“Snow”
Book 1, chapter 23; Book 2, chapter 14
Characters
1.23 boy, his mother and father (unnamed)
2.25 man and girlfriend (unnamed)
General Subject/ Plot
1.23: Nostalgia, dream. A child glimpses through a tunnel of snow an idyllic family life which is soon to end.
2.25: Doomed love. A pair of skaters contrasted with lovers in difficult but undescribed situation.
Motifs
1.23 Grey Homburg, blue overcoat, white silk scarf with blue polka dots, worcestershire sauce, alcohol (whiskey), snow, heaven, magic, ketchup, coffee, another of the book’s “meals”.
2.25 snow, black, green, rockefeller center, candy store, coffee,
Notes
There’s a lot of beautiful, wonderful writing in Strange Commonplace, exact and complicated, but I frequently think of the two “Snows,” along with the second “Rain”, as containing the best.
The first takes us to the action described in the first “In the Diner” and clarifies the meaning of the conclusion of that chapter — the image of heaven involves domestic bliss.
But where the narrative in that “Diner” chapter is given in the frame of a memory or imagining of a man sitting at the diner, the first “Snow” is narrated omnisciently in the present.
The silk scarf with white polka dots has taken on a symbolic force by this point in the book: we know, without being told, that the reason this married couple will separate is that the husband is having an affair, and that his mistress has likely given him this scarf. (This story occurs in January. In another story, the second “Happy Days”, the scarf is given as a Christmas gift.)
Another pattern of A Strange Commonplace repeated in the “Snows” is that of looking at the same situation from drastically different perspectives or with slightly altered premises. An earlier example of this is the contrast between a married woman being raped by two men (Second, “On the Roof”) and a married woman giving herself to two men (first, “A Small Adventure.”) In the first “Snow” we see a person’s happy childhood about to be dashed by an adulterous parent; in the second, we see a (probably) adulterous relationship that seems founded on a real passion, a sincere affection.
(Perhaps the skaters in the rink of the second are the married couple of the first, or their proxies.)
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