‘The Age of Hope’ by David Bergen

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor

In The Age of Hope, David Bergen carefully delineates the days of Hope Koop, née Plett. The novel starts with the death of Hope’s first love, a debonair flyboy who is killed in a plane crash after a show-offy stunt. Bergen dispatches him with unemphatic economy right on the first page, announcing clearly that this is not going to be that kind of novel. Even Hope, once she gets over her initial shock and sorrow, begins “to understand his death as something that happened to him, not her.” Hope’s response to her sudden loss reveals a core of stoic, get-on-with-it strength. (If you view Hope’s reaction as cold, this might not be the book for you.) Bergen’s response signals an authorial rejection of flashy gestures, self-destructive passions and big, explosive events. With a tone that is at once detached and impossibly tender, the Winnipeg-based writer focuses on the seemingly conventional life of one woman born in rural Manitoba in 1930.

Sensible Hope marries the steady and steadily prosperous Roy Koop just in time for ’50s domesticity and four kids, has a few brushes with the usual ’70s shenanigans, and then ages into the confusions of our current era. While Bergen’s recent novels The Time In Between (2005), The Retreat (2008), and The Matter with Morris (2010) circle around actions in the wider political world, The Age of Hope consciously explores what goes on when “nothing happens.” In a brief burst of meta-fiction near the book’s end, Hope’s grown daughter Penny ponders writing a novel about a small-town woman born in 1930. Hope is suspicious – and dubious. “Oh, why write such nonsense,” she says. “It will be too episodic. You’ll need some backbone to the story. A plot. My life was plotless.”

It’s true that Bergen avoids events in The Age of Hope, or rather that he piles on the kind of repetitive domestic incidents that crowd out big events and large questions. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes Hope’s “episodes” fall short, the plot points too suddenly taken up or dropped, the feelings too muted and muffled. But there are many more sequences where the narrative moves like an underground stream, propelled by Bergen’s emotional generosity, acute perception and by the precise currents of his language.

Even episodes that could be played for drama – the weekend Hope takes a daughter’s friend to Minneapolis for a secret abortion, or the molestation of one of Hope`s daughters by an older cousin, or the loss of Roy’s business in the double-digit-interest-rate ’80s – are deliberately defused, their emotional implications kept cautiously at arm’s length. Hope’s bouts of mental illness allow for no confessional Diary of a Mad Housewife histrionics. Even as she sinks into a clinical depression that will require hospitalization and electroshock therapy, Hope describes it to herself this way: “She wasn’t able to keep her shoulders square anymore.” Bergen could be expressing cultural attitudes – the fact that there were, in fact, few words to describe Hope’s condition at that time.  But this prairie-style understatement also seems to function as a deliberate narrative strategy. The premise of the novel has been dismissed as old-fashioned — Globe & Mail columnist Russell Smith cited The Age of Hope as proof that Canadian lit is stuck in 1955 – but there’s something almost experimental about the stubborn reticence of Bergen’s tone.

Without much in the way of conventional plotting, Bergen relies on characterization. In a culture that values Hope only through her relationships to other people – as a daughter, a wife, a mother – she maintains a prickly separateness. As a young woman she writes to Roy that she is “aware of being alone. I mean this in the strongest way.” In the novel, Hope’s connections to her friends, her in-laws, even her children are unclear, but this feels like Bergen’s choice. Husband Roy, a model of quiet reasonableness and decency, remains a cipher, certainly to the reader, but also – significantly – to Hope. “Roy had a way of saying things, as if he didn’t quite understand the subtlety of language,” Hope thinks at one point. “She wondered how he managed to run a business with thirty employees.”

Similarly, Hope does her best by her children while aware that they are growing into lives she can’t quite imagine. She views them with a stringent lack of sentimentality, knowing their weaknesses and mistakes and understanding that, as they become adults, these are their problems and no longer hers. In one scene, Hope has a sudden, sharp apprehension of her son, mired in middle-aged defeat and losing his hair. “She wondered if this happened to other mothers – that they arrived at a point in their lives where their children had become strangers.”

On the surface at least, Hope is commonsensical and conformist. But she’s also set apart by some inner impulse – an instinct for introspection, perhaps. Hope reads widely, for instance, in a town where reading is distrusted: “A book did not give you clean bathrooms and waxed floors. It did not put the garden in.” At the same time, her reading is grounded in her own experiences. She finds the language of Lolita “very fancy” and is impatient with the ennui of Emma Bovary, thinking her “insipid and weak and wanting.”

In one sense, Hope is alienated, but she’s also crisp, clear-eyed and scornful of self-pity. And Bergen is too scrupulous to make her dissatisfactions into a romantic revolt. Hope understands the limitations of her town, the ironically named Eden, where the word “wisdom” is “wrongly used in the place of ‘parsimonious.’” But she has also made a bargain to live by its structures and rules. Rebellion is represented by her friend Emily, who tells Hope that her Hawaiian vacations are “bourgeois” and in the 1960s introduces Hope to The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. (There follows a small comic misunderstanding involving Betty Friesen, a woman who lives on Third Street. “I never imagined that she was a writer,” says Hope.) In the 1970s, Emily is reading R.D. Laing and theorizes that Hope’s nervous breakdown might have been the only sane response to the suffocating insanity of small-town life. Hope finds this presumptuous.

Bergen resists giving Hope’s story a central defining event – this is not a “problem of the week” novel. Even a relatively untroubled middle-class life, then, is shown to hold its own mysteries and pain. This idea feels even more poignantly true as the novel heads to an unexpectedly moving conclusion.

Hope has always been set slightly apart. One daughter addresses her letters home, “Dear Dad (and Mother),” making Hope into a parenthetical part of her own family. As a widow she finally finds her spiritual separateness matched by physical isolation. Her natural introspection is no longer overrun with the busy-ness of daily domestic life.  She is now for the first time left to shape her own life, with interesting results.

In one sense, the once beautiful Hope has become invisible, as older women often do in our culture. She “belonged to a whole herd of grey-haired women in running shoes who apparently did not exist,” she notes with asperity. But we suddenly see her very clearly. Bergen no longer holds Hope at a distance – perhaps because she no longer holds herself at a distance – and the banked emotions of her life suddenly flood into the story. Bergen’s calibrated narrative risk pays out as the decades of Hope’s life culminate in an almost unbearably intimate portrayal of old age and death. The Age of Hope is that rare thing – a novel that ends really well.

HarperCollins | 304 pages |  $27.99 | cloth | ISBN #978-1443411356