Photographic Fiction #2: The Photograph

Unlike Helen Humphreys' Afterimage, Penelope Lively's The Photograph takes no real interest in the relationship between photography and storytelling.  While a photograph propels the narrative, the novel's key metaphors for memory and history derive from landscapes and gardens; moreover, the novel consistently redefines attentiveness to others as not looking but listening.  Glyn, a landscape historian, finds a photograph of his late wife, Kath, that apparently reveals the existence of an affair with her sister Elaine's husband, Nick.  Not surprisingly, this knocks his world off its axis, and he--being a good historian--promptly sets out to uncover the truth.  In turn, his investigations upset everyone else involved in the story, from Elaine herself to the man who took the photograph in the first place.  By the end, though, Glyn will discover that the affair itself is meaningless; far more important are the darker truths about Kath's existence that reveal themselves over the course of Glyn's "research." 

The novel's plot bears some resemblance to Virginia Woolf's short story "The Legacy," albeit without Woolf's feminist point.  In "The Legacy," a self-satisfied politician reads his late wife's diaries, looking almost entirely for reflections of himself; as he reads, however, he discovers that he actually knew his wife not at all.  Like "The Legacy," The Photograph features an eminently self-satisfied male who discovers that his wife was not what she seemed; an affair; childlessness; and suicide.  Unlike "The Legacy," The Photograph holds out the promise that Glyn will, after all, change.  (While Woolf's politician certainly experiences an epiphany at the end, it's still a very self-centered epiphany, as my students regularly notice.) 

In any event, whether or not Lively is consciously indebted to Woolf, the novel itself exemplifies what Suzanne Keen dubs a "romance of the archives": that is, unlike postmodern historical fictions, which tend to emphasize the possibility of multiple and subjective historical narratives, romances of the archive reinvigorate the search for truth through the quest-romance.  There are, indeed, truths to learn about Kath, and these truths will realign the lives of everyone who thought they knew her.  As it happens, both Glyn and Elaine are desperately in need of some realigning.  While Glyn is a historian and Elaine is a garden designer, both of them err in trying to control their pasts and their surroundings; we are meant to frown, for example, on Glyn's careful application of scholarly method to his newest research "project."  For this reader, at least, the novel's primary weakness lay exactly in the predictability of its outcome.  Granted, nobody lives happily (or, for that matter, unhappily) ever after, but it's far too easy to figure out what happened to Kath, how each character will react to the final revelations, and so on.  That being said, Lively constructs her novel carefully, and her prose is thoughtful and graceful throughout.