Almost Life
The heroines of [Hargrave's past] novels were up against big, external forces such as plague, witch-hunters, famine, drought and ironclad patriarchal rule. Erica and Laure face subtler, internal forces, with mixed results ... Hargrave has a great eye and ear for close-focus, intimate scenes. Conversations, sexual encounters and meals are vividly alive ... Laure and Erica are richly drawn, in both heart and mind, but as the novel hopscotches through the years, bringing them back together only to pull them apart again, Hargrave seems determined to make their flickering connection a tragedy ... While I believed in the characters, as the novel went on I had a harder and harder time believing in the grave destinies to which Hargrave was frog-marching them. Most people, after all, don’t end up spending the rest of their lives with the hot foreign strangers they meet one summer.
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Paris in the late 1970s is rendered convincingly but at a length which, along with an abundance of drunken philosophical discourse, mars the pace ... All its joy and brilliant tension lies in the scenes between them rather than in the sections when their separate stories meander along at a maddeningly glacial pace while they write each other occasional letters. However, the obstacles to them being together are real and convincing ... Despite one obvious queer character trope near the end, the novel does become increasingly propulsive: sensitive, sad, multilayered, and a moving examination of true love and passion.
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It’s a daunting task to fill in both the lovers’ meetings and all that happens in between them; Hargrave excels in portraying those brief, heady passages that add up to a monumental story of love and loss.
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