Books in Brief: Missed Connections

Missed Connections, by Elaine Ford (Random House, 229 pp., $13.95). “Life appears to be a mere accident and of the worst kind. We are born to be the victims of diseases and passions, of mischance and death.” So wrote St. John de Crève-cœur in 1782 in his Letters from an American Farmer, expressing the fatalistic view of human life that runs through much of literature. In Missed Connections, by Elaine Ford, this same theme is evident, as the lives of a close-knit Italian-American family illustrate the vulnerability of human life to the vagaries of chance. Christine Scarpa is a young woman growing to maturity in the late 1950s in an aging Boston suburb. Her horizons are limited to plans for taking a business course in school, working a few years, and then raising a large family. A random element enters with young Sandy Cole, who loves and wants to marry Christine. A series of misunderstandings ends their intense relationship and sends Christine into a wider, more sophisticated way of life in Boston art circles. Years pass, Christine has taken a lover, and the construction of an interstate highway threatens to destroy her old neighborhood. All the failures to connect reach a climax when Christine’s sister Anna marries Christine’s former love, Sandy Cole. Christine returns home in a futile attempt to regain a lost sense of family and to be near Anna, for whom she has always felt particularly responsible; but her well-meaning interference in her sister’s life precipitates Anna’s breakdown. Only then does Christine discover that Anna has always felt smothered by her. The Scarpas are not heroes. They blunder and cause harm to those whom they love best, but, as in life, they learn, or do not learn, from their experiences and they move forward in their altered courses. Elaine Ford has evoked a time, a place, and a family in a wise and moving novel.