Divorce, literarily

Caitlin Shetterly renders Fault Lines

By Tim O’sullivan

Caitlin Shetterly and Richard Ford read at Longfellow Books, in Portland, Sept. 5, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 772-4045.

STORY COLLECTOR: Caitlin Shetterly makes divorce literature.

Marriages in the United States are just about as likely to end in court as they are in a pair of elderly hands holding each other on a front porch. The breaking apart of families has disturbed millions of parents and children across the country. Coping is not always easy. Caitlin Shetterly, a Maine native and editor of Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce (Knopf), a short story anthology, was able to deal with her parents’ divorce through literature, specifically, the literature of divorce.

“As I read,” Shetterly states in the book’s introduction, “my grief at the dissolution of my family began to feel, in the words of Walker Percy, ‘certified.’ ”

Shetterly was born in Bar Harbor in 1974. Her parents were “back-to-the-landers” and soon moved to a 75-acre parcel of land in Gouldsboro where they lived for six years. They then moved to Surry, just south of Ellsworth, where Shetterly lived until she was 18.

As she was heading off to college at Brown University, her parents divorced. Her family was “in a living hell.” After some difficult times trying to deal with the catastrophe, she found John Updike’s story Separating. The experiences of the characters jumped out at her as her own, and she began to find a path to understanding, and, as it turns out, the beginnings of Fault Lines.

“The truth is this,” Shetterly explains in an interview with the Phoenix, “the book began in my mind as something I used for myself long before it was something my agent thought I could sell.”

“Some people have parts of the Bible they know they can go to for reassurance,” she continues. “I had stories about divorce that I knew were there and that I knew represented the experiences I had been through.”

Shetterly’s senior thesis at Brown was on divorce literature, and, to her knowledge, she is the first person to “define and name a genre of divorce literature.”

The authors in Fault Lines, due to be released September 4, are some of the best known in American Literature: John Updike, Russell Banks, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and more. But it is the book’s first story, John Cheever’s The Season of Divorce, that paved the way for all the rest.

Shetterly credits Cheever, who published the story in 1950, with introducing divorce into American literature.

“I knew from research I did in college that it wasn’t until Cheever started using the word divorce in his stories, and started inserting it into the suburban domestic genres of fear, that it started to become a literature of divorce as people referenced Cheever,” she explained.

Thus, The Season of Divorce is set as the book’s prologue, despite the fact that the main couple doesn’t even get a divorce. They remain together despite having a marriage that is “broken and cannot be repaired.”

The rest of the stories are wide ranging in terms of character, style and plot, but, of course, they all have divorce in common. The stories are divided into three sections: “What Falls Apart,” “The Children,” and “The Afterlife.” Shetterly did not start intending to make these divisions, the stories simply “spoke to each other” that way.

Ann Beattie’s The Burning House opens the “What Falls Apart” section. A couple has a dinner party, and throughout the course of the evening it is revealed that both husband and wife are having affairs. Yet, these affairs aren’t secret, the dinner guests know all about one or both, and even the couple knows what the other is up to. In this wicked web of open deceit, cruelty and despair portend the ruin of a family.

In Updike’s Separating, the story that Shetterly says “changed my life,” we meet the Maples on the day they are going to tell their children about their separation. The parents, Richard and Joan, are oddly coming together one last time for this delicate and difficult disclosure. They don’t hate each other, there is nothing specifically horrible about their marriage, they have just lost that magic “it,” as Updike eloquently symbolizes in the story’s opening lines:

“The day was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples internal misery with solid sunlight.”

“The Children” section opens with Randall Kenan’s Hobbits and Hobgoblins. The reader is privy to the wild imagination of a boy trying to deal with his parents’ separation. “A green orangutan hangs from the ceiling lamp; giant fire-red Amazonian toads play leapfrog on the carpet; a yerple sea turtle swims the length of the room. . . ” The child imagines all this as his divorced parents fight about his custody.

Helen on Eighty-Sixth Street, by Wendi Kaufman, portrays an amazingly bright girl who performs an ancient Greek sacrifice in hopes of getting her father back. Russell Banks’ Queen for a Day depicts the sad and courageous story of a 12-year-old New Hampshire boy who is left to be the man of the house and desperately tries to get his mother on the “Queen for a Day” game show in hopes of saving the family.

“The Afterlife” section begins with Raymond Carver’s Intimacy. It is the story of an odd and fuming encounter between ex-spouses. A former wife gets the chance to tell her betraying ex-husband that he has “caused her anguish, made her feel exposed and humiliated.” The ranting continues, but there is no resolution. As Shetterly says in her introduction “this is, after all, no self-help book.”

If you have been personally affected by divorce, it can be difficult but cathartic reading. If you are not, it may help you understand the psyches of those who you know who have been affected by divorce.

Shetterly’s hope is that some teenager will pick up the book and understand that he or she is not alone in their feelings of despair and abandonment caused by family breakup.

“I do believe in the comfort of fiction,” she says.

Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at timosulli@msn.com.