Richard
Seltzer's home page Publishing home
Nevermind
71,790 words
Literary Fiction,
Magic Realism
The lives of Ruth
and Mark are punctuated by the two times they
invoke nevermind, hand-me-down magic that Ruth learned from her
mother, that
can undo what has been done and alter the shape of reality. They
fall in love
twice, once in their early 20s,; and for the second time, on a
world cruise,
when they are 70.
When they first meet, during
World War II,
both Ruth and Mark are sheltered, naive, and repressed. Ruth
-- her mother dead
and her father in prison, raised by unmarried
aunts and haunted by the lies she has been taught to tell --
distrusts all men.
Mark, a GI away from home for the first time, raised in a
male-dominated household,
is tempted by worldly-wise women while seeking the perfect
innocent wife. Their
on-again off-again romance, among the contingencies of wartime
America, forces
them to grow up quickly.
Their marriage
falls apart when they lose their four-month
old son, Davey, on a transcontinental train. They blame one
another and divorce.
Then, separately, they each invoke nevermind, which solves their
immediate
problem -- Davey -- but leads to unintended consequences. Each
finds Davey and
doesn't tell the other, to avoid custody battles. Each raises
him separately,
in parallel similar worlds.
Ruth finds her
father, who, in this world, is loving and
caring, with a very different past. And after she is widowed
from a loveless second
marriage, she evolves to become a sex therapist known as "The
Love
Granny" and author of an unpublished autobiographical novel,
"Well-Meaning
Lies. Meanwhile Mark writes a successful series of books about
the role of lies
in American history.
Their separate worlds become
entangled when,
after they have changed so much that, at first, they don't
recognize one
another, they meet again, 40 years later and fall in love
again. Learning that
they each have Davey and that other aspects of their life
stories conflict, Mark
and Ruth invoke nevermind once again, this time together,
hoping to avert disaster
and leading to yet another world -- their happily-ever-after.
Comparables --
Counterlife by
Philip Roth
Life After Life by
Kate Atkinson
Asymmetry by Lisa
Halliday
The Fountain
Overflows by Rebecca West
Cloud Atlas by
David Mitchell
Garp by John
Irving