“Does it happen […] in other people’s lives that a single event influences all subsequent time?” So ponders the protagonist of “The Printmaker,” a 40-something British woman—a professional photographer and printmaker—who lives alone. She never got over the unconsummated romance (more of a mutual crush, really) that she experienced at 17, when she lived for a summer with the Langevin family in France. Through business connections, Charlotte’s father arranged for his daughter to lodge with the wealthy Langevins at their country manor and learn French; what Charlotte learns—via the commonly used technique of memories flooding a banal present moment—is that she loves Monsieur Langevin, and he her.
To answer Charlotte’s question, as I have in previous installments: no, I don’t think so. I find this mode of storytelling singularly unconvincing, in fact. This is not to say I don’t believe that single events can and do shape people’s lives. Childhood trauma, sexual assault, violent accidents: these are single (sometimes serial) events that people spend lifetimes getting over. What I don’t believe is the version of the single event that Trevor often asks his readers to believe cannot be surmounted—variously in The Collected, we encounter characters who have never gotten over: being mean to one’s sister (“The Original Sins of Edward Tripp”); fantasizing about a deceased schoolmate (“The Death of Peggy Meehan”); fantasizing about a long-dead historical figure (“The Raising of Elvira Tremlett”); the suspicion of long-ago violence in a lover (“The Blue Dress”); an affair with a student (“Mr. Tennyson”); the list goes on.
“The Printmaker” offers possibly the flimsiest and most egregious version of this setup (a setup, by the way, that is almost always dramatically inert, as we watch the present-moment character stumble through their day decades after the putatively life-changing moment). Charlotte had a crush. That’s it. I found myself waiting for the reveal, the door flung wide at the end to reveal Monsieur Langevin naked on a bed with a rose between his teeth, but no. She sells her prints, she has a glass of wine, she goes on with her life, a kind of double life that, according to the story, she lives in the present alongside still-fresh memories of that halcyon summer, during which she embraced an older man and felt weird about it. As she thinks, sitting in the bar drinking and smoking:
[She] did not attempt to explain, for how could happily married people understand that such flimsiness could become the heart of a human existence? Ambitions in this direction or that, and would-be husbands keenly persuading, seemed empty of seriousness, ludicrous almost, compared with what she had.
This feels like one of those moments that sometimes appear in action movies, wherein something so preposterous and unconvincing occurs that the main characters have to pause to acknowledge it. Perhaps I am simply one of those happily married people, but like Charlotte’s father, I do not understand how such flimsiness can become the heart of a human existence. Or, put another way, I want to understand. I want to know how a summer at 17 with a mild, burgeoning crush can prevent a seemingly functional adult woman from forming romantic attachments. Monsieur Langevin surely had much going for him—rich, attractive, noble, fatherly, French—but still, 20 years is a long time. I cannot think of anyone I know who carries a torch in that manner, even remotely close. Fiction is, of course, not reality, but it needs to correspond with reality enough not to constantly create a sense of contrivance, which Charlotte’s eternal fixation certainly is.
It occurs to me, however, that it may not have felt so to William Trevor. As discussed recently, sex (and by extension romance) is almost always dirty, debasing, unpleasant, unsatisfying, and violent in the Collected—it is, in a word, traumatic. In that light, it’s easier for me to see how William Trevor might have imagined thwarted romance and the specter of sex as traumatic, and therefore possessed of the gravity that might plausibly prevent someone from breaking free. In the Trevoeuvre, the idea of sex and romance, I suppose, can be as lastingly damaging as actual abuse is in our reality.
