The Dive From Clausen's Pier

The Dive

Carrie Bell asks, ""How much do we owe the people we love?"
Loyalty, guilt and responsibility feature prominently in this "before and after" novel. Carrie was ready for a change even before the tragic accident that rendered Mike, her fiancee, a paraplegic. She takes the same dive, albeit symbolically. What damage has she done to herself?
She flees to New York and begins to make a new life there but she's constantly reminded that Mike doesn't have the luxury of making choices for himself, he has to play the rotten hand he's been dealt. Carrie blames herself for the accident, believing that, if she'd loved him more, Mike wouldn't have felt compelled to make the foolhardy dive. She's hurt by the rejection of her friends in Madison and feels guilty for hurting, knowing that Mike faces emotional and physical challenges that dwarf her own concerns. They move separately through the stages of coming to terms with the outcome of the accident. Mike experiences fear, anger, frustration and depression. Carrie comes to realize that she is just one person and she can't do everything but she can do something. She ultimately decides to do what she can do. Her journey is influenced by the father who abandoned her and her mother when Carrie was just a baby. She wonders if she's like her father. She takes some comfort from her mother's assertion that "people aren't defined by what they do so much as they define what they do". The story is all about Carrie's deeply felt struggle between loyalty and her own freedom. The characters of her hometown friends and family and her hipper New York circle could be cliched but Packer does a good job of presenting them in a balanced way and this allows the reader to share Carrie's pain. Carrie would like to have it all, to have all the good parts of her life wrapped up in a neat little package, to have her difficult new York lover move to Madison where she and he and Mike can all be best friends. Knowing that she can't have what she wants, of course, creates the tension in what could be a very bland novel. Packer teases out the conflict skilfully, in a down-to-earth way that reminds me a lot of Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller. I'm becoming a more ruthless culler so I won't keep this book but it was a good read- I like that there was no fairy-tale ending- and I'll make sure I find it a new home with someone I like.