Book Review: Ordinary People

Originally published in Rice and Beans

I’ve read Judith Guest’s famous novel, Ordinary People, about twenty times. For a long time, I had a tradition where I read it every year to kick off my summer reading. Why? To tell the truth, I think I simply loved the story and its characters. But, really, why? I think I am using this review to figure that out. Having just reread it, I know for sure that I certainly had strong reasons for being drawn to the story at age seventeen, but from my current 56-year-old perspective I relate to it even more.

 Whether experiencing the book or the Oscar-winning movie, many people know the story. Conrad Jarrett is a seventeen- year -old just released from Hillsborough mental hospital where he was sent after an unsuccessful suicide attempt (His method, as he puts it, “double-edge Super Blue”). This event occurred less than a year after his only brother, Buck, was killed in a boating accident in which Conrad was the sole survivor. Conrad’s therapist, Berger, tells the story and also gets to the essential truth of Conrad’s despair:

Kiddo, let me tell you a story. A very simple story. About this perfect kid who had a younger brother. A not-so-perfect kid. And all the time they were growing up, this not so perfect kid tried to model himself after his brother, the perfect kid. It worked, too. After all, they were a lot alike, and the not-so-perfect kid was a very good actor. Then, along came this sailing accident, and the impossible happened. The not-so-perfect kid makes it. The other kid, the one he has patterned his whole life after, isn’t so lucky. So, where is the sense in that, huh? Where is the justice?.....The justice, obviously, is for the not-so-perfect kid to become that other, perfect kid. For everybody. For his parents and his grandparents, his friends, and, most of all, himself. Only, that is one hell of a burden, see? So, finally, he decides he can’t carry it. But how to set it down? No way.  A problem without a solution. And so, because he can’t figure it out how to solve the problem, he decides to destroy it (Guest, 224).

The novel’s action begins in November, about three months after Conrad’s return from the hospital. His well-to-do Lake Forest, Illinois existence seems neat and tidy from the outside with its beautiful home and successful, attractive parents. However, the façade is exactly that. This family is on edge. The veneer of trying to keep it all together, to put things back as they were before the huge losses of the previous year is deeply cracked. Conrad has nightmares and night sweats. He dreams about the accident, repeatedly reliving the tragedy. He is nervous, edgy, isolated from his old friends. He cannot bare to be around even his closest friend, Lazenby. The pain is too great.

 The story is about Conrad, but also his parents, their relationship with their remaining son and each other. Dad Calvin is loving, protective, guilty, and struggling to be the middle man in the icy relations between mom, Beth, and Conrad. Beth is reserved, cold, controlling, emotionally guarded, distant.

“Who it is who can’t forgive who,”  Conrad processes to Berger.

Beth can’t forgive Conrad for surviving her favorite son, Buck, and for attempting suicide, seeing him as the cause of the “big mess.” And mess is something Beth simply doesn’t do.  

An agitated Conrad tells Berger, “I am never going to be forgiven for that, never! You can’t get it out, you know! All that blood on her rug and her goddam towels-everything had to be pitched!”

Conrad cannot forgive his mother for not loving him enough. He is anxious, guilty, and bitter about his mother’s cold contempt. Things are not easy with his father either. Conrad feels burdened and distressed by Cal’s watchful eye, guilt-ridden love, and inability to communicate his grief and care effectively. Cal provides a path toward healing, encouraging a hesitant Conrad to see Berger for the first time. Berger is sloppy, lovable, disorganized, perceptive. His loving and direct questions allow  Conrad (and Cal) to articulate their stories and begin to heal.  

“Maybe you gotta feel lousy sometime, in order to feel better. A little advice, kiddo, about feeling. Don’t think too much about it. And don’t expect it always to tickle,” he says.

 As a former high school teacher I often received suicide poetry during the creative writing unit. Considering the hype about the suicide-centered book and Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, as well as the insidious flow of school shootings/suicides and the occasional celebrity suicides, I do know there is a fascination with this subject, one I too have shared. Maybe an obsession with Conrad’s method, something I never heard of before until my first reading of Ordinary People, the blood, the mess, the slash marks, was what originally captured my teenager attention.

