This Must be the Place

This Must be the Place

By Maggie O'Farrell

 

Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel's past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection.

I have no idea why this was on my reading list - I think I must have gotten the impression it was a comedy? I couldn't figure out why it had a waitlist at the library.  And then partway through it, I realized the author is BLOWING UP over her newest book, Hamnet, and she's actually an award-winning literaturist and maybe I should pay attention and learn a little something from reading This Must be the Place, huh.  

Like many other reviewers, I struggled in the first couple sections.  Not because I was having trouble following the story, per se, but because I was struggling to figure out if it would get any better.  I have an entirely rational dislike of average male characters who seem to glide through life thinking they're special in some way, and Daniel Sullivan was just... not my bag.

 I spent the first part of the book getting irritated by Dan's narration, then drawn into Claudette's story, then so aggravated by Dan's cheating-on-his-girlfriend-who-just-had-an-abortion-like-earlier-that-day activities that I spent the next chunk of book actively wishing him ill, and then after he actually does screw up his life (ironically, not because of the situation with his ex-girlfriend, but because his oldest daughter is shot in a random mugging) with depression and alcohol and drugs, ended up wanting him to get back together with Claudette because of how obviously unhappy everyone was when they split up.  Never satisfied! 

I did like the section on Claudette's memorabilia, partly because it was so unexpected, just flipping along and then suddenly you're in the middle of an auction book on a faux celebrity.  I can't imagine how they did all the photos and stuff - are those real magazines? Are those the author's bags? Inquiring minds want to know.  It suddenly became a mixed-media piece and I was here. for. it.  (I don't know how to do those clapping emojis, just imagine them).  I also liked all the different locations, it really was like traveling all over the world. O'Farrell has a real talent for scene setting.

Here's a fun fact: I didn't care about Phoebe at all - not during her narration, not when we find out she died young, and not when her death becomes a huge driving force in the book.  I mean, in a book where you have a famous actress fake her own death and then marry a divorced American who's wandering the countryside with his grandfather's ashes and apparently all of their collective kids are somehow geniuses/extraordinary in their own ways, and you're gonna add a tragic and random shooting death in there too? I feel like we're approaching magical realism, or maybe the opposite, ordinary non-realism.  

 

Does the story give me any insights or thoughts about relationships, between husband and wife, father and child, etc? Not really, all these people are pretty weird, like living in a Wes Anderson movie weird. 

The back of my edition also has a bunch of book group questions, which I normally find to be pretty banal, but in this case were more intriguing, perhaps because the book itself was more obscure? It did ask why we thought O'Farrell included the viewpoints of fairly tertiary or one-off characters (like Dan's mom Theresa, random acquaintance Rosalind, and former lover Timou) and to be honest, I'm not... entirely... sure? I mean, I feel like Timou's was in there to prove a point that he used Claudette for professional success and couldn't do it without her, although frankly, I don't think anything we hear about him in the book really justifies Claudette faking the death of herself and their child and then telling him that he needs to call her brother if he wants to see their son. I mean - so what if he is a deadbeat dad? Just because Ari seems stable enough without him (although how stable can he be, having a kid at 17?) doesn't give you the moral (or legal) right to cut off that relationship.  Plus, I feel like Timou's been punished enough, what with every jackanapes reporter out there asking questions about his disappearing girlfriend instead of his new projects.  I ended up feeling sorry for him and disliking Claudette more, which may or may not have been the point.

As for Rosalind, honestly I'm not real sure, but man did her section make me want to visit the Bolivian salt flats. I have a photo taken there, by Gray Malin, and it's incredible how distinct each color is and how saturated it feels. Rosalind's narration really captured that for me, which is one of those things I think looks easy when you have an extraordinary writer, but is really hard to do, to describe an extraordinary scene in words alone.  People on goodreads say it's to give Dan the push to apologize but honestly, if he hadn't figured that out himself at that point, he's too dumb to be married. 

And Theresa is anyone's guess, although maybe to underscore that she was only a sainted figure for Dan, but was a more complex person than that in life? Again, it has the effect of making Dan look, I dunno, dumber, maybe, for idealizing her (not that she's not a good person, but certainly not this two-dimensional cutout he seems to be living with) and I already thought Dan was pretty dumb, so there. And her fated-for-life thing with that random guy who keeps turning up was weird.  I don't even want to get into it, because this is already a treatise, but COME ON.

Anyway, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would in the beginning, definitely felt like the parts with/about Janks kind of dragged, since they seem to end up kind of as a false lead in the ultimate marital disharmony, thought it was well written at least, and ended up not wanting to re-read it at all.