Searching for the Remedy for Lack

Throughout the novel, the dreaded and restless feeling of lack lurks not-so-subtly within many of the characters but is seen most profoundly within Aloma. The progression of the novel’s “plot” is driven by her sense of lack and subsequent efforts to resolve it: her decision to live with Orren because of her dissatisfaction with her current state and job, her work as the church’s pianist to appease her true passions and combat the boredom and imprisonment she feels within the house, her feelings for Bell because of the longing left unanswered by Orren, her decision to marry Orren because it has been a problematic missing factor even from the time she first arrived at the farm, and so on. However, despite her efforts, she still seems to be struggling to come to terms with this idea of lack by the end of the novel and rather than overcoming it, she resigns herself to it, accepting that any efforts to curb that lack would be futile or temporary because “the world [couldn’t] make her happy for more than a minute at a time” (197).  

            Part of me felt the slightest bit of hope for the characters towards the end; Aloma and Orren finally marry so perhaps things could get better for them, Aloma has hopes to rent a piano and offer lessons, rains comes to satisfy the crops and quench their thirst, and a new life is born in the form of a calf. Even amongst all of these things, however, I felt that that hope was an attempt to find some happy ending, no matter how small, in a novel perhaps not meant to have one, as if even I were tormented by the lack and looking desperately for any tinge of remedy to fix it. I thought, for a brief second, that I had finally understood why “a living dog is better than a dead lion” because what really matters is the hope that things will get better, the hope that one day the lack will fade into extinction.

Ultimately, however, all I saw were the negatives of those false positives: marriage is not going to change anything for Aloma and Orren, it “stirred up nothing new” for Aloma after all (193), her plans to offer piano lessons are really just plans until she makes something of them, rain cannot bring the promise of anything (profit, food, etc.) beyond the fact that the crops received water, and the mother cow ended up dying. She already seems to have lost hope in the idea of marriage changing her relationship with Orren following the fight on their wedding day, recognizing that her wish to not fight “this day or ever again” was a “useless” statement charged with “longing and futility” (196). The novel even concludes with Orren leading Aloma “back out of the woods […] and up to the old house” (199), away from the very woods she once found she’d prefer to stay in “for a long time before ever wishing to return to the house” (93). Maybe I am being too negative about it, and am missing out on all of the hope present in the novel’s conclusion, but I finished the novel wondering what the permanent and true remedy for lack is, if such a thing exists, and if the answer really is hope, can that really be enough?