Rafael Yglesias

This is, I suppose, a fairly obscure 1980s novel. Yglesias, author of the wonderful "A Happy Marriage", is a terrific writer who can really drill deep down into his characters and skillfully fashion complex psychologies. In "Only Children" he wrote about two wealthy New York City couples who fit the Yuppie mold of the time. Today you might just call them wankers.

Diane, a corporate lawyer, is married to Peter, an independently wealthy arts funder. Diane intentionally becomes pregnant without clearing this with Peter, who informs her that if she thinks he's going to play daddy, she's sadly mistaken. He sticks to his promise of non-involvement until Diane's ferocious drive to mold a genius toddler drives her to a breakdown after she slaps the two year old boy full in the face in public after he failed to perform at an IQ testing. Peter then steps in fairly adequately, although when Diane suggests having a second child (since this child raising thing is going so swimmingly and all) he responds that he doesn't think that's a good idea, since he neither loves her nor their son.

At least they have a fabulous apartment and a competent nanny.

Nina comes from a wealthy old Boston family but doesn't really do anything professionally herself until a tacked-on development near the end of the novel. Her husband Eric is a wealth manager who fantasizes about becoming the "Wizard of Wall Street". Nina's family is dysfunctional and loveless, and having a baby gives her something to finally lord over them. Eric is embarrassed by his parents because they were never able to make a lot of money. Their child raising actually goes quite a bit better than Diane and Peter's. Their son Luke has a genius IQ, and all the best private preschools in New York City fight to get him enrolled. They don't get carried away though and display genuine love while dealing with some tough baby and toddler issues.

Okay, honestly, these people pretty much suck, so why would you want to spend hundreds of pages reading about them? The problem with reading it as satire of 1980s Yuppiedom, which I believe was its aim, is that it's not at all funny. Granted, satire doesn't always have to be funny to work, but if it is not then it really needs to sock it to you hard, force your eyes open, make you gasp. I wouldn't say this novel did any of that.

Maybe this novel is just too much a product of its time. Maybe it would have done that in 1989.

In 2012, the only thing I can offer is that Yglesias really is an excellent writer, and he does offer his characters some redemption in the end.… (meer)

The story is Enrique's, and, evidently, Rafael Yglesias's. Enrique's wife Margaret is dying of cancer, and the novel is structured to jump back and forth in time between her final weeks of life and other times, stretching backwards 30 years, during which they met, fell in love, and struggled. Yglesias writes with a sharp and unsparing insight into insecure Enrique, into himself, laying bare his immature and unfaithful love of youth and then later in time, contrastingly, the depth of love and devotion to Margaret that he recognizes as the essential truth of his life, and the profound pain, guilt, and bereavement he feels at losing her. Enrique and Margaret are both brought fully and wonderfully to life, characters created with all the authenticity seemingly transferred whole and without loss from their real-life models.

Essentially this a novel of loss, and so can be bleak. Straightaway Yglesias writes that "His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red- and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail." (page 24... sure you want to keep reading?!). Enrique is a harsh self-critic who fears he cannot provide what is needed for Margaret and for their two young adult sons. "He dreaded the sorrow that lay ahead for his sons and feared he would be unable to console them. He soothed himself with the hope that a permanent deposit of those carefree hours playing on the hardwood floors with their mother - not a memory of happiness but an unremembered absorption of her joy at having created them - could provide a lifetime's buoyancy that would eventually lift his sons' hearts above the cruelty of losing her."

Alternating paragraphs that deal with the present with paragraphs that recount the past, in which Margaret and Enrique are young and full of life and in which death is an unconsidered far-off reality, balances the couple's ending with its beginning and provides moments of welcome amusement, as Yglesias pokes fun at his extraordinarily insecure, but with a patina of bravado, younger self. There is a yearlong affair Enrique has with a friend of Margaret's during an early portion of their marriage, a time during which he professed to feel like the marriage was a huge mistake, and that he did not love his wife and felt he never would. If there is anything murky in this novel, it is how he moved from those feelings to the deep and unmistakable love he clearly feels for her 20 years on.… (meer)

I saw Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Les Miserables" in London with original cast; it's fantastic. This was a sad travesty compared to it, with unnecessary modernizations, clunky shifts to songs, stiff acting, and plot cuts that should not have been made. I saw this movie in a theater and walked out halfway through. Why do I have it then? Because Vudu offered it as part of a package of other movies, which I wanted. And, unfortunately, once you have a movie on Vudu, it's hard to get rid of it. Oh well, I can keep it as an example for its flaws--I keep a few books for this reason.… (meer)

Enrique Sabas, guionista de cine, y su mujer, Margaret, diseñadora gráfica, tienen dos hijos y llevan una vida acomodada en Nueva York. Tras treinta años de matrimonio y alcanzada una estabilidad que parecía imposible, la pareja lleva tres años luchando contra el cáncer que ella padece y que ha entrado en fase terminal.
Margaret prepara su despedida de familiares y amigos ayudada por Enrique, quien durante estos últimos y extraños días va reconstruyendo la historia del matrimonio: la época en la que se conocieron, el desarrollo de sus vocaciones artísticas, el nacimiento de sus hijos, los altibajos de su relación… Los recuerdos de su vida en común y la intensidad de su despedida nos muestran la complejidad de una relación duradera.… (meer)