Carolyn See | Thornfield Hall

A few weeks ago, I was happy. I sat under a tree, enjoying the golden light through the branches. I was rereading Carolyn See’s tragic novel, Making History, an exploration of the survival of the human spirit in the face of devastation, as literal spirits linger in the atmosphere before drifting away.

In the course of this 1991 novel, accidents shape the lives of an affluent family. Wynn Bridges, the wife of a financier and the mother of three children, has an opportunity to reconnect with Whitney, her daughter from her first marriage, when the teenage girl is seriously injured in a car accident. It takes months, but Whitney makes a full recovery. This will not be the only accident, alas, but in See’s novels joy never quite deserts her characters. Even in Golden Days, which ends with an apocalyptic event, the characters feel joy when, toothless, bald, and ill, they finally stagger down to the beach to look at the ocean.

Does anyone else see the world as Carolyn See did? She looked at both the microcosm and the macrocosm, the family and the financiers who shape the world. We don’t pretend to know all that. On our level, we try not to take too much in. There is, instead, bafflement and endurance. But then we had this wonderful, mellow, exquisite summer. The temperatures here were “normal” for the first time in years. It was a twentieth-century summer in the twenty-first century. I will remember this magical summer.

Of course the seasons change quickly. The days are already shorter, the light is wan, the grass is dry, and mottled leaves are falling. One day the Covid went away and I got up and went outside. Summer was a ghost, but fall was here.

You grab these moments for what they are.

Near the end of Making History, Wynn engages in imaginary dialogue with her close friend, Kathy, the mother of Whitney’s best friend, Tracie. It is as if Wynn is prescient, that she knows that their lives are about to change. The two women come from a similar background: they were poor and miserable in their first marriages; later, they deliberately married money.

Wynn laments, “Our youth is gone, my dear, dear friend! We haven’t lived the lives we should have! Somewhere between poverty and riches, we lost it. We’re alone. Yes! We are. When we had some good things, we didn’t recognize them. Even now, with another set of good things, I can’t feel them. You can’t feel them. Can this really be it, life? The Big Deal? This can’t really be it, this dread, this dissatisfaction, this imperfection in the midst of so-called perfection, the suffering I saw in Whitney, the indifference at the heart of the world!”

See’s characters cherish the moments of joy and connection. However, Wynn is a character in a Greek tragedy, shattered by an event so tragic that it is difficult to take it in .Now it’s up to her mostly-absent, cosmopolitan financier husband, Jerry, who isn’t used to dealing with human responsibility, and doesn’t want to step up. He will, though. He must. There’s no one else.

This beautiful summer has been a revelation to me. For a decade there has been record-breaking heat, literal “scorchers.” I thought dazedly: You mean, this is the way we used to live?

And to think we took EVERYTHING for granted! How lucky we were! And how lucky we were this summer!

Does anyone read Carolyn See ? She is one of my favorite writers.

See (1934-2016) was a novelist, a book critic for The Washington Post, and a professor at UCLA. A few years ago I reread her masterpiece, Golden Days. In this effervescent genre-bending novel, an unconventional family in L.A. in the 1980s lives as joyously as they can in the shadow of the imminent dropping of a nuclear bomb.

See’s other novels are firmly rooted in realism. A carpe diem attitude colors all her work: life is fragile, but people find their joy where they can. I recently reread her novel Making History, and though it did not affect me as strongly as it did on a first reading, I was fascinated by the characters. In this impossible-to-classify novel, See portrays a “blended” family who survive one tragedy only to unravel again. She also explores the lives of a parallel family struck by tragedy. Then there is Thea, a woman who can see the future (not a gift in the age of AIDS), and Donny, who has lost jobs and family until Thea provides him with alternate pasts. And, because See does not write only about the personal, she also writes about the global economy.

See’s gorgeous writing always knocks me out. The novel begins with the observations of a benign ghost, Robin.

No one ever said I was very bright. But I know some stories. I’ve got a line like every other guy. I hang out at the beach and I wait. That’s the story on me, that’s what I’m supposed to do. I know something now—the dead watch us with a terrible caring. That’s not much to build a life on, but some friends of mine would argue, what’s a life?

Robin doesn’t know he’s dead–yet! And we don’t know he’s a ghost. He finally learns this from a fortuneteller.

See traces the effect of a car accident on the survivors and their families and friends. Seventeen-year-old Robin, the driver who becomes a ghost, dies in a car accident: he is making a right turn when a truck plows into him. When Wynn learns her daughter Whitney was in the car and is in the hospital, she is shocked and terrified. And it doesn’t help that Jerry, her husband and Whitney’s stepfather, is on his way to Japan on a business trip. He travels so much that Wynn jokes he hasn’t seen the kids since the ‘70s.

Wynn is appalled to see that Whitney has only has one tooth left, her blond hair is caked with blood, and her arm and shoulder are broken. Wynn longs to be close again to Whitney, and they do become closer because of the tragedy. And you have to love Whitney, who sticks her teeth back in her gums while her mother is out of the room, and though they are crooked, it will save them thousands in dentistry.

The whole family seems golden: they live in the Palisades, and are rich and beautiful. But “the real family,” as Whitney once overheard Jerry describe Wynn and his two small biological children, Josh and Tina, live in the house, while stepdaughter Whitney lives in the cupola above the garage. But Jerry seems unhealthily obsessed with Whitney—and it is uncomfortable and even a bit creepy, but See treats this as a normal psychological phenomenon—and thank God he doesn’t overstep boundaries. Most of his time is spent on business deals—he and his partners don’t sell things so much as ideas, and they are trying to find investors in a Paradisiacal tourist destination they hope to develop in New Guinea. I wasn’t as interested in Jerry’s business deals as I was the first time around. Perhaps I have actually absorbed some of the economic principles!

Am I being too complicated? Too much about the plot? It is an uneven novel, but I love it. Let me just say there is much joy in Whitney’s recovery, and there are many, many wonderful characters. Whitney’s witty best friend Tracie and Tracie’s mother Kathy, who is going crazy because of a new baby, spend much time with Whitney and Wynn during Whitney’s recovery. Wynn and Kathy have parallel lives: both married unhappily in the ’70s, and then left with their daughters and finally married “up” into comfortable happiness.

But nothing stays the same. And there ARE more accidents.

See reminds us that affluence is part of happiness–we don’t like to think about money, do we?–though family is also key. But everything can changee in a minute.

WARNING: I cried buckets.