Where the Stress Falls Read Online Free PDF

unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin:

    From Kentucky to New York, to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient—never mind that it is the truth.

    The voyaging of the bookish, undoubtedly a source of many keen pleasures, is nevertheless an occasion for irony, as if one’s life had failed to meet an agreed standard of interest. A career of mental traveling, illustrated by a fair bit of real traveling in safety and relative comfort, doesn’t make for a very exciting plot. “It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all”—best to name the formidable constraint unknown to other representatively brilliant first-person narrators—“‘I’” am a woman.”
     
     
    COMPARED WITH BEGINNINGS , endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.
    The Pilgrim Hawk starts with the Cullens’ arrival and must go on until they leave and stop very soon after they do. Pictures from an Institution also draws to a close with a departure, actually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief.
    The Pilgrim Hawk signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens’ torment:

    “You’ll never marry, dear,” I said, to tease Alex … “You’ll be afraid to, after this fantastic bad luck.”
    “What bad luck, if you please?” she inquired, smiling to show that my mockery was welcome.
    “Fantastic bad object lessons.”
    “You’re no novelist,” she said, to tease me. “I envy the Cullens, didn’t you know?” And I concluded from the look on her face that she herself did not quite know whether she meant it.

    For last lines, Wescott’s novel confects a flurry of doubts about what is meant and what is felt, an exchange of teasing untruths: “You’ll never marry.” “You’re no novelist.” To readers who have retained a piece of information dropped into the very first paragraph (Alex will soon meet and marry the narrator’s brother) and to those still gripped by the histrionic misery of the Cullens as parsed by the joyless narrator, the ending may seem light; perhaps too light. Or too neatly da capo.
    Pictures from an Institution finishes as do the great comedies, with a celebration of marriage. It’s the no-name narrator, until now the most revved up of observers, who has the becalmed last scene of the novel all to himself. Summer vacation has started; the campus is deserted; he has been in his office going through books and papers (“I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon: I threw away and threw away and threw away …”). Then he leaves:

    When at last I went downstairs everything was hollow and silent; my steps echoed along the corridor, as I walked down it looking at the sunlight in the trees outside. There was nobody in the building—nobody, I felt, in all the buildings of Benton. I stood in the telephone-booth on the first floor, dialed the number of my house, and my wife’s hello was small and far-off in the silence; I said, “Can you come get me now, darling?” She answered, “ Of course I can. I’ll be right over.”

    For all that we know virtually nothing of the narrator, still less about his entirely notional wife, it seems appropriate that this novel about comic and pathetic (but never tragic) marriages ends