Miss Giardino

For Christmas I gave Son 2 a copy of Dorothy Bryant's novel Miss Giardino.  When he unwrapped it and looked quizzically at me, I told him it was one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors.

Well, last night he told me "I finished Miss Giardino, but I'm not sure I really got the main point it was trying to make."  And I found myself trying to think, … Is there a point that it is trying to make?  Does the book have a moral, like Aesop's fables?  Or an underlying message about good and evil, like The Power and the Glory?  Why do I even like it so much?

I had thought about this a little off and on since giving it to him, because I figured the question might come up, but I didn't really have an answer.  I tried to improvise one now.

So in the first place, I said, I liked the main character, Anna Giardino herself.  Son 2 mentioned that in some ways she resembles Wife (though not in others) and I strongly agreed.  I explained that I had first read the book shortly after I met Wife, and that for many years I had seen Wife through the lens of Anna Giardino.  "Of course maybe that just means I was looking through rose-colored glasses," I went on, and we both laughed.  But then I clarified that it's true that the young Anna Giardino and the young Wife really did have a lot in common: a fierce dedication to teaching, a deep belief that only the best is really good enough, and a difficult relationship with their fathers.  Wife's father even died of emphysema, much as Signor Giardino died of a lung ailment from his work in the mines.  The differences between them (Wife and Miss Giardino) became strikingly apparent only in greater age.  But I went on to add that while you can usually look backwards and see that the features of one's mature character were present even at the beginning (as I noted in an earlier post, "You Can Kind of Tell These Things"), you can't read them forward.  The difference is that while those features are present early on, so are many others, all jumbled up in an inchoate mess.  It is only in the act of growing older that we each of us make hundreds of decisions over the years which end in strengthening some features of our personalities and weakening others.  You can't tell ahead of time which ones will win out.

But this was a digression.  I also like the story.  I like that there are no real villains – well, except maybe Willie Ventura.  But the mugger who attacked Anna turns out to have done her a great service by it; and she – in turn – helped him just as much.  (I won't explain how, so as not to spoil it if you want to read it.)  Some of the characters are funny – I instanced Arno Steadman.  ("I thought he was just a self-centered ass," said Son 2.  "Yes, but he is so totally a self-centered ass that there is really something comical about him.")  Indeed, the near-absence of villains is something I see in a lot of Dorothy Bryant's fiction: the characters may do stupid or destructive things, but rarely because they are villains; more often it is just that they are trying to do the only thing they can understand but their understanding is limited.

I like her relation with Stephen Tatarin.  Son 2 asked, "You mean her kind-of lover-boy-ish sort of thing?"  And I tried to explain that at its best the teacher-student relationship really is intense and deeply personal … usually not erotic per se (though there is a kind of quasi-erotic energy about it – I didn't tell him that!) but powerful all the same.  I added that if he hasn't experienced that yet, he probably will some time before (say) he graduates from college.  At any rate, I hope so.

And I like the ending – that after so many things go so sourly in her life, Anna Giardino can pick herself up, turn away from the past (rather than being weighed down by it), and move forward bravely into an uncharted future.  Though I didn't say so, I sometimes see this phase of my own life in the light of that last chapter, as a new turning of my own.  And while I'm not willing to be as unencumbered as Anna, I keep her in mind as a model.

I saw an article somewhere that claimed the defining feature of this whole book is its anger – the anger that builds up in Anna over so many years, the anger that finally comes spilling out at the climax of the dramatic action.  I never saw the book in those terms.  Anger?  Yes, I suppose so, now that I think about it.  But it's as if I never thought about it before.  I wonder why not?  Am I simply blind to the anger?  Or is it because Anna's anger is so much like what I have experienced over so many years that I just never noticed it?  A fish reading Moby-Dick probably wouldn't think to comment on the sea, either.  Maybe that's it.  But if so, the redemption in the last chapter is just that much more hopeful.