Swan Abbey
Review by Walter Cummins
This is a collection of original and unusual stories, the characters richly developed as they face essential dilemmas. Some of these people exemplify the title’s notion of terrible or at least difficult because they are not in control of their situations. While human complexities are integrated in all of the stories, no two are alike. There are no redundancies in the involved predicaments or the situations of their occurrence.
But deep dilemmas are at the root of all these stories, each unique and resonating beyond an immediate plot issue. The stories usually cover a period of time and create a reality from a series of incidents, past and present, developing a full context for the central quandary, where it is leading often not emerging until deep into the telling.
Apparently, from her Notes on the Stories, Dupal has lived or spent time in many places in the U.S., Canada, the Utah desert, Italy, India, and beyond. She knows so much about each, incorporating information that authenticates the world of each story.
For example, in “Godfrey Green” she offers in-depth explanations of the process of art restoration and about the female artists whose works are undergoing the intricate process of repair. Here’s one example: “She [Tasmin] oxidized her own pigments in paint pots numbered in the hundreds, replicating the exact shade of blue of the Virgin Mary’s veil in more than a dozen frescoes, in small flashes of light and shadow in the depths of ancient chiaroscuro.”
Such knowledge goes beyond a technical explanation and serves to convince that the author knows the characters and their emotional lives as intimately. Of a painter Tasmin restored, the narrator says, “She inhabited the painter’s personality and channeled his spirit.” Tasmin is a mystery to the narrator, a half century younger, who is driven by a desire to fathom Tasmin’s personality, wondering whether she wants to inhabit it. Such a concern runs though the collection, the hope of penetrating the unknown of a person or situation and even of self. Ultimately, the narrator chooses not to become Tasmin’s successor, fearing the loss of her identity. The story ends with her awareness that her young daughter, born several years after the involvement with Tasmin, will face the same dilemmas of making her own choices.
In the collection’s title story, “The Kindness of Terrible People,” Eve, who retired from teaching at sixty-three because of a failed affair with the university chancellor, realizes she stopped earning too soon. She finds herself in a financial crunch, possibly having to sell her valuable classic car or her cottage on North Carolina’s Lake Gaston. But the immediate situation is a visit from her college-student niece, Riley. To Eve’s surprise, Riley shows up with Braverman, her new boyfriend.
Braverman turns out to be a puzzle. So much about him becomes suspect. Did he really drop out of Harvard and then Duke? Is he really in his late twenties? Eventually, Eve begins to wonder if Braverman is really his name. As with Tasmin, a version of the questionable nature of knowing a person complicates this and the other stories, but in this one Braverman is the collection’s most literal mystery.
Riley is more of a familiar mystery. Still not yet twenty, she has cropped her long, thick hair and turns out to be failing courses. She is not the Riley Eve knew and loved. Braverman’s presence complicates Eve’s opportunities to understand her niece, especially because she becomes fascinated by him and his detailed knowledge of literature, but more so aroused because he revives Eve’s memories of sex with the chancellor.
During their many conversations without Riley, Braverman reveals much about himself, the college he had actually attended and even his real name. He helps Eve with her garden and repairs to her house, deepening her interest in him, but Eve suddenly sours when he calls her a “cool old lady”: “shame and humiliation burned brightly within her breast.”
Who is the title’s terrible person—the man known as Braverman or Eve herself. And where does the kindness come in? The story ends with her smoking one of the Gitanes he had given her, as she smiles at him “through a ring of smoke.”
Such complications at the heart of the collection’s stories are what makes them so effective. Dupal knows so much about so many things and tells with such rich prose that these creations are enveloping.
