I had almost forgotten about HILL WILLIAM. Animal cruelty,
child abuse, homophobic attacks, and environmental destruction. Didn’t deserve
to make it this far, luckily got knocked out in this round, good riddance.
What’s interesting to me about A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING this
week is narrator-Ruth’s relationship with her husband, Oliver. Oliver is a
little-known artist who works in the medium of plants—he is building an
Eocene-era botanical garden on their island home, and believes his work will
not be fully appreciated until he has been long dead and the plants have come
to be a natural part of the landscape. It’s a nice idea. Ruth also describes
Oliver as being a little bit obtuse, and probably having something like
Aspberger’s. He can be very sensitive, and sometimes annoys Ruth, but of course
she also depends on him and loves him. And the parallel I want to draw here is
between Ruth and Hannah Horvath, on GIRLS.
Before you click close tab, if you haven’t seen the most
recent episodes of GIRLS, Hannah and her boyfriend Adam are at the hospital
visiting Hannah’s dying grandmother. At Hannah’s mother’s suggestion, Adam
tells Hannah’s grandmother that he and Hannah are getting married—although they
aren’t—because Hannah’s mother believes the grandmother can die happy knowing
that her granddaughter is in a stable relationship. When the grandmother’s
prognosis improves later, Hannah jokes to her mother about whether she and Adam
will have to get married if her grandmother survives. Hannah’s mother tells her
to “keep the job, not the guy” and explains that Adam is socially awkward and
maybe not a good fit for Hannah; she doesn’t want Hannah to have to “socialize”
Adam if they stay together. Of course, Hannah herself can be very socially
awkward, and she rightly tells her mother that she doesn’t know enough about
Adam to make these statements. We can tell that the judgment hurts, though.
Although it’s not sensitively delivered, there’s some truth to it—saddling herself
with a man who will sometimes embarrass her is a weighty choice. Their
different personalities are charming now, but the charm may not last. And I
wonder too whether for Ruth the charm is wearing off; she daily regrets living
on their small Canadian island, and intimates that she left New York partly
because Oliver loved living on the island. It makes sense that Oliver would; on
the island they are part of a small community, while New York could be daunting
even for a socially adjusted man. In Ruth’s case, removing Oliver from the
unwanted stimuli of New York meant exiling herself; in Hannah’s case, she
herself is the unwanted stimulus, and when Adam finds her dramatic personality
distracting to his nascent acting career, he moves out of their shared
apartment while rehearsing for his play, which is obviously traumatic for
Hannah.
The simple question is, is the man worth the trouble, but of
course the answer isn’t so easy for Ruth and Hannah—both desperately want to
care for their partners while also resenting them for the constraints they
impose on their joint lives. Naoko’s story takes this dynamic to the extreme,
with a father who retreats from society and from life so completely that she
and her mother are forced to change their family structure and protect Naoko’s
father from himself. Naoko allows herself to resent her father for losing his job, for taking them from Sunnyvale, for becoming a shut-in and not caring enough about her and her mother to sacrifice his comfort and philosophical ideals to provide for them. But how does Naoko's mother feel, having chosen to marry a sensitive man—a man who might have needed some socializing, as evidenced by his naivete about human consciences and motivations, as well as his habit of interrupting professors unannounced to explore theories of mind
This round's tangential Winner: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
Read the official tournament review here.
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