The Descendants

It’s an almost momentary pleasure for me to read a book after seeing the movie; I speed through the book at a great pace, looking for differences. When I read The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings, I found that the novel is naturally able to do more fleshing-out of the characters, but was pleasantly surprised at how much of the dialogue had been reproduced in the movie, word for word.

The setting, of course, is why I went to see the movie. There’s nothing like watching lovely, sunlit scenes of Hawaii while huddled in your itchy wool coat in a chilly movie theater, ignoring the grayness of the cloud cover lowering outside. My initial irritation with the movie–sparked by a voice-over about how people in paradise have problems too–was dispelled by what came next in the story unfolding on the screen, and that attitude, which I’m going to chalk up to some kind of Hollywood guilt about using Hawaii as a vacation spot, was not in the book at all. (When I saw the movie with Ron, he commented on the voice-over by saying that anytime one of the four of us has to be in the hospital, he wishes we could all do it in Hawaii.)

One of the things the movie did well was to show what it’s like, having people continually barrage you with good wishes for the health of your loved one when you know that there will be no recovery from this final illness. The book does it well, too, with passages like this one: “He looks at a card on the table, then puts it back down and shuffles to bed. I hate get-well cards. It’s like telling someone to have a safe flight. There’s really not a whole lot you can do.”

The main characters in the novel are deeply and well-developed, and even people they meet once get the novelist’s penetrating glance: “Twelve years old. I see her at the club wearing string bikinis and lipstick; she has this collected air about her that no twelve-year-old should have. She reminds me of Alexandra—beautiful and fast, ready to dump her childhood like a bad habit.” I enjoy that description particularly because it reminds me of a middle-school friend of my own daughter’s, a girl who always struck me as a dangerous friend for her. I had dinner with this girl recently and was amused to find out that my daughter’s taste is as good as I always thought it was; the girl has a kind of fierce intelligence that brooks absolutely no delay in growing up, but now that she’s there, she’s good company.

The parts about the adolescents in this novel were some of the most penetrating. Finding this section was like finding something that has passed through my mind visible on the page in a more articulate form:
“I wonder if our offspring have all decided to give up. They’ll never be senators or owners of a football team; they’ll never be the West Coast president of NBC, the founder of Weight Watchers, the inventor of shopping carts, a prisoner of war, the number one supplier of the world’s macadamia nuts. No, they’ll do coke and smoke pot and take creative writing classes and laugh at us. Perhaps they’ll document our drive, but they’ll never endorse it. I look at both of these girls and see it in their eyes, their pity for us and yet their determination to beat us in their own way, a way they haven’t found yet.”
Both the book and the movie strike me as pitch-perfect about some aspects of having been married and been parents for a pretty long time. When the husband suspects a financial aspect to his comatose wife’s affair, he thinks “It’s hard to love my wife right now. If she were perfectly healthy and I found this out, I’d wish upon her the fate she is currently enduring, at least momentarily.”

The victory of the novel is that the hero finally finds a way to take a stand:
“I want to shout that I’m holding on to it, that I’m holding on to everything, that life has taken me by surprise and I’m surprising it right back in my small way.”

I saw the movie three times in the theater, partly for the scenery and partly so I could watch each member of my family watching it. I read the novel once, so far, and found that there is nothing about it I don’t love.