In a previous novel, “In the Family Way,” Tommy Hays handled an emotionally loaded circumstance — a family’s grief over the death of a son — with a delicacy that allowed the reader to feel invested, moved and enlivened, but never gratuitously manipulated. In his latest work, Hays once again tells of a family in crisis, and the results are every bit as remarkable.
“The Pleasure Was Mine” (St. Martin’s, 255 pages, $23.95) is the first-person account of Prate Marshbanks, a crusty old housepainter whose well-bred wife of 50 years, Irene, is suffering from Alzheimer’s. While tending to her as her condition deteriorates, Marshbanks agrees to keep his 9-year-old grandson, Jackson, while the boy’s recently widowed father, Prate’s son Newell, spends the summer at an artists’ colony.
Writing explicitly about a subject such as Alzheimer’s forces an author to navigate a narrow path between unbearable sadness and trivializing sentimentality. In Marshbanks, Hays has created a narrative vehicle up to the task. By his own account an ill-tempered simpleton, the old man reveals himself to be a thoroughly decent, stoic survivor as sturdy as the Carolina mountains where much of the novel takes place.
Hays defines his narrator with details such as his favorite book being “Jude the Obscure,” Thomas Hardy’s classic work about a humble man’s burdens. More subtly, he filters Marshbanks’ observations of his plight through the prism of his small but rich life as an old-fashioned, small-town Southerner.
Irene, too, even with much of her identity stolen by disease, shines through as a marvelous character, as reflected in the people whose lives she touches, in her struggle to communicate with her family, in her intermittent periods of clarity, and especially in the lovingly told memories of her husband.
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Even in secondary characters such as neighbors, shopkeepers, waitresses and strangers who give directions, love gently expresses itself in countless ways.