ON READING JUSTINE LEVY, part 1; or HOW TO ENDURE THE EXCRUCIATING JOY OF WAITING

the nature of aspiration never lets it give up hope. though that's certainly not to mean that some things aren't hopeless. but rather that even when a conclusion is foregone, and the aspirant understands the impossibility of any one something, there are always the possibilities of different successes, bright other futures that seem no less foregone than the initial defeat. resignation (even) to hopelessness as a universal has never been cause enough to completely stop hoping.

to restate, while diverging slightly, we can always give breadth to our potential for replicating the accomplishments (or avoiding the failures) of the people who preceded us. when i was twelve, i was sure that i could become a world class gymnast by sixteen. at nineteen, a diplomat in paris by twenty-five (think flaubert). i'm convinced now that i can make it as a dancer by thirty-five. or a novelist -- despite my never having written a pure work of fiction. (but you can't ever get too old for that one.)

at the same time, that same process seen in reverse can be equally anti-inspirational. nothing tarnishes the silver lining of untapped potential like seeing an aspiration eclipsed by the success of someone younger. regret, you might say, is hope seen in retrospect. when justine levy wrote the rendezvous, she was roughly the age i was when the book was published in english. and while i might still be bolstered by news of a first time someone finding success in his thirties, i will never write an acclaimed first novel at age nineteen.

but while that is a source of regret, it's also a sadly perfect place from which to engage levy in the rendezvous. louise will wait all day at the cafe for her mother, mama, alice. and strangely, even as readers come to understand that the novel is about the waiting and that alice wouldn't be as effective a character were she to show, we hope against hope for her arrival.

things happen in the meantime. there are other arrivals, and things drank and eaten, throughout which action louise, in the absence of her mother, recounts life with an absent mother. in other words, living happens in the meantime, but a life coalesces around louise only through the action of memory, her decisions to see some things as successes, others as failures, and the impression of significance on some events, and the dismissal of others, everything, though, done with an acquiescence to inevitability. alice isn't coming. but if we weren't interested in waiting for her, we wouldn't have louise, and levy wouldn't have her book.

a rendezvous and the rendezvous are about the wait, the desires that move us from one happening to the next even as we expect them to remain unfulfilled. fulfillment, of course, can still come when bidden, but is just as often the result of happenstance. living then is just the simple act of participating in what's happening, and we make our lives in memory in the interstices.

not surprisingly for those themes, louise narrates as in a maniac's retelling of la recherche (yes, people, EVERYTHING FROM FRANCE has to do with proust). levy distinguishes herself from the past, though, in her frenzy, both syntactically and through louise's acceptance that times have changed since alice's golden age as a model. the past can be romantically recounted, but there is no longer time for grand romance. we hurry. we are impatient. but we wait (impatiently and hurriedly). romance might come in the meantime.

and it seems like it might, too, for louise; although (necessarily, maybe, for levy) as an afterthought. maybe that's why i come to type at the cafe, to wait for something like my own adrien, even though i'm expecting someone else and my day has other plans. and so, perhaps, we keep amassing regrets, but can't help also re-setting our sights. in the meantime, we wait. que sera.