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Love and No Money

Every Light in the House Burnin'
Andrea Levy
Manufacturer: Headline Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 074724653X

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Love and No Money.......2006-06-22

Every Light in the House Burnin' by Andrea Levy

Just before reading Levy's fictionalized account of a woman's life growing up in the "Estates" in urban England, (the equivalent of "the Projects" in the U.S.), I had just read an editorial by David Brooks of the New York Times about what creates poverty ("Of Love and Money," May 25, 2006). The experts have agreed that there is a widening gap between rich and poor, and the crux of the gap comes down to something that is not amenable to economic or journalistic ideology. The suprising solution to the income gap? Love is all you need.

His article then logically asks, if love is what you need then, "How does government provide millions of kids with the stable, loving structures they are not getting sufficiently at home?" Brooks is stumped for an answer but the very question scares me! I don't want governments getting into the love business, they've done quite enough damage in trying to eradicate poverty as it is (some of which is agonizingly portrayed in Levy's account of the indignities of British public housing).

It turns out that the income gap exists mainly because of the gap in learning ability between individuals. In a knowledge-based economy, those who learn well are going to the top, those who don't, fugghedaboutit. Where love comes into it is that Brooks' investigation leads him to the basic psychological truth that, "'Emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain' (Daniel J. Siegel's summation)". Brooks obviously didn't take Psych 101 in college, so, he concludes his article somewhat sophomorically: "Kids learn from people they love. If we want young people to develop the social and self-regulating skills they need to thrive, we need to establish stable long-term relationships between love-hungry children and love-providing adults." Well, that's about as far as he can go as there is nothing a journalistic crusade or government agency can do about love-insurance.

Before getting to Levy's book, the article reminded me of a conversation I had with my eldest son. He just couldn't understand why the world wasn't set up to solve the problems people face in life: losing a job, getting divorced, sickness, etc. "But the world is set up to help," I said, "that's what families are for." He was surprised that he'd never thought of it that way before.

"That's because you've grown up in a `Great Society' culture after so many great shifts in history--Maoism, communism, Nazism--attempted to eradicate the inequalities created by family ties." I said, "We still keep thinking we'll find a way to replace the family with some kind of better solution!"

My son joked, "I've certainly wished I could replace my family with a better solution when I was mad at you guys!"

I replied that I suspected that, psychologically, that's actually where most of the "isms" come from, either people from unloving homes, or who are mad at their parents. I am a depth psychologist after all!

My son and I have had many conversations since about why in conservative economics the only place where governments are supposed to intervene in peoples' lives is where they have lost their families--so, programs should only help orphans, the aged, the dispossessed. (Parenthetically--and surprisingly--these are the same groups that are to be given charity in the New Testament. Christians are not supposed to just help anyone, but only those who are not able to work (for fear of creating idle hands for the occasion of sin), surely a caution that might have helped the U.S. avoid the devastation it perpetrated on family structure in the Black population by its come-one-come-all welfare system.)

It was with these thoughts in mind that I picked up Andrea Levy's book "Every Light in the House Burnin'". The story opens with the main character, Angela, being taken on her first family holiday with her parents, brother and two older sisters. Although this is supposed to be the beginning of a holiday, her father does not allow anyone to order any of the small delights from the menu at the train station (chips or sodas, etc.), but, instead, orders each the cheapest item, a buttered roll, and a cup of tea. The other members of the family, including Angela's mother, are so upset by his stinginess that they leave their rolls and go back to the train hungry. Angela's father, sitting alone, finishes every single one of the buns before strolling unconcerned back to the bus. And, amazingly, the reader knows immediately that she is reading about family love.

How is this scene a loving one? I don't know the answer. Like Brooks, when it comes to love, I am as stumped as the next guy. But, in a way that shatters the clichés and certainly takes any government agency (which would require logical, categorizable definitions) out of the picture, Levy shows how, paradoxically, even this seemingly selfish act can--at least eventually--be seen as loving and important to the development of family ties. (It is the very irrationality of emotion that will, I suspect (and hope), always make it out of reach of government solution.)

While reading this first introduction to Levy's characters, I could not help but remember a similarly "loving" experience at my father's hand when a child. Note, however, that there is no violence to speak of in the fictional Angela's home, and the experience I remember is a mildly violent one. My father and I were on a boat toodling around Baltimore harbor when I was about seven or eight and I happened to notice a young girl sitting on a bench above us on the dock. Her eyes were strange, as if she had been given two black eyes, and she wasn't looking at anything at all, but her head moved oddly back and forth. I squinted because I had a hard time seeing in the bright summer sun and I wondered if I could actually see her eyes at all. I was curious and I turned to my father and pointed. Before I could speak ("What's wrong with that girl?"), my father swatted my face with the back of his hand. He didn't explain himself, certainly didn't apologize. And I held my face for a long time, shocked and confused and in pain. We didn't speak at all until we were far out in the Chesapeake Bay motoring back to our summer beach home. "Don't ever do that again," my father said severely, with no explanations. As it turned out no explanation was needed because by the time he spoke, after going over it in my mind, I had figured it out all by myself: I wasn't to point because the girl was blind.

