You ever have a perfect plan laid out? You ever think about it over and over again in your head, trying to find one flaw in it but never doing so? It’s so perfect that you start to wonder if you could have thought about it all on your own, but you look everywhere, and can’t find it. It’s, not to sound redundant, but…perfect. It’s so perfect you have Ed Sheeran’s new single “Perfect” playing in the background, adding to the ambiance of the events about to take place (of course, I am doing this to reference how music adds to the mood of a piece). Finally, your life can now be thought of as more than being alone in your room listening to pop ballads all day, eating potato chips, throwing your life away…uh, you get my point (I’m not speaking from personal experience, wink wink). You decide it’s time to execute it, and your heart sinks to the pit of your stomach.
This is exactly what happened to me over the course of the day. ready to type my perfect ideas on the screen, I looked below at previous posts to get an idea on the perspectives grasped by the book thus far, and saw Gee’s post. It was almost identical to what I was thinking. Almost every single world! My perfect plan…DESTROYED!!! I proceeded to drown my sorrows in Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” for 12 hours, until I decided to begin to write again.
Anyways, in all seriousness, I was reading through the posts after reading the book, and realized that Gee had a very similar though process when it came to this book. Not trying to copy her or sound redundant, I dug deeper into this perspective a little and came up with the following. Gee talked about the allusion to fairy tales, yet with a little morbid twist. I 1000% percent agree with that, but I do want delve a little deeper in the fact that Claire was smiling uncontrollably despite the fact that the sergeant gave the news of a death. Throughout the course of the chapter, I couldn’t help but think to myself that there was something off about Claire. It didn’t hit me until this very seen that there is something wrong with her: she is normal.
Think about it: in the city full of art, crazy people on the train, and even a guy who walks across the World Trade Center, she is simply normal. She even said it herself that she has lived the same old routine for 31 years! Even when she looks at a picture of her and her son at the beach, she describes the scenery with just physical details, no emotion whatsoever. She even described Joshua as just a boy. Just a boy?! That’s your kid for crying out loud! Something that seals this argument is that she has to choose her words for conversations with her friends, as if she is a robot that converses with people. She doesn’t let the emotion of the world, as represented by its colors, penetrate her to give her body life. That is why her hair always has that gray strand, because it is impossible to cut that part of her, as it is now a part of her she can’t let go of.
As far as interactions go, I stopped counting after 50 (I wonder where I heard this before). However, one interaction that really interested me was Claire and Solomon (it was really Lara and Ciaran, but that was too unoriginal). It surprises me how little a couple can know about each other even after being together for decades. This is true of all couples as all human beings have multiple layers to them, each of them unique to specific situations, hence Solomon cursing so bluntly after the sergeant talked about dying a hero.
I could apologize for ruining your perfect plans, but I think it worked out in that you covered what I could not. I love the line about how normal Claire is, which I totally agree with, and the relationship between her and Solomon is quite interesting. It makes me think of a line from a song, which goes roughly like this: “Everybody’s gonna die, but not everybody lives though,” which has what happened to this couple.
I agree that Claire is a conflicted character, and can be somewhat restrained, but I wouldn’t describe her as normal. Her life may not be as eccentric as some of the other characters we’ve met, but I still think she’s pretty unique. Despite growing up in Florida in a rich and prejudiced household, she matures to be more accepting than her family. She also was the only woman in her college math department. Doing high-level mathematics was abnormal for women at the time. Also, the upbringing of her son, and his role in the Vietnam War is vastly different than the sons of the other mothers.
Claire’s “robotic” side is partially due to her background as a genteel lady. It’s not lady-like to show violent emotions.
I enjoyed reading your post, especially the beginning since it was so funny!