Every Eye
Hatty, the narrator of this exquisite 1956 novel, is a piano teacher who was born with a lazy eye. Though her vision has been repaired, a lingering feeling of isolation makes it seem that "this outward sign was only the visible proof of inward impediment." Hatty's voice on the page vividly conveys her sense of "discordancy" with others, as the action shifts between recollections of adolescence and young-adulthood in grim, gray England and her considerably cheerier present, travelling through a Technicolor Spain with a new, much younger husband. The true marvel of the novel lies in the taut interweaving of these narratives: past informing present and present recasting past. Enlightenment is kept satisfyingly in abeyance until a rapturous conclusion on a mountaintop in Ibiza.Copyright © 2006Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker