Two Women Take Different Routes to Escape Their Lives

“Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria,” by William Trevor

Reviewed by Stephanie Abbajay

William Trevor's "Two Lives" contains a pair of beautifully crafted and original novellas. The first, "Reading Turgenev," is so evocative and its tragedy so deep, it is more like reading the work of Ivan Turgenev, or Leo Tolstoy for that matter.

The year is 1955, and Mary Louis Dallon, a Protestant farm girl in a small, Catholic town in Ireland, is engaged to the "square and balding" owner of the local drapery, the aptly named Elmer Quarry, who is twice her age. Though he is one of few available Protestants, appeals from both families are made at once to dissuade them from the marriage: Mary Louis' sister tells her that "there would be smells and intimacies no girl would care for." Elmer's hateful spinster sisters warn of "a folly he would regret for the rest of his days."

But Mary Louis had weighed it in her mind – "the long slow days at Culleen…for weeks on end not seeing anyone outside the family." Her fear of having to remain at the farm, with only "half a life to live," eclipsed Elmer's unattractiveness. For Elmer's part, he simply needed an heir.

The trouble begins immediately and gets worse. The marriage is never consummated, Mary Louis' "condition" (or lack thereof) becomes a town concern and the sisters grow even more hateful. To escape his private hell, Elmer begins drinking heavily. To escape hers, Mary Louis falls in love with her frail, sickly cousin Robert, who reads Russian novels to her. But before their love affair can be consummated with anything more serious than a kiss, Robert dies.

With nothing to lose (and in fact, everything to gain – anything is better than life with the Quarrys), Mary Louis begins a sad preoccupation with Robert, which rapidly becomes a methodical madness. She buys all his belongings and recreates his surroundings in her attic so she can sleep where he slept, sit where he sat, see the pictures he saw and read the books he read.

She escapes into the world of Turgenev – they are on a troika, he is kissing her at a café – and so carries on their love affair. In her effort to avoid living only "half a life," she ends up madly, but happily, living one that isn't even hers.

The story of a 56-year-old Mrs. Emily Delahunty in "My House in Umbria" couldn't be more different: Given away (for money!) by her parents who were motorcycle daredevils, sexually molested by her adoptive father, she moved from England to Idaho, then onto the S.S. Hamburg and to the Café Rose somewhere in Africa, where it seems she was a prostitute, and finally to Italy, where she operates a small boarding house.

If it hadn't been for those awful years in Africa, she tells us, she never would have written a string of successful, though somewhat cheesy, romance novels (including "Two on a Sunbeam" and "Waltz Me to Paradise"). She fashions herself into a great student of human nature and, being a writer, everyone is a potential character.

One day, she takes a train to Milan to buy shoes. As usual, she does a quick read of her compartment mates. When a bomb explodes suddenly, killing everyone but her and three others, Mrs. Delahunty takes in the survivors – an old English general, a young German journalist and a small American girl – as each has lost his family. Their time together proves cathartic. They all heal together and become a family of sorts. But the only way Mrs. Delahunty can heal herself is to try to put the pieces together to make sense of "the outrage."

Right before the blast, a title came to her – "Ceaseless Tears." She believes there must be a reason for this and becomes obsessed with trying to fit the survivors into it, with the secret promise that their lives will be improved and perfected on paper. (In her earlier "Precious September," for example, her humble Sunday school teacher became the elegant Lady Daysmith.) But after the blast, she cannot write a single word. The survivors eventually scatter, and the outrage fades into a memory of one summer.
For Mary Louis, the novel was an escape into a fantasy of passionate love, something she never knew. Mrs. Delahunty also escaped an awful existence at the Café Rose and turned to writing about what she never lived – faithful love. She wrote fantasies of neatly rewarding and perfecting lives. But when she needed to escape after the blast, she no longer could.

Both stories have clever and surprising endings, but while Mary Louis' is touching and sad, Mrs. Delahunty's is frightening and shocking. What William Trevor has achieved in "Two Lives" is brilliant – his prose flawless and the ability to move from the voices in "Reading Turgenev" to those in "My House in Umbria" remarkable.

You may like one better than the other, but both will captivate you.

Stephanie Abbajay is managing editor of the National Interest.