Title: Standard Deviation
Author: Katherine Heiny
Published: 2016, Fourth Estate
I suggested this book for the book club because I expected it to be a profound meditation on marriage and I didn’t think I could stomach that without some handholding. I was nevertheless profoundly surprised when it was picked. And then worried because the book club tends to literary, and this turned out to be less profound than lighthearted in the chick lit mode. This is what happens when your chick lit protagonist grows up, gets married, and has a kid.
Except the entire novel is narrated by the male protagonist Graham. He seems to be having second thoughts about his second wife Audra, who he begins to compare with his first wife Elspeth. The two women are a study in contrasts. Audra is gregarious and garrulous, social to a fault. Elspeth is calm, collected and self-contained, and has just made a reappearance in their lives. Graham clearly veered from one end of the spectrum in his choice of life partner to the other, and now he seems to want to self-correct.
Audra and every other woman he knew titled their heads slightly when they answered the phone, so they could slide their handsets under their hair. But Elspeth always wore her hair pulled back in a French twist. She answered the phone without any nonsense.
Graham and Audra have a son Matthew, who has Asperger’s, adding to the emotional complexity of his married life. In the course of the novel, Matthew joins an origami club composed entirely of adults. These misfits seem to be Matthew’s future, and despite their misgivings, Graham and Audra embrace them, because that’s what you do for your child, just as later, they embrace a completely unsuitable friend so that their child will have one.
Audra is exhausting, and yet many women might have an Audra in them. She seems incapable of holding onto a straight line of thought, moving constantly into tangents. Her soft corner is so advanced that she invites all the neighbourhood strays (and the entire awkward origami club) to Thanksgiving. Forget dinner, a series of people move in with them at difficult stages in their lives. It’s hard to believe that this happens in New York, and it probably doesn’t – Audra is a caricature, but likeable enough that you want her to be true.
While the novel is told through Graham’s perspective – and it was posited at the book club that one should see him as an unreliable narrator and take the impressions he gives us, especially of the two women in his life, with a pinch of salt – I loved how Heiny portrays Audra’s penchant for gossip as a superpower.
It was true that Audra had a lot of insider knowledge. And it seemed like everyone wanted to trade on it. Sometimes Graham felt like he was married to Warren Buffett. Well, a female Warren Buffett who knew about everything except finance.
Audra is fully aware of her powers, and she is not unwilling to use them – to say, bring a priest around for a friend, or in the service of Matthew’s social life. This is the unsung labour that many women do, and it is possible that Audra is a little tired of it too.
Graham, it was suggested at the book club, is an emotional freerider. I love the term – so many men are, scoffing at feelings while letting the women in their lives do the emotional labour for both of them. I’m not sure about Graham though. The entire novel might be said to be his attempt to reckon with his emotions, as best as a man can do anyway.
And Graham is dragged into many of Audra’s schemes, such as the dinner party at the scout leader’s house, where they are supposed to network with parents of potential friends for their. son. Audra doesn’t appear to be networking at all, but for Graham, “it was intensive physical labor, similar to panning for gold – patiently sifting through sediment and much while your back ached and cold river water numbed your ankles”.
Or the playdates and lunches they mediated with Matthew, “until you understood – truly understood, on an emotional level – why simultaneous interpreters have the highest suicide rate of any professions”.
Graham experienced the wave of weariness he sometimes felt when he considered all the steps it would take to make Matthew – any child, but especially Matthew – a functioning adult
The difference between Graham and Audra is that Graham articulates the labour involved – when he has to do it – while Audra makes it look easy. On Audra’s endless stream of houseguests he says: “they drained your batteries.”
Now that I come to think of it, Graham seems consumed by an intense weariness, the kind that comes with being married for a long time, from having young children, from doing the same job, from having walked this Earth for half a decade. This weariness is something I can totally relate to, because, I realise now, it’s your standard issue midlife crisis, down to, in his case, thoughts of infidelity.
Speaking of which I really liked how infidelity is handled in the novel. For one, the tables are sort of turned. And when they are, it is with a sense of “yeah, so what?”. There was an itch, it had to be scratched. Itch happens.
Finally, perhaps like this book, I thought I’d have something profound to say, but in the end, all I have is a series of quotes that I typed up, so I’m just going to put them out there.
On friendship
This was the pleasure of twenty-year-old friendships, Graham thought. Tracing a memory back to its source. Like following a stream through the woods and up a mountain until you find the spring tricking from a rock and you clear away the dead brown leaves of the intervening years and the water flows as sweetly as ever.
Don’t kid yourself – emotional attachment and common hobbies are great, but not having to defend your choice of restaurant is hard to beat.
Graham saw Lorelei fairly often, but it felt like he was married to her because for fourteen years now, Audra had been giving him Lorelei’s opinion on everything.
On adulting
But Graham had come to believe that people were only happy when they could feel one emotion at a time. That was a reason that things that provoked such pure joy in childhood – fresh chocolate-chip cookies, a sweatshirt warm from the dryer, a perfect sand castle – did not offer the same joy in adulthood. You were too busy having all these other tiresome emotions about income tax and drunken texts and varicose veins and how much money was in the parking meter. People in love were happy because being in love blocked all the other emotions out.”
Oh he supposed origami taught you something about patience and attention to detail, but did that really prepare you for life? Graham was of the opinion that nothing prepared you for life, unless maybe you were forced to run an Indian gauntlet as a toddler.
He thought that just having a polite conversation with someone, just surviving thirty minutes in that person’s company, just realizing that that person did not dislike you enough to sit at a separate table – sometimes that was a major triumph all on its own.
He had spent so much time wishing Matthew were different, wondering how to make Matthew different, when it was actually the process of living that did it. Life forced you to cope. Life wore down all your sharp corners with its tedious grinding on, the grinding that seemed to take forever but was actually quick as brushfire.
On being a parent
Graham thought he could ask any of the women he knew how motherhood had changed them, and they would all sigh and talk about how their hips had widened or their skin had coarsened or their feet had flattened (Audra claimed her arms were hairier), but Graham thought the real changes were mental. The real changes were a tendency to give ten-minute warnings before leavings the house; a restlessness at school pickup time even on weekends and holidays; a previously unsuspected knowledge of the lyrics to folk songs; and the strange compulsion to comment aloud on everyday sights.
Once Audra had told him, ‘Nobody but nobody gets out the door smoothly. At least not people with children.’ It helped to remember this.
Was there any sight more heartbreaking than a small boy with a big backpack. Well, yes, of course there was. Think of the photos of victims of the Nepal earthquake, of the starving children in South Sudan. But those weren’t the same. Those photos made you sad for a little while, but they didn’t make you want to run out on the balcony and drop to your knees, promising God anything if only He will protect your child from bullying and motion sickness.
On marriage
It was amazing, really, that after so many years apart, he and Elspeth still spoke in marital code.
Imagine: it had been over a decade since he had spoken by phone to a woman he had once married. People were not meant to live like this, he sometimes thought. It was too confusing.
He was thinking that maybe people weren’t meant to get married twice; it only led to comparisons
Wasn’t that the weird thing – sorry, one of the million weird things – about marriage? That the familiarity that drove you so crazy at times was the very thing you longed for in the end
This was marriage: you started out thinking you’d married the most interesting person in the world and twelve years later, your head was full of useless hair facts.
Chick Lit Hall of Fame 