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A lovers discourse12/11/2023 There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Modeled after Roland Barthes' structuralist masterpiece, also titled A Lover’s Discourse, Guo’s latest meditation on the nature of belonging asks many of the same questions as her earlier works-Can language create identity? Can love create a home? Are the differences between cultures, genders, nationalities, and personal ideologies what pull us apart, or are lifelong conversations, even arguments, about these things what help us understand what it means to truly be together?Ī fiercely intelligent book whose exploration of the philosophy of identity is trenchant and moving.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Their relationship quickly develops from this chance meeting to a full-blown love affair, co-habitation on a houseboat in the London canals, parenthood, and travel to German farmland, Australian tourist towns, and an enclave of tradesmen in Southern China whose job is to reproduce great works of art for sale on the open market. “The elderflower picker,” as she terms him, turns out to be another culturally displaced person, the child of an Englishwoman and a German man who grew up on the east coast of Australia before moving to Germany in his late teens and to England as an adult. Both her parents have recently died, and she doesn't know whether to attribute her loneliness to her identity as a foreigner in Britain, to her newly orphaned status, or to another more essential part of her nature she comes to understand as “distance pain, an ache or a lust for a place where you want to belong.” Her desolation is somewhat ameliorated when she meets the you to whom these fragments are addressed-a landscape architect she meets picking elderflowers on a picnic organized by mutual friends. in visual anthropology in the winter of 2015, just prior to the Brexit referendum. The unnamed narrator of this novel in epistolary fragments is a young woman from a rural town in Southern China who has come to London to pursue a Ph.D. Two lovers merge their lives, but not their identities, across boundaries of culture, nationality, and ideology.
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