Sunday, January 28, 2024

Separation as a Literary Theme

Dave Astor

January 28

An internment camp in Idaho for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

It's quite intense when fictional characters who are in love disappear from each other's lives. So many questions evoked: Why did they get separated? How long will they be apart? Will they ever get back together? If so, how will that come about? If not, why not? All this can make for page-turning, emotionally wrenching novels.

I experienced this again last week when reading Jamie Ford's heartwarming/heartbreaking 2009 novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which focuses on Chinese-American preteen boy Henry Lee and Japanese-American preteen girl Keiko Okabe in the months after they meet in Seattle in 1942. They develop a charming relationship amid anti-Asian prejudice that's especially virulent against Japanese-Americans at a time when the U.S. and Japan were on opposing sides during World War II.

Then, Keiko and her family are forced to move, along with other innocent Japanese-Americans, to a bleak internment camp in Idaho. She and Henry manage to stay in touch for a while until their relationship is sabotaged (we learn how that happened late in the book) and the two go on to have totally divergent lives with no contact at all. Then Henry, who married someone else, becomes a widower in the mid-1980s. Will he and Keiko find each other again? (During a time when the Internet, and its search-for-people possibilities, was not a general-public thing.)

Through these two characters, author Ford (who is partly of Chinese descent) makes us deeply feel the injustice of what was done to loyal Japanese-American citizens during WWII. And I couldn't help thinking of the blatant racism that spared white German-Americans and white Italian-Americans from also being wrongly put in camps, even though the countries of their ancestry were also at war with the U.S.

Speaking of white Europeans, we have the English characters Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Jane Austen's Persuasion. They're engaged until things get broken when the young, not-yet-mature Anne is persuaded by interfering family and friends that Wentworth doesn't have high enough social status. Eight years later, the two meet again. Will things work out this time? My favorite Austen novel.

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre classic published three decades later, we have the famous rupturing of the Jane/Edward Rochester relationship. They are subsequently apart for about 10 months (a 10 months in which a LOT happens) until...

A novel written in the 20th century but set in the 19th features an unconsummated "affair" between Newland Archer and the free-spirited Ellen Olenska even as Newland is engaged and then married to the conventional May Welland. This is in Edith Wharton's memorable The Age of Innocence. After May's death nearly three decades later, Newland has the chance to see Ellen again. The ending surprised me.

A late-20th-century novel also set in the 1800s, during the American Civil War, is Charles Frazier's absorbing Cold Mountain. In it, Confederate Army deserter W.P. Inman walks for months trying to reunite with his love Ada Monroe. Will that happen?

Circling back to World War II, a key relationship in Herman Wouk's gripping War and Remembrance is between Byron and his Jewish wife Natalie. The two are parted as Byron serves in the U.S. Navy, and further parted when Natalie -- through a series of events too complicated to summarize here -- ends up in a Nazi concentration camp despite being an American. Will she survive?

Reunions don't always occur, or, when they do, don't always result in "happily ever after" endings. While I don't want to give specific spoilers, some situations I discussed above didn't conclude as pleasingly as readers might have hoped. But others finished in a more upbeat way.

Examples fitting the theme of this post?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning "Montclairvoyant" topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece -- about an unfortunate intra-town lawsuit and a great cat cafe -- is here.