Ocracoke Island by Alice Adams, 1987
The magic trick:
A protagonist so self-absorbed as to become an unreliable narrator of his own life
I don’t know what it is about these Alice Adams stories detailing the lives of people who don’t seem to have to have problems worthy of our time as readers.
That’s the 2023 mindset I carry, when we’ve learned that people bring with them no default sympathy. Our love is earned only. I’m not sure people felt that way in 1987 when “Ocracoke Island” was published. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading these Adams stories the last few months, even as I find most of the protagonists somewhere between boring and awful.
Today’s Duncan, the man at the center of “Ocracoke Island,” is perhaps closest to the “awful” portion of that scale of any of the Adams protagonists. The story finds him just at the front of a breakup. His wife has left for the titular island with a poet. Duncan has retreated from his midwest professorship for a weekend of sulking in New York City.
The situation probably merits sympathy from the reader, but our kindness soon hardens as we spend even just a page or two with this guy.
The story puts us in his point of view, which means in the case of this day spent in New York, him analyzing every little detail of the breakup, him talking to old friends about those details, and then him analyzing every little detail about those conversations with old friends.
It’s exhausting. He’s exhausting.
It’s enjoyable for the reader, though, to watch as Duncan’s own analysis skews so far into the self-absorbed as to miss the point. It’s almost like having an unreliable third-person narrator.
And that’s quite a trick on Adams’s part.
The selection:
“The point is,” said Jasper, in a summing-up way, “whether or not you want her back. One. And two, if you do, how to get her.”
Unprepared for this precis, Duncan felt quite dizzied.
Nor was he prepared for what came next, which was Jasper’s efficient departure: a smooth rise to his feet, and a firm, sincere handshake. Lots of eye contact. Murmurs of friendship. And then Jasper was gone, last glimpsed as a narrow, animated back departing through the door that led out to the lobby.
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