Within Arm's Reach

I am not gonna lie – I struggled with keeping on reading the book a couple of times. Not only because I found most of the characters extremely unlikable, but also because the ones I actually liked (Gracie, Louis, Noreen) seemed a bit underdeveloped; it all felt a bit flat, to be honest. I craved more depth and detail and I think that the plotline was a bit too scattered and left with some loose that needed to be tied up. Also, as I said before, I grew fond of Gracie, for many reasons - she is the oldest daughter, she is trying so hard, she is caught in one of the most difficult moments of her life and everyone seems to be unable to see that it is about her, not about all of them. I really liked her vulnerability, the fact that she is the only one that shows emotions and cries in public while the others recoil in embarrassment. So I would love to have more of her, too.

This is all to say that I spent all the reading with mixed feelings, thinking that there was always something missing, that the story wasn't fulfilling me completely. But then, right at the end, I wonder if Ann Napolitano played a little trick on me. Maybe it's just my opinion, but something on the last page (yes, last page) makes me forgive a lot of the other things. Catherine, the matriarch, says “I am lucky enough to recognise this for that it is: one of those perfect, full-to-bursting moments you wait a lifetime for, when it all comes together”. And somehow, that trespasses the narrative and becomes about that bit of the book, too. Maybe the rest of the book, incomplete, with some bits missing here and there, is a waiting room for this moment.

That is the last line of the novel. But if you go through the next pages, you'll find the ‘Acknowledgements'. I read them, and somehow, again, the book became a different thing to me. It became a very dear memory. And I know, I know – the author is one thing, the book is another. I honestly don't care. What Ann wrote, in this re-editing of her first novel, was what I needed now. She says “I wrote Within Arm's Reach a lifetime ago. It was published in 2004, when I was thirty-two years old, and while I was writing it I was convinced it would never be published. I'd already written two other failed novels in my twenties, and I had little reason to think this time would be any different. My first novel had been rejected by eighty literary agents; the second secured me an agent but my agent was unable to sell the book to a a publisher. At that point, I felt like a failure with a capital F. I was working as a personal assistant to pay my bills, and my father had started sending me law school brochures in the mail [...] I'm a different writer at fifty-one than I was at twenty-nine, I'm a different woman. Thank goodness for that! But this is the best book I was able to write when I wrote it, I was proud of it then, and I'm proud of my younger self for writing it now. I had so little belief in my ability when I wrote this novel, so little belief in my right to be a writer at all, that it feels miraculous and brave that I summoned this story and put it down on the page.”

And somehow, this brought me down to tears and to reason. Of course. She should be proud of her first novel. I'm proud of her too. It is confusing and something with some holes, but who cares? It came together at the end.