Anything Is Possible

These chapters explore inner conflicts in which characters have a difficult time letting go of the past. In Chapter 4, the narrative focus turns to Charlie, the object of Patty’s desires. Charlie’s demons are revealed throughout the chapter, as are the holes in his self-awareness. Traumatized by the Vietnam War, now long forgotten, Charlie has difficulty expressing himself. This comes from his difficulty dealing with his past. When Charlie attends veteran support group meetings, most of the men are younger and veterans of the Iraq War. Charlie feels left behind in these group meetings, as though the war he fought in was so pointless and long ago that it and, by extension, Charlie’s experiences in it no longer matter. Instead of living in the present, many decades after the war, Charlie is caught up in his traumas of that war. This pattern repeats in his relationship with his wife. He remembers falling in love with Marilyn many years before and realizes that what he used to appreciate about her now annoys him. Instead of finding a new way to change with and love his wife, Charlie resents her for not being the woman he once loved. Charlie’s preoccupation with his past distracts him from being fully in the present. He’s aware of this in some ways but oblivious to it in others. He’s proud of his son but knows that he doesn’t do a good job of showing his son that affection. In this way, Charlie is self-aware. However, in his tryst with Tracy, whom he believes he’s in love with, Charlie acts out his anger. He doesn’t seem as self-aware about the way he treats Tracy, who he decides is dishonest and enables her son, even though Charlie is also dishonest and enabling. Being frozen in time makes Charlie harden his exterior shell, though Strout’s narrative point of view demonstrates Charlie’s many inner layers and thoughts. Ultimately, Charlie embraces his pain, not wanting to be like the men who have become so hard that they no longer feel even their acute pain. Strout thus foreshadows Charlie’s development toward happiness and self-satisfaction. If Charlie can divorce himself from the resentments of his past, he can become a better man and father.

Likewise, an obsession with the past identifies Angelina’s complicated relationship with her mother, Mary. Angelina is angry that Mary moved to Italy to marry a much younger and less wealthy man. Angelina feels that Mary has abandoned her, even though Angelina is married and has children of her own to occupy her emotional efforts. Although Mary is living for her present, Angelina holds onto the past to connect with the mother she misses. Mary has had her own challenges throughout life yet embraces her present with a positive attitude. She recognizes that making plans in life is essentially fruitless, as life will always interfere in unexpected ways. Mary imagined that life with her husband and five daughters would always fulfill her. However, her husband’s affair, followed by heart attacks, strokes, and cancer, convinced Mary to start a new chapter in her life. Although she misses her ex-husband and regrets hurting her daughters, Mary is confident that her new marriage and move to Italy indicate resilience and belief in herself. However, Angelina sees her mother’s new life as an imposition on Angelina’s plans to keep her family together and care for her mother in her old age.

Notably, while Mary is transforming her life to be happy again, Angelina is experiencing fractures in her marriage. Angelina’s obsession with her mother’s decision to leave her father, marry a new man, and move to Italy negatively impacts her marriage. Angelina thus unintentionally uses her resentments toward her mother and their lost past to implode her present. Mary hopes that the joyous moments they share during Angelina’s trip will stay with Angelina with more force than Angelina’s unhappy memories. In their juxtaposed attitudes about how to live their lives, Strout uses the mother-daughter relationship as a complex space of intense love and resentment to explore the theme that people should embrace and celebrate life even when it interrupts their well-laid plans.

Another notable element to this mother-daughter relationship is the way that gossip connects Mary and Angelina. Angelina’s gossip about Amgash reconnects Mary to her past in that town and all the people she used to know. In addition, Angelina prefers to talk about other people rather than about her own issues. Thus, the small-town gossip that reminds Mary that she used to be part of that community gives Angelina the power to suck Mary back into her world, which is a part of Mary’s past.

While the mother-daughter relationship informs Chapter 5, Chapter 6 focuses on the relationships among three siblings. Lucy Barton, whom earlier chapters allude to, returns to Amgash after many years. While Lucy became a celebrated author, a mother, and a New Yorker, her sister (Vicky) and her brother (Pete) stayed in Amgash and lived more difficult lives. Even though Lucy is lauded as having gotten away, her panic attack challenges her being the sharp analyzer of Amgash. Returning home and taking on her siblings’ memories of the domestic abuse they experienced at the hands of their parents breaks Lucy, and she leaves as quickly as she arrives. Lucy is thus another character who tried and failed to escape her past. In escaping the past, Lucy only attempted to ignore it or find ways to narrate it with a level of distance that felt safe. However, when Vicky confronts her, Lucy realizes that writing is a survival tactic, not a healing power.

Lucy can’t see her siblings for the people they now are. Although Pete and Vicky have had their problems, both are kind people who work hard and humbly. They confront their pasts, not to let go of it but to deal with their present. For example, Pete wants to show affection to his sisters the way he has seen other families do, but he can’t act out his affection because he never learned how. Therefore, Pete’s traumatic upbringing kept him from being the fullest version of his sweet self. However, this doesn’t mean that he resents his life or refuses to love. Instead, he’s simultaneously aware of the impact his past has on his present and satisfied with living the life he now has. Pete reflects that he and Vicky didn’t turn out so bad, finally freeing himself from the idea that Lucy is superior for having escaped to a glamorous and famous life. Pete may be physically stuck in Amgash, but he’s mentally free of the darker elements of his past.

As much as the siblings love one another, they also resent each other. Vicky resents Lucy for leaving and never returning, while Lucy resents Vicky and Pete for bringing up horrible memories. Like the relationship between Mary and Angelina, Strout emphasizes that it’s normal for families to reminisce, even when hurt and trauma cloud their memories. Unlike Mary and Angelina, the Barton siblings are unable to find a level of shared joy that transcends their past dynamics. They too connect through gossip, sharing stories about people they once knew well. This gossip is their tactic to settle back into a conversation, but it backfires on them because no matter how other peoples’ lives have turned out, the Bartons are still dealing with the shared pain of their upbringing. Gossip, then, is only a superficial way for the Barton siblings to connect.

These chapters are connected to the first three chapters of the novel in two ways. The first is the repetitive accusation of “true sentences.” Vicky mocks Lucy’s writer motto to write only true sentences because Vicky can see that Lucy isn’t being truthful. However, Vicky and Lucy each have a different version of the same truth. Lucy didn’t endure as much abuse as Vicky, so Vicky’s truth differs from Lucy’s. Furthermore, because Lucy wants to write true sentences, Vicky finds it ironic that Lucy can’t have true conversations. Neither are more correct than the other, but the idea of writing true sentences is a strategy that Strout employs to explore what truth is and whether there can be more than one truth. This connects to the first chapters of the novel because Lucy’s true sentences inspired Patty Nicely to change the way she views herself. Although Lucy’s writing may not feel truthful for Vicky, her book is truthful for Patty.

Additionally, these chapters connect with the first three chapters through allusions to characters Strout already introduced. Charlie, the main character in Chapter 4, is the object of Patty’s desires; Angelina, one of the main characters in Chapter 5, is a friend of Patty’s; and Pete, one of the main characters in Chapter 6, is the same Pete that Tommy looks out for in Chapter 1. Thus, the novel’s middle chapters start connecting characters and thereby creating the structure of a novel instead of a collection of short stories. These stories are too interconnected to be disparate stories, but the structure of a novel through short stories helps Strout express characters through different lenses depending on the narrative point of view. By evoking characters introduced earlier, Strout foreshadows how the characters develop in the last three chapters of the book.