Sorrow, by Tiffanie DeBartole

In Sorrow, misfortune doesn’t need to happen, but it does.

Sorrow tells a schizophrenic story that fluctuates between how despair and sorrow come to a person in a variety of degrees. One can be simply sad or one can be wretched. There is suffering and desolation, but then woe and misfortune can sail by, even if one is spineless. And then there is heartbreak. Sorrow, by Tiffanie DeBartole, runs the gamut of the kinds of sorrow a person can experience. Most likely, when you read the novel you will find a few that startle you.

The protagonist of the novel, Joe Harper, is not a Holden Caufield knock-off and readers who dislike Holden Caufield should not shy away from Sorrow on account of a dislike of A Catcher in the Rye. Joe is a variegated character, not always predictable, often self-debasing, and sometimes self-congratulatory, which makes him quite human. He introduces himself at the beginning of the story as spineless and one who goes “the wrong way at almost every turn.” At one point, he compares himself to fire, but it is a “safe kind of fire,” of course, meaning a battery-powered candle, which is “no real fire at all.” In contrast, his best friend is depicted as “combustion,” and his lover, October, as “all sparkles and warmth.”

Joe has his good moments. Ironically, most of these are brought on playing his guitar after his best friend, Cal, shows up as a nemesis. Cal is the successful musician Joe didn’t become on account of his defeatism. After playing soft chords and lullaby notes for October Joe feels “electric.” It was a “good kind of loneliness” he observed, which is about as positive a feeling as Joe ever has, until, that is, Cal elicits from him, after they write a song together, a realization that his heart is flowing, more than just beating.

There are brilliant parts of the story, where Joe’s morose thinking is put in perspective by October and Cal. Since the novel is written from Joe’s first person point of view, these alternative observation are present in dialogue, which is very skillfully written. In fact, the dialogue offers a clever counterbalance to Joe’s interior, gloomy monologues. A significant aspect of the story’s plot involves Joe’s falling in love with October with whom his best friend is also in love. Joe believes he has to make a mordant choice of which one he will hurt. It’s an example of Joe’s defeated thinking, his immediate conclusion that no matter what the outcome he will be the one hurt, that he will be exposed for what he really is and his lover and his friend will “crush” him. October tells him that he lives “like someone who doesn’t understand how fast the sand moves through the hourglass.” Joe has a glimpse of the validity of October’s observations, but in the end he ignores them, retreating into his moroseness like a wheel spider, doing frantic cartwheels away from danger. October’s exasperation to the many times Joe retreats is reminiscent of a W.H. Auden poem: “Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.”

I had but one disappointment with Sorrow, but upon reflection I came to understand that it was not a criticism but a praise for Ms. DeBartolo’s writing. Joe, through his many travails, is at times consumed with what seems to be a shallow millennial angst, something that fills so many new movie dramas, the ones you wish you’d not watched afterwards. But, ironically, that angst makes the story real, and that makes Joe’s character believable. In other words, it is a part of the novel’s carefully constructed plot. There are too many boring novels that are full of protagonists whose monologues include complex philosophical passages. One puts them down thinking at the end that a lecture is over. Not so with Sorrow. The reader can feel Joe’s sorrow in Sorrow beyond the words on the page, the same as October felt when she touched the lobsterman’s hand in the coffee shop in Willits. And, as the lobsterman did with Joe, the reader can feel Joe’s rage over the sorrows in his life. One cannot help but think of Leonard Cohen’s observation in Anthem, “every heart to love will come but like a refugee.”

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