Was this loving? It was ironical, for sure (the girl wouldn't have been able to see me point, after all). I am positive no court in the land would vote it was sensible or loving, but, paradoxically, when I think of my father, after a lifetime of knowing his total sensitivity and respectfulness toward persons with any kind of physical deformity, such knowledge has become for me a way "into" my father, a way to really know him. If a little suffering might be the price of such knowledge? It seems to me now a small price, one worthy of my forgiveness. Andrea Levy appears to me to have discovered this equation too, and I think it is the theme of her book: the messy, paradoxical, irrational, painful truth, and "central organizing process" truth, of family love.

Personally, "love" seems to me to be more of a noun, more something we are, than something we do. As happiness is what happens, love seems to me what happens when we are given the opportunity to just be with our family members. Divorce (only viewed from a distance, I've never seriously experienced it from either end myself) seems mostly to deprive parents and children from that intimate knowing. My nephew, whose parents are newly divorced, complains desperately not that he doesn't get enough attention (for example, both his parents go to all his sports' events) but that he just wants to "be" with his father alone (and not, say, with his father and his father's girlfriend). So, family love may be more closely related to the knowing of our family members than the doing of anything in particular.

A great many of the instances that Levy describes about Angela's father are certainly nothing that would be on the "to do" list for great fathers: sleep all weekend afternoons on the couch, never give your kids anything they want when you go on outings, be satisfied with living in a tiny flat, tell everyone in the project `neighborhood' to, "Stop that noise or get away! (p. 50)" Yet, through Levy's slow, steady, accretion of data about her father, we begin to see quite another side, the "in" side of the life of family love.

The mainspring of the family and the main breadwinner, Levy's fictional father dresses for his Post Office job in a suit, and is never home when the kids get home from school (because he works the late shift)--but is always home to ensure that his girls get in by a decent hour, that their clothes are all ironed (on Sunday nights in front of the television watching the shows only he wants to watch), that his marriage is inviolable (he rarely goes anywhere but work or home), in other words, he is a stable family man. And what impresses me more than anything else in Levy's description of the father is that he finds a way to live as he likes, support his wife's intellectual interests (she goes to college and becomes a teacher), in the midst of so many other people (three kids and a wife) in a tiny, cramped apartment. He is satisfied with his life just the way it is.

Certainly, part of the reason Levy's father is able to make his life satisfying to himself is that his children accept that this is who he is; and how he decides things is how things are going to be. They might occasionally complain, but I wonder if it is the security of knowing that he is who he is, and their mother is who she is, that creates that "central organizing process" for Angela and her siblings. Angela herself becomes a graphic artist, the other children succeed at setting up their lives to some level of success. And we all know that many people from poor circumstances have succeeded in life, but I am beginning to wonder how many people have succeeded without one person--loving or half-loving--`goodenuf loving'--as the books say--being there for them throughout their lives? Could it be that it is the mere certainty of the emotional responsiveness of one person is what allows one to organize a world for oneself even more than some grand virtuous or loving behavior?

Levy's book is not about poverty but about love. And it is not about love's relationship to intelligence (that's just what was on my mind when I picked the book up). However, it is an emotionally intelligent book about the absurdities of family love.

Levy's Angela takes both her parents for granted to such an extent that, over her lifetime, there are so few times that her parents break their daily pattern that those moments remain impressed on her memory in total detail. Her mother has to be away at dinnertime one day when the children have off from school and so she leaves her husband to cook meatballs for dinner. (The meat ends up being thrown into the alley and I won't ruin the arc of the story to tell how.) What is significant is that her father sets the dining room table and goes all out to give his children a formal dinner, something they never experience normally.

Why does he set the table? Why not have the older girls deal with dinner for him? Why is he so happy to be tending to this small chore himself? Detail after detail we get to see why, because he loves his family and delights in them--as they grab his attention, as they fit into the arc of his own life story and life duties, as real people love one another.

When she's an adult, Angela discovers her father has gone away for a few days, a total aberration from his normal personality, and is astonished to find that he has gone to visit a twin brother who lived within driving distance and about whom he had never told her or her siblings. "Oh, I never told you? . . . Well, you know now." Angela was 25. Again, he shares his life, his personal story, without expectation that it would make a difference to Angela, as if they are bonded in so total a way that one more mere personal detail would not add or subtract from the solid compound of their relationship.

This slow, patient, revelation of detail that is the book's style, reflects the parents' characters. They don't talk about their families in Jamaica, and they are not particularly articulate; but when the need arises, they can take action. Levy's book slowly reveals each character, but when the action comes (very near the end of the book) it remains vividly in the reader's memory. One day, the child Angela is confronted by a dog and her (very overweight) father grabs a handrail and acrobatically jumps down eight feet to the sidewalk to save her. Soon after this flashback, the final act, literally, in her father's life is described with such striking intensity that I will never hear the word "Lazarus" again without remembering the scene.

And, finally, that is the plot of the book. It is about family love, but it's the story of what family love is like under duress, when a child is going on stage, when a daughter is going to have a baby, when someone is dying in excruciating pain, and what it's like from everyone's point of view: the mother's, the father's and the main person who is suffering. Amazingly, because the story of her father's death is interleaved between the scenes of her childhood, Levy is able to carry off the toughest assignment of describing death without even a single moment of pathos or sentimentality. Emotion is evoked through the "subtractive" method, by all the things taken away, so that all that is left is the thing itself. That is how Michelangelo described sculpting, and, in this book, Levy's death scene deserves to be on that kind of elevated list of great artistic literature for her achievement in that one scene. THAT scene deserves six stars!

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