All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
As The History of Love opens, Leo Gursky says every day he makes a point of being seen because he doesn’t want to die on a day that nobody saw him. He goes to movies and spills his popcorn as soon as it’s handed to him, goes to Starbucks and changes his order half a dozen times, trips and goes sprawling on the floor in a store. He expects to die alone, probably in his apartment, and he wonders how many days it will be before the super notices the smell. He has no family, but he does have a burial plot, and he carries a card stating as much for when the inevitable happens.
Leo Gursky feels like he’s invisible. He probably is.
Initially when I finished The History of Love, I didn’t agree with the critics who consider it to be superior to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but it really is. The thing is, it’s just so inevitable and sad whereas Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has a tiny bit of uplift to it. Leo lives a life, possibly not even an unhappy life, but not really a whole life. Not exactly a happy life. He just lives. He poses as a nude model because of the incredible prospect of having so many eyes on him, studying him, all at once. So many people seeing him. And in the end, the thing he wants most to happen doesn’t happen, at least not the way he thought it would.
Is it enough that a thing happens? Does the happening not matter if we don’t know that it happened? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?
And then there’s Alma, who anchors the other thread in the book. Alma, who is named after the main character in a book her father gave her mother, who has a weird little brother and a lonely, introverted mother, and whose father died of pancreatic cancer. Her brother, Bird, is reminiscent of Oskar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, except he’s more annoying than loveable. Oskar, I want to hug; Bird, I want to slug. Sometimes. And then I feel badly about it because he’s one of those kids — we’ve all known at least one — that really just needs someone to pay attention to him, someone other than his teenaged sister who’s still trying to figure it all out for herself, but his brand of eccentric is such that he’s amazingly off-putting. I know I should be more sympathetic, but I can’t be, and I think that may be part of the point.
Alma’s lonely too, a little. Bird’s lonely a lot, only he doesn’t know it. Their mother has wrapped herself so tightly in a cocoon of loneliness she never even notices her loneliness is by choice. None of them are completely invisible because at least they have each other.
Leo doesn’t have anybody.
On Sunday, a story about lonely Americans ran over the AP wire. It seems we’ve all gotten so busy we don’t have time to cultivate relationships, resulting in thousands of Leo Gurskys all over the country. I have to wonder, do we really see the people who share our space? How many invisible people have I not seen just in the last twenty-four hours?
And is it fair for me to dislike Bird while I love Leo when Bird is also just trying not to be invisible, even if he doesn’t realize that’s what he’s doing?
This book has gotten in my head even more than Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close did, despite searing fewer lines and images in my head. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I haven’t even begun to process the themes of love and loss that the critics are all raving about.
When I was a kid, I thought the world was generally a happy place, with a few patches of sadness. Now I’m pretty sure the world is generally a sad place, with a few patches of happiness.