Part 5 of 5
Pages read: 200-240, so many times I lost track
At the end of the last column, I suggested that my appetite for knowledge of Kate’s past has not been satisfied. Well, in these, our last forty pages, it was, along with, as DFW promised it, attendant tears.
Kate doesn’t jump immediately into confessional mode; she slides into it unwillingly over the course of twenty-two pages. It begins with a playful reimagining of soap opera plotlines from Ancient Greece (As Troy Turns?) and during that time Kate naturally mentions Helen’s cat. Helen’s cat leads her to write about an episode that took place in her loft before the Fall, during which a number of friends may or may not have helped her write to famous people to enlist their help in naming her new cat. (In this section, facts slip through her fingers in more noticeable ways, perhaps because we’re more familiar now with the information she’s working with.) And that cat leads to the cat of many years ago, the one named Cat or Gato (recall our conversation about naming things) who belonged to her son, here called Lucien almost uniformly. And then the remembrance of the unutterable of Long Ago: Lucien’s premature death from meningitis, Kate’s infidelities (“one sometimes merely fucked, too,” she says, and that profane word seems to burst like a bullet out of the dispassionate, academic prose), Adam’s drunkenness, and the murky questions of cause-and-effect surrounding all these tragedies.
The whole book, in some sense, was a means by which to distract herself from this trauma, and yet all the book was naturally leading directly to it. In fact, after she talks about Lucien’s death, and sputters a bit, trying to regain her footing, she wonders if perhaps she could have avoided the topic all together.
