By Victor Greto
When Marisa de los Santos killed me off about two-thirds of the way through her book, “Love Walked In,” I became more worried.
I had been troubled long before this melodramatic point in her first novel because the emotionally-detached character — “my” character — Martin Grace, increasingly became shrouded, or smothered, by another male character in the novel, Teo.
Teo is this persistently — impossibly? — understanding character who overshadowed Martin from the beginning.
Cornelia Brown, who narrates a good part of the book, warned me at the beginning that Martin — a chiseled, Cary Grant-like figure that walked in her Philadelphia coffee shop — was both the spark and segue to the true relationship of the novel: that of Cornelia and Clare Hobbes, Martin’s estranged 11-year-old daughter.
Clare lives with her mother, whom Martin divorced before the events of the novel.
Martin’s detachment from Clare and her increasingly manic mother becomes the reason for Cornelia’s rejection of him. Cornelia and Teo eventually cushion Clare’s longing for stability until her mother returns toward the end of the novel.
At one point in my conversation with Marisa about her novel, I asked why she had killed off Martin.
“There’s a piece missing ,” she said of Martin’s character. “He doesn’t get a close connection.”
Not with anyone. Although he seems stable and polite, his presence seems to evoke a pretty non-presence.
“Cornelia does try to draw him out a bit, telling him about her vulnerabilities,” Marisa said. “But he doesn’t go there.”
No, he doesn’t, and, I confess, nor would I.
I can’t identify with Martin’s cleanly-burnished good looks — although, after a couple of drinks, I feel as though I have this cool bedroom-eyes-Mediterranean thing going.
But I did sympathize with both his predicament and, especially, his careful attitude.
I can identify with a guy who doesn’t respond properly or on cue to a woman’s stated or, more likely, hinted-at vulnerabilities.
In the novel, Clare calls Martin for help while her mother mentally unspools. He effectively blows her off, politely, but in what I imagine to be his routine way of handling things.
“When Cornelia finds out about him rejecting Clare, that’s it for her,” Marisa said. “He didn’t want to get involved or feel an obligation.”
Maybe.
Martin’s subsequent death in a car accident while on business in London frees Cornelia to come fully into herself, Marisa said.
My identification with Martin’s emotional detachment is not to justify his attitude. It is to say that, with a lot of guys I know, it’s our way of dealing with stuff, from women to our childhoods to work relationships.
It’s a defense mechanism, which may either be oiled by circumstance, or rusted to nothing through understanding. If a woman is interested, she either will chip away at it, or throw her hands up and judge it’s not worth it.
Cornelia isn’t interested. Or it’s not worth the effort for her, at that point in her life. All legitimate.
But did he have to die? Ouch.
“Keep in mind, these are fantasies,” said Suzanne Ferriss, a scholar who studies the genre known as “chick lit,” in which Marisa’s book partakes.
In the novel’s urban setting, its voices and themes, the genre’s imprint is there.
Even so, whether a novel in this genre is either more tongue-in-cheek, or deadly serious, it’s about time a woman’s experience — single or otherwise, in an urban setting or not — was consistently explored.
Because, what most of us grew up believing to be “literature” has been male-dominated. And, more often than not, those authors’ female characters died for lesser flaws than Martin’s.
Touché away.
Still, there’s Martin, dead on a London street, melodramatically pushing Marisa’s plot toward its foreseeable conclusion.
I asked Marisa’s husband what he thought about the male characters in the novel.
“If I was Martin, I’d be pushing up daisies,” said David Teague, a University of Delaware English teacher, whose been married to Marisa for nearly 14 years.
As for Teo, “Is there a guy like that around?” he asked. “It may be wish-fulfillment. But if there’s a Prince Charming out there, it’s me.”
Fair enough. After all, Marisa dedicates her book to him with Cole Porter’s words, “You’re the Nile/ You’re the Tower of Pisa,” from the song, “You’re the Top.”
Still, there is hope, and it’s contained within the last episode of television’s version of the first American chick lit book, Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City.”
There, but in Paris, not London, the emotionally-detached Mr. Big isn’t run down by a car. With all of his flaws intact, he realizes Carrie Bradshaw is his committed lover. And Carrie cares enough to accept him.
On TV, Carrie was played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who optioned Marisa’s book for the movies.
That emotionally-detached face of mine is smiling.