Mary Lavin’s In the Middle of the Fields
Mary Lavin’s linked short stories about the life of Vera Traske are all written in third-person, but the narrative distance employed varies from story to story, not only depending on the requirements of a particular story but also reflecting where each story fits in the overall arc of Vera’s life.
In the title story of Mary Lavin’s collection, In the Middle of the Fields, Vera struggles with grief and loneliness as she tries to move on after the death of her husband. She functions well during the day and is determined to establish a new life and identity for herself. At night, however, she succumbs to a crushing burden of loneliness and memory. One night, she has an encounter with Bartley Crossen, the man she has hired to trim the grass in her fields. This encounter is at once both comic and terrifying and reveals the pain that is felt by those who survive and have to create new lives for themselves.
Lavin chooses to tell this story in the third person, limited omniscience. We have insight into Vera’s innermost thoughts and feelings, but not into any of the other characters in the story. The opening paragraph provides the setting and mood of the story:
Like a rock in the sea, she was islanded by the fields, the heavy grass washing about the house, and the cattle wading in it as in water. Even their gentle stirrings were a loss when they moved away at evening to the shelter of the woods. A rainy day might strike a wet flash from a hay barn on the far side of the river. Not even a habitation! And yet she was less lonely for him here in the Meath than elsewhere. Anxieties by day, and cares, and at night vague, nameless fears, these were the stones across the mouth of the tomb. But who understood that? They thought she hugged tight every memory she had of him. What did they know about memory? What was it but another name for dry love and barren longing? They even tried to unload upon her their own small purposeless memories. ‘I imagine I see him every time I look out there,’ they would say as they glanced nervously over the darkening fields when they were leaving. ‘I think I ought to see him coming through the trees.’ Oh, for God’s sake! She’d think. She’d forgotten him for a minute.(1)
The sense of isolation is palpable from the very first sentence. What’s even more striking is the level of interiority that is established at the very beginning of the story. Vera’s inner life, her inner monologue, is completely open to us. Lavin could have chosen to write this story in first person, but this level of interiority would not be plausible. We can accept this intimacy from an omniscient, apparently objective third-person narrator who is not a character in the story. If the narrator of the story was Vera herself, she would be more guarded. Also, a first-person narration also introduces the problem of temporal distance. Is the narrator in the moment, telling the story as it happens? That would preclude the possibility of any kind of objective reflection and interpretation. If Vera is telling her story at some point in the future, then the immediacy of the action is lost. By their very nature, first-person narratives are told by people who already know the ending of the story.
There are, however, large portions of the story that are written in first-person. The two main characters in this story, Vera and Crossen, are both haunted by the past, so their backstories provide the essential context for the present action. Without that context, the present action would be dramatically flat. Lavin uses dialogue to let the characters reveal their own backstories rather than using flashbacks. The reader gets all the essential information needed to interpret the present action as efficiently as possible. In any case, a flashback to Cossen’s past would awkwardly break the limited omniscience of the narrator. The narrator has access to Vera’s inner life but not to any of the other characters. Suddenly breaking out of that Vera’s limited perspective to tell another character’s backstory would disrupt the fictive dream.
Lavin uses this same technique in the story “The Lucky Pair.” This is another story about Vera, but at a much earlier period in her life—when she is a university student in Dublin and starting a relationship with a lecturer that she meets at the library. The relationship develops with fits and starts due to the lecturer’s continuing involvement with a woman from his past. The story is again told in third-person limited, but there’s a greater distance between Vera and the narrator. There is no interior monologue as there was in “In the Middle of the Fields.” Andrew abruptly cuts short one of their meetings when he is distracted by the other woman, Olive, who is standing across the street.
She didn’t need to look to know it was another girl, but she didn’t expect the girl who was waiting impatiently for him on the other side of the street to be so striking, tall like him, and with a strong but perfect face. But as the girl impatiently stepped off the pavement and came across the street to meet him, it was her eyes that held attention. What word would describe them? The only word that came to mind hardly made sense, but it fitted exactly, they were ranging eyes. She felt she was never going to see him again.(30)
While it is clear that Vera is feeling jealous, the narration in this story has less interiority. Where the first story gives us a view into the thoughts of an older woman, a now widowed mother who has lived through both joy and sorry, the younger Vera in this story is more tentative and unsure of herself.
This story, however, does use the device of having the characters themselves reveal their backstories through dialogue. It works very naturally because the story is about two people meeting and getting to know one another.
In “The Cuckoo-Spit” a Vera meets a much younger man, the nephew of her neighbor. There’s an immediate attraction between them and over the next several days the young man, Fergus, manages to find excuses for visiting her. They spend their time walking the fields and woods together, enjoying one another’s company. In this story, Vera is no longer the fearful widow of “In the Middle of the Fields,” nor is she the tentative young woman of “The Cuckoo-Spit.” This story is again in third-person limited but with still more distance from Vera. Again, there is no interior monologue:
As she went into the house, she wondered if he would come again. She hoped he would; it was a pleasant encounter. And she kept on thinking about it as she went around the house, fastening the windows and locking the door. Even when she went upstairs, she stood for a while at the open window, looking out and going over scraps of their conversation. Some of the things she had said now seemed affected. Had she lost the nack of small talk? In particular, she thought of what she had said about happiness, and not being able now to bear it. That was so absurd, but surely he understood that she meant a certain kind of happiness, possible only to the young. (79)
Vera is more reflective in this story than the other two. Vera replays their conversation and critically analyzes it a way that we don’t see the other stories. This reflectiveness is a function of where Vera is in her life. There’s a thoughtfulness and wisdom that the earlier stories don’t exhibit. There is less backstory to tell, and Lavin takes care of giving the reader all the necessary information economically:
“Is he long dead?”
“Four years this summer, she said and turned her face away, although she felt his sympathy would not be so easily stemmed. (76)
Unlike the other stories, we do get some insight into Fergus’s thoughts and intentions as viewed through Vera’s analysis:
“You must miss him very much,” he said. “I was thinking that as I was walking in the fields, and looking at the house. I was wondering how you were able to go on living here without him.” But he must have felt tactless, or impertinent, because he looked away from her, out over the fields.(77)
This is a level of insight that the younger Vera of “The Lucky Pair” did not yet have.
While there is a common approach to point of view in each of these stories, Lavin changes the distance between the reader and Vera along with the tone to match the needs of the story and Vera’s life journey.
Works Cited
Lavin, Mary. In the Middle of the Fields. New Island Books, 2016.
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