It’s the Less Wonderful Time of the Year
A pair of novellas captures the nature of holiday ambivalence
by Maria Browning
The title story moves from Thanksgiving through Christmas with the devolving Posey family of Mobile, Ala. Their mother’s been dead three years, and sons Frank and Ted are at odds over their father’s refusal to bestir himself from the old family home to start a new holiday tradition with Ted’s picture-perfect Garden & Gun family. The father, Jeff, is a classic stubborn, depressed widower. He dotes on Ted—to Frank’s chagrin—but he’s too deeply mired in anger over his wife’s death to accommodate Ted’s demand that he play grandpa.
Frank, the younger son, an unsuccessful actor who alternately envies and admires his bluff big brother, narrates the story with the ironic perspective of the unfavored child. He has little investment in the dispute, yet he’s drawn irresistibly into mediating it, if only because he hopes to bask in the glow of restored love between Jeff and Ted. He sees both sides with painful clarity as he endures an awkward Christmas meal at Ted’s table: “All he wanted was for me and Dad to come over here and poke around and find his life worthwhile, even if it wasn’t as perfect as it looked. He wanted the present to get equal billing with the past. That seemed reasonable enough. But knowing this didn’t change anything with Dad. In his eyes, I thought, Ted’s life must have looked like proof that the world wasn’t much affected by our mother’s death, that her passage through time mattered less than it should have.”
“The Holiday Season,” while not exactly grim, is dogged in its determination to avoid being heartwarming. A potential romance between Jeff and a neighbor never blossoms, Frank never gets the brotherly chat he hopes for with Ted, and even the grand gift of matching ponies for Ted’s twins turns out to be a disappointment. The father-son dispute is only halfheartedly resolved, months after Christmas is over. And that, it seems, is Knight’s point. Not only do we never get a happy ending, we rarely get an ending at all. As Frank says, the Poseys’ story “had no clear-cut resolution, and likely never would.” Life wanders vaguely until it peters out—a frustrating, inescapable fact that defies our hopes, especially at the holidays.
The second novella, “Love at the End of the Year,” follows the New Year’s Eve wanderings of a group of connected characters in a Mobile so generic it could be any Southern city. A couple whose sleek marriage is disintegrating, their pubescent son, an elderly black babysitter, a defiant 13-year-old girl, her put-upon mother and a May-December gay couple are featured members of a sizable cast. New Year’s Eve is an altogether more cynical celebration than Thanksgiving or Christmas, and that alone gives “Love at the End of the Year” a very different tone from “The Holiday Season.” New Year’s revelers expect fun, not family joy and togetherness, so there’s little at stake. Nobody winds up having much fun in Knight’s tale, but the disappointment is less poignant.
The novella is a series of vignettes, each focused on a single character. Knight makes no overt attempt to string the vignettes together, leaving the reader to construct the narrative, such as it is. This gives the story a freer, more spirited quality than “The Holiday Season,” and Knight lets his characters have a little more breathing room here, too. Though you wouldn’t call it antic, “Love at the End of the Year” indulges a bit of quirkiness in its cast. Evan, the 12-year-old son, is not just your average horny kid—he’s a precocious Internet porn addict who masturbates to exhaustion. The sweet old babysitter Miss Anita carries a gun and miniature bottles of schnapps in her purse. There’s a predatory female named—no kidding—Esmerelda Daza.
Knight’s overriding concern in “Love at the End of the Year” is, true to the title, love—specifically Eros in its many forms. Everybody in the story is filled with desire, often frank sexual desire, but there are more inchoate desires, too. (Katie, the restless wife, dreams simply of escape from her marriage.) The drama of Knight’s story is located in desire itself, quite apart from its object. The experience of being seized with desire is drama enough, as Miss Anita observes: “What a thing, desire. She remembered how she used to slap MacGregor’s face sometimes when they made love, how terrifying it was to lose herself in the way he made her feel, how feeling that way made her angry for reasons she couldn’t understand.” As midnight arrives, Knight lets his mob of characters enjoy reconciliation, homecoming and, in Miss Anita’s case, a little celebratory gunfire.
“Love at the End of the Year” is as sensual, and ultimately hopeful, as “The Holiday Season” is soulful and gloomy. Presented together, they turn holiday clichés on their heads: the sweetness of Christmas is lost in bitterness and resignation, while New Year’s debauchery winds up being life-affirming and filled with intense, if imperfect, joy.
