THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 13, 1996 TAG: 9606130041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: 65 lines
``Are you happy?'' my daddy asked me.
``Oh, yes,'' I said. ``Of course.'' How can I not be happy? Haven't I ruined enough lives?
BUDDY AND Virginia meet at college and fall head-over-heels into parenthood. Author Abigail Thomas introduced the young couple in ``Getting Over Tom,'' her acclaimed short-story collection. Virginia gets pregnant, is thrown out of college, marries Buddy and gives birth to a baby girl. This is where ``An Actual Life,'' a novel about Virginia's coming of age, begins.
In a poignant and hilarious voice, Virginia recounts her first summer as a wife and mother. It's 1960, an era of rigid conventions; in vain, she looks for instructions to apply to her problems. ``It's too bad marriage doesn't come with attachments, like a vacuum cleaner,'' she reflects.
Virginia's fragile mother can't offer much guidance. (``She only knows about the kinds of problems you can fix with a damp cloth, or with a handkerchief and a little bit of spit.'') Her minister father is kind, anxious and ineffectual. Her glamorous friend, Elinor, who is engaged to an Italian count, advises her that men turn ``back into frogs.'' Nobody seems to have a clue how to help 19-year-old Virginia settle into some semblance of a happily-ever-after. Isn't that what's supposed to happen next?
Instead, she and Buddy are growing apart: ``Now that we know each other a little better, it turns out that we are actually strangers.''
It is a story the author knows well.
``There's no doubt I took the long, hard way around,'' Abigail Thomas said in a recent interview. ``I was pregnant at 18.'' She was thrown out of Bryn Mawr. Three marriages, four children, secretarial work and selling real estate followed. In the '70s, Thomas wrote some well-received poetry and became a successful New York literary agent.
She published several children's books before her fiction debut in 1994, when Algonquin brought out ``Getting Over Tom.''
``An Actual Life,'' however, is not autobiography. Virginia is a fictional character in an adapted-from-real-life situation. This is a young woman who thinks interrupting lovemaking to find birth control is a breach of manners. More careful now, she lives by a complicated mix of social codes and superstitions: ``I don't actually spit over my left shoulder if I see a cross-eyed woman because it would be too noticeable. I simply turn my head slightly to the left and make a small `pfft' sound with my tongue.'' If it were not pitiful, Virginia's search for ways to get through life would be high comedy.
At the end of ``An Actual Life,'' Virginia has faced some hard realities and grown in compassion. She has gained courage and learned to be forthright. The reader closes the book gently, hoping there's some happiness in Virginia's actual future. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer and poet who lives in
Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo<
RICHARD FAUGHN
Abigail Thomas writes about a young woman coming to grips with
motherhood and marriage.
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Book Review
"An Actual Life" ...
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