If you’ve seen the movie or read this literary bestseller, originally published by Viking Penguin in the year of America’s bicentennial, you may regard this book as a story of three characters in the same family. Like its title, Ordinary People plays upon what’s plain: a vast, dark great lake, the uniquely collegiate, Christian city of Evanston, a convertible, a choir, a psychiatrist, a Christmas tree. Its insight mines ordinary lives: a friend of the same sex—a girl from another state—a doctor with a strategy for healing—a faculty member teaching by orthodoxy—a patient who purports to care for herself as she disowns herself.
This short novel dares you to gauge whether you are, know or accept ordinary people. The underestimated novel’s titular play on words lulls you with the slow, insidious sleep of suburban life before it stirs you from the slumber of what might be or become a secondhand life.
Beginning with a sonnet to embed the plot’s theme, Judith Guest begins by depicting the tension of family in crisis. The caliber of older teenager Conrad Jarrett’s innermost thoughts excels as exposition. “You don’t lose what you never had,” Conrad tells himself, before he’s left shivering by the third chapter after swim practice at the vaunted Lake Forest High School. After an unpleasant encounter with an athletic coach, Conrad coaches himself: “Never hit it off with the guy not even before he is too brusque, too all-knowing there is only one way to do everything, only one main street.”
This is good writing. Guest’s brief beginning shows her sense of place—Chicagoland’s North Shore—without revealing too much too soon. While dramatizing Conrad with incision, clarity and enticement, she leaves the reader wanting to learn, to know, to tread with caution.
The scope soon widens to include his parents, Calvin and Beth. Theirs is a marriage which has been “arranged”; downtown Evanston tax lawyer Calvin “was never sure how it was arranged” though his golf and tennis playing wife Beth “would decide to marry him after a double date with another couple.”
The troubled child of their arranged marriage—Conrad’s recently been released from a mental ward after attempting suicide—strives to create and maintain his identity. Add to this that his dad’s an orphan, his mother’s distant, her parents are overbearing, and there’s a brother named Jordan who went by Buck and died in stormy seas, and the landscape of a world going mad. All of this and north suburban Chicago’s social climbing nags at your sense of justice as it tests your values.
As it does, Ordinary People forecasts today’s ubiquitous social scorekeeping. In a culture permeated by the influence of influencers and 50 years of peer pressure against being “negative,” it’s easier to spot an emasculated husband and father and troubled boy in an obsessive-compulsive, attention-deficient enclave in 1976. Judith Guest writes about tech fatigue and the peer pressure pushing everyone to be numbingly “positive.”
“…[Beth was] tense with fury as she scrubbed the fingermarks from the walls…bursting suddenly into tears because of a toy left out of place, or a spoonful of food thrown onto the floor from the high chair.”
That it is “chance and not perfection that rules the world” hints at deeper plot twists to come. Coping with uncertainty forms the basic conflict as Calvin witnesses his wife and his son spinning into separate orbits and realizes he must either choose to think or evade thinking; to go by reason or to take facts on faith. Calvin’s character arc sets up the theme that vulnerability breeds resilience.
Conrad’s almost prayerful affirmation of reason precedes Guest’s description of grief as he shows signs of coming out of the death spiral:
“He hangs on now, pressing his hand lightly against the wall…waiting for the familiar arrow of pain. Only there is none. An oddly pleasant swell of memory, a wave of warmth flooding over him, sliding back, slowly. It is a first… At peace with himself, he walks home through the falling snow.”
The boy’s awakening comes in Evanston at Christmastime, with Judith Guest skillfully writing humor as the byproduct of love between parent and child. In conversation with his dad, Conrad explains his bold decision for a real, huge pine tree: “I tried to let you pick it out. We would have ended up with the worst one on the lot. You always want to buy some tree you feel sorry for.”
A Christmas tree conflict cues an uprising over the morality of altruism. The aftermath yields Ordinary People’s most poignant consecutive sentences. Calvin goes to his hurting son’s side and speaks as a salve: “First,” he tells Conrad as a complete sentence. “I give a damn about everything you do.”
With music as a valve—loosened by another hero named Berger who tends to Conrad’s health—the only surviving child of Beth and Calvin Jarrett comes to terms with “an aching void of loneliness” before the rational doctor’s eyes “have pinned him to the wall…[under the gaze of a] hard blue light.”
Judith Guest predicts good grief psychology, even today’s progress in neurobiology, as Dr. Berger’s lessons subvert Beth’s dogged pursuit of self-esteem through the lives of others. The writer conveys the veil of suicide. Realizing you’re reading about a possible end and a possible beginning of young life comes as a gradual, spine-chilling creep and shock.
Yet you don’t feel tricked or played. As Guest pivots to “a house on Green Bay Road,” she intensifies the dual dad/son introspection. You begin to grasp the promise in Conrad’s egoism—as you feel the weight of his dilemma. “I don’t want to do this alone,” Conrad admits at a crucial point.
Whether Conrad gets the love he deserves rests in three men—father, doctor, friend—and his mother Beth. This quartet shuffles the revolving picture puzzle of an American child in the fractured family. It’s 263 pages of literature which is more stirring, powerful and thoughtful than its reputation. Calvin, Berger and Lazenby are quiet heroes. Yet it’s Conrad, who becomes lighter as he grows more courageous, who gives Ordinary People its voice of reason.
Judith Guest’s artistry lies in how she depicts the young, privileged, white one in peril while dramatizing that, as a mother suffocates, a father softens, strengthens and loves. This 50 year-old novel pre-dates and rejects the culture of oversimplified terms, trends and jargon. It mines marriage, family and the sexes with meaning, rejecting sarcasm, bite and snark.
What can you gain from reading Ordinary People? That the good is possible here on earth—that the person of ability can be both damaged and self-rescuing. That man must be free to choose to love men with tenderness, warmth and vulnerability. That the orphan can be heroic. That taking life seriously affords the lighter and enlightened life. That this is ordinary—and that recognizing this is how you can and ought to enjoy being alive.
