And the Love You Make

The Love You Take a novel by Robert Wilson.  Warbler Press.  270 pp.  *****

Robert Wilson is a first novelist who writes like a veteran, and well he might; he has published three biographies, has written and edited for a variety of publications—including the Washington Post and The American Scholar—and for years was one of my favorite book reviewers for both the Post and USA Today, where he was also an assigning editor and assigned me a number of reviews.  We’ve known each other for forty years, and now he produces this first novel and is a total natural.  My only question is: what took you so long?

The book is especially enjoyable for me because it is what I would call a Sixties novel, though it actually begins in 1970[1], on the day after the Kent State shootings, and most of the action takes place long after that.  But the spirit of the Sixties generation penetrates the book (the title comes from a Beatles song), and it takes up a central question that faced all of us during that time: how does a generation raised on free love and free sex, and celebrating those things, deal with the institution of marriage?  This certainly isn’t a new question, for this generation or any other, and it’s not going anywhere.  But it expressed itself in my generation in a particular way.[2]

Andy Watson is a freshman at a small liberal arts college in Virginia when the Kent State shootings take place.  Although the campus was already changing, it underwent an abrupt change with the shootings: classes shut down, a free university began on a hillside in front of the school, and academic life came to a halt.[3]  Andy was at the demonstration with some friends when a slightly older student, a woman from New Orleans named Susanna, casually let him prop his back on her legs.  That little bit of touch was enough to get a young man’s heart racing, and when, later in the day, they go to a favorite professor’s house for dinner, and the man happens to have a sauna, things proceed rather rapidly.

Andy has been trying to maintain a romance with his high school sweetheart, a beautiful young woman named Shelley who is at a different college in Virginia, but that is going the way such things often do: it’s hard to get together often enough to maintain it, there are other temptations, their lives are changing.  With Shelley he had stopped short of the final act, but the older and more experienced Susanna had no such compunctions.  In fact, they managed to accomplish it three times during that first encounter, once al fresco, before Andy staggers back to his dorm.

That whole blend, of politics, a knowing older professor who likes to mingle with students, and who happens to be gay (and who has already found a young man he’s interested in), the slightly older woman who is sexually experienced, all sounds very Sixties and very familiar.  Andy and Susanna spend the rest of that spring together, at a time when there wasn’t much else going on, then Susanna moves on.  It was a perfect situation for a first sexual experience.  It couldn’t have been better.

When the novel moves forward five years, Andy and Shelley have gotten back together, they really were in love all along, and in fact they’ve married, with no particular idea what they mean by that, other than the fact that they love each other.  They’re still good friends with Professor Wainwright, who by that time has gotten together with a friend of theirs whom they call Saint John, but John allows Wainwright his occasional forays to Key West (hence his sainthood), where Wainwright owns a house.  Andy is trying to figure out how to make a living with his particular interests, in literature, writing, editing; he’s in grad school at the University of Virginia.  Shelley is teaching history at a local secondary school.  Then suddenly one day, while he’s pursuing his graduate studies, Andy runs into Susanna, who’s a grad student in French.

Their romance had seemed casual when they first had it, and Andy was convinced that, though he loved Susanna in his own way, she was destined for bigger and better things.  Susanna, as it turns out, really did care for Andy, though in practical terms there was no way for them to continue.  Andy and Susanna are in that peculiar situation of grad students, where they’re working and have responsibilities but to some extent their time is their own (while Shelley is off slaving at the secondary school).  They care for each other and are still attracted to each other.  We don’t wonder if something’s going to happen.  We just wonder when.

Wilson has thus brilliantly created a story in which a man loves two women at the same time and doesn’t know what to do about it.  His love for Shelley is more solid and long-lasting, but that doesn’t make the other situation any less alluring, and of course he could split up with Shelley and run off with Susanna, it happens all the time.  That isn’t really what he wants, though he’s not sure what he does want.  Actually, he is sure.  He wants both things.  But he can’t have both.

Just as predictable as it was that Andy and Susanna would get together, it’s predictable that Shelley would find out, though the way that comes about is shocking and awkward.  And in contrast to many novels I’ve read, the way Shelley confronts this situation is exactly right emotionally, and nails the whole thing on the head.  Until then it’s been a lighthearted novel, but that scene of confrontation is not lighthearted.  It’s deeply, emotionally true.

Anyway, this novice novelist has now written his coming-of-age novel, and as an appreciative reader I’m hoping he’ll go on to other things.  But as I would say to other friends of my vintage: don’t take too long.  We don’t know how long we’ll be here.  I have a feeling that Wilson knows that already, and that he’s launched on a second career.  It looks to be fruitful.

[1] People have various dates for when “the Sixties” begin and end.  I would say they began with the Kennedy assassination in ’63 and ended with our exit from Vietnam in ’75.  Vietnam is very much an issue as this novel opens.

[2] Some time ago I wrote about how three different generations dealt with the question, through three iconic woman novelists, Mary McCarthy, Erica Jong, and Miranda July.  Jong was the representative of my generation, and though she wrote a great and iconic novel about this question, she was rather glib, and came out in favor of freedom.  That’s why she was celebrated.  Wilson takes a harder look.

[3] The same thing happened at my university, Duke, two years before, when Martin Luther King was killed.  By the time of the Kent State shootings we were old hands at protest, and though there were some anti-university actions, we spent most of our time canvassing against the war, going out into neighborhoods with petitions objecting to the incursion into Cambodia.  It was my senior year.