I Read It!

I finally finished reading Portrait of Jennie last night. What! I actually completed our work pretty much when it was supposed to be complete? Why yes I did. I happened to get some good feedback on my HUGE paper I’m presenting at the Creativity and Research Forum in 10 days, so it turns out I’m farther along in that than I thought, and had some extra time to spend reading Jennie. Plus, it’s a pretty quick read. I’m sad to see there are only three posts on Jennie so far, as I find this book fascinating from both a “story” and a “how are they going to adapt this into a film?” point of view.

I’m particularly interested in some of Carmen’s ideas about time and art in this book, particularly, as she points out what Mr. Matthews sees as a reflection of our time is Jennie, who is, it seems from another time. Perhaps what reflects the time in the portrait is the way Eben has painted her, putting in the past, present, and his hopes for the future, but all the while knowing he and Jennie will never truly be able to be together. Not that I know much about mid-century America, but it seems like that’s what he’s doing, and it seems likely Mr. Matthews would respond to the emotion in the piece over its subject.

I also enjoyed this post (sorry, I don’t know whose blog this is!), because I too got really excited when I hit the last 20 pages of the novel. I simply had to find out what was going to happen, and I couldn’t read fast enough. But I have to admit, when the hurricane came, I pretty much caught on to the ending, but I still enjoyed it. I’m intrigued by the terseness or somewhat minimalist quality the text often seems to have. As this post points out, the descriptions of the artwork and settings were really quite good, but the descriptions of the action were often quite simple. For example, “Even before I telephoned out to the school, I knew what the answer would be. ‘I’m sorry; there is no one here by that name,’ I didn’t ask them to go back over their files; I knew what the answer would be to that, too. So there it was.” (67) Ah, what? Obviously he has a handle of what’s going on and has pretty much figured out “how Jennie works,” but I haven’t! What was the answer? We know the answer wasn’t what Eben was looking for, and we know he can’t find Jennie, only she can find him, but we don’t know why and he seems to. And the thing is, why only Jennie can come to him is never explicitly stated. Anyway, I can’t wait till tomorrow to see how the film version handles this.

And in the meantime, I’d like to think this is how Jennie actually appears to Eben.