Someone else's movie

Larry Watson's new book The Lives of Edie Pritchard is a novel about identity. Who are we exactly, and are we always the same person? Consider these lines uttered by the title character during the story:

"I'd like to take another shot at being me."

"They'd seen what they projected on me. And now when I look at myself I wonder if that's what I'm doing too — just seeing someone else's movie."

"But the thing is, when you're back home, you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never were that person."

Watson shows us three episodes from Edie's life at 20-year intervals. In the first she's Edie Linderman, a young woman married to Dean, an uncommunicative man who is jealous, and rightfully so, of Roy, his womanizing twin brother. Roy pleads with Edie to run away with him.

Then she's Edie Dunn, divorced and remarried to Gary and the mother of a teenage girl. More because of her unhappiness with Gary than any lingering love for Dean, she takes her daughter and goes to see Dean when she learns he is dying of cancer, her angry husband in pursuit. Roy is married now, but again he asks Edie to run away with him.

Finally she is Edie Pritchard again after returning to her maiden name and to her hometown, Gladstone, Mont. Her teenage granddaughter visits with two young men, her boyfriend and his brother, and Edie senses they are both trouble. Later the granddaughter calls her from Bismarck asking to be rescued.  Roy Linderman shows up to help. After they complete the rescue mission in exciting fashion, he still wants Edie to run away with him.

One thing you can say about Roy is that he, at least, is one constant in her life. Yet to Edie he is representative of her identity problem, that of "seeing someone else's movie." Even at 62, she is an unusually attractive woman, something virtually everyone in the novel, women as well as men, comment upon. Even Watson himself seems to want to define Edie by her looks. We don't learn all that much about her true identity, at least not until that final showdown with the young brothers.