 Suicide is what might have led me to this story, but I know what made me reread it every summer was Conrad. I loved Conrad and I still love him. I love him from a teenage girl’s stance. Conrad is cute and introspective. Even with all of his baggage, he was my teen dream boyfriend,. It’s easy to love Timothy Hutton too, the perfectly cast actor in the film adaptation.  I love Conrad’s nervous phone call to prospective girlfriend, Jeannine Pratt. How I wish a boy would have called me that way in high school! I love him for his list of personal goals: finals, exercise, friends, job, guitar, books, girls. I see myself in this list. I have written lists like this. I still do.

 I love Conrad from my current mother- of- a- son stance. I can’t imagine how Beth could not love Conrad and I enjoy hating her for that. Even if she does look like Mary Tyler Moore in my head (and who could hate MTM?),  I still hate her.  I love Conrad from my guilty Catholic stance. The Jarretts are not religious, but Conrad is riddled with the kind of guilt I carry every day. I love his compulsion to appropriate every tragedy. Cal says to Conrad in the final scene of the book, comparing him to his brother, defending why he was always easier on the younger son, “He needed it. You didn’t. You were always so hard on yourself, I never had the heart. Besides…you were the good kid. The easy one to raise.”  

I was not as good as Conrad, but I do tend to think everything is my fault.

 Most of all I love Conrad Jarrett for his overwhelming grief, something I have always known and always been waiting for, even before it came to find me. Since my first reading of this book, I have lost a brother, a sister, my parents. All of them died at much older ages than Buck and for much more natural causes (cancer, old age), but I still feel the guilt, the emptiness, the despair that Conrad feels. Also, as the youngest child of parents who were always older than everyone else’s, I have always been aware of mortality, of the frailty of every happiness. This is the main truth of my life. I have been anticipating and attempting to prepare for the grief that awaits me, that awaits all of us, from a very young age.

I identify with Conrad’s need for a therapist, for support, for feeling at once self-isolating (Lazenby says,  “Look, I don’t know why you want to be alone in this…”) and in desperate need of connection. In my own life I require much alone time as well as a constant “team of experts” weighing in on my experiences - religious people, family, friends, bonafide therapists, strangers in the grocery store, anyone I come across who will listen. I am strangely democratic about where I get my advice. I need all these people to help me process the pain and disappointments of life. Although therapy was sort of hidden in the mid-twentieth century and earlier - Beth is horrified by Conrad’s need for a therapist - I am so grateful it is so much more accepted and viewed as necessary now.

 Clearly, when I was young I was mostly focused on Conrad, but now when I read it I find myself equally stuck on Cal. The story is told in third person perspectives, alternating Conrad and Calvin viewpoints. Why not Beth’s or Berger’s? I think Guest chooses Conrad and Calvin’s perspectives because they are the ones in this tragedy who want to grow. They are both facing the pain and attempting to find their way to another place. Beth is stuck and for all we know will always be. Berger is the guide. This is not his story. Funny, when I was younger I thought Calvin was boring and fatherly. I couldn’t relate I guess. Now I see him so differently. 

“You want the truth? I don’t know why she left. And neither do you, because a lot of things happen in this-this world, goddamn it!-and people don’t  always know the answers! I’m not authority on her! You’re no authority, either!”

When I was a teenager reading this book I had no idea what it might be like to lose someone close to you, like a child, or a sibling. Now I feel I am Calvin banging on the door of the bathroom where Conrad lies inside bleeding. I know Calvin’s desperate parental love, his desire for the worst to not be so.

 Ordinary People is such an apt title, and perhaps the final reason why I have loved this book for so long. I believe these kinds of problems, despite our culture’s desire to cover them, are ordinary, the rule and not the exception. We all must face and process loss as head -on as the characters in this book, whether we like or not. Some of us will be better at this than others. Luckily and unluckily, we all get many chances to try. Though ordinary, understanding love and forgiveness and acceptance in the aftermath of life’s worst events is not only our greatest challenge, but also our duty, our destiny.