To me, one of the definitions of a great book is that after I finish it, I continue thinking about its content and/or characters for days afterward. The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley (Ecco, 2013) is just such a piece of fiction. While technically a work of fantasy, this novel is also grounded in some very deep ideas about love and loss.
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope tells the tale of Evelyn starting from her Great Depression and World War II childhood and continuing to her declining years of life at the end of the 20th century. Along the way, she negotiates the challenges that many of us face in life. As a farmer in rural North Carolina, Evelyn experiences quite a bit of independence for a woman. It is on her farm, inherited from her beloved aunt, that she begins encountering her lovers, both male and female. One of the lovers, Adam, becomes her husband and the main focus of the story. Together, they find a deep love that many of us strive to find in our lives, filled with intimacy and passion. They have a large brood of children together, and the tale continues to walk their lives’ journey as parents.
During the course of the story, Evelyn and Adam must cope with the deaths of both a child and a parent. Riley’s descriptions of their grief pulled me back to the days and months after the loss of my daughter. Her words capture the emotions one experiences in such devastating times in a way I’ve never seen so clearly described. She writes,
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope tells the tale of Evelyn starting from her Great Depression and World War II childhood and continuing to her declining years of life at the end of the 20th century. Along the way, she negotiates the challenges that many of us face in life. As a farmer in rural North Carolina, Evelyn experiences quite a bit of independence for a woman. It is on her farm, inherited from her beloved aunt, that she begins encountering her lovers, both male and female. One of the lovers, Adam, becomes her husband and the main focus of the story. Together, they find a deep love that many of us strive to find in our lives, filled with intimacy and passion. They have a large brood of children together, and the tale continues to walk their lives’ journey as parents.
During the course of the story, Evelyn and Adam must cope with the deaths of both a child and a parent. Riley’s descriptions of their grief pulled me back to the days and months after the loss of my daughter. Her words capture the emotions one experiences in such devastating times in a way I’ve never seen so clearly described. She writes,
Grief is a powerful river in flood. It cannot be argued or reasoned or wrestled down to a trickle. You must let it take you where it is going. When it pulls you under, all you can do is keep your eyes open for rocks and fallen trees, try not to panic, and stay faceup so you will know where the sky is. You will need that information later. Eventually, its waters calm and you will be on a shore far from where you began, raw and sore, but clean and as close to whole as you will ever be again.
In particular, Riley relates the intimacy of sex after a loss in a way that I’ve rarely seen discussed nonetheless described so powerfully:
Since [her] death, [Adam had] held himself back in everything, even with me. Days went by without intimacy. Then he would turn silently to me in the dark, not out of love but out of need, and there was a fierceness to his touch that overwhelmed me. We went at each other as if the hounds of hell were after us. Or we were the hounds themselves. The act was not lovemaking, but grief-making, a new beat manifest, without tenderness, raw and exhausting, throwing us into black, dreamless sleep.
The book branches into fantasy as one of the leads is not human, and yet that plot line helps feed much of the deeper philosophy in the book about our identities. The questions of what it means to be human, to live, to love, and to die are at the core of the work.
© 2015 Green Heart Guidance
© 2015 Green Heart Guidance
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