come true," our heroine reports. But, on the last night of the trip, it gradually dawns on her that what she so desperately wants simply is not meant to be.

It is the evening of her dreams. She, her husband and their friends are sharing a farewell meal at their "favorite restaurant in Fontvieille, a few miles away."

The food, the service, the conversation, the weather, the setting " they are all perfect. They are everything our heroine could wish for. And, she is finally willing to concede, they are the best she could wish for.

"You can't keep things as they are, but you can hold things fixed in your memory, and so I still have that evening, although everything was lost, after that."

Not only does her husband leave her and marry his former mistress, their mutual friends are soon thereafter each stricken in turn with fatal cancers.

As deeply saddened as our heroine is by these events, with that one incredible evening to sustain her, she somehow manages to carry on just fine on her own.

"It - so strange to think that all that is past, gone, that it - over and can't be reclaimed. But that night in the warm garden, with the dark aromatic countryside all around us, the black starry sky overhead, we were happy. What we had, without realizing it, was enough. It was all we were to have, whether we wanted more or not."

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine - contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She is the librarian at the Genesee District Library - Goodrich Branch.