The
Bliss of Solitude is a novel about sexual obsession,
time’s transformation of memory, the gradual erosion
of wonder, and the interplay between the external
world and inner vision. Its heroine-narrator is Iris
Cloud, a 43-year-old product of affluent Boston
suburbs and an Ivy League education, who retreated
to Vermont twenty years earlier to hide an
illegitimate pregnancy and to escape the
expectations of her perfectionist parents. Now she
runs a hand-knit sweater shop with her longtime
lover Carolyn in a small resort town, clinging all
the while to memories of her dreamy, awed, and
restrained childhood in which she aspired to
becoming a great artist and later a renowned
physician. Life is tranquil enough, if passion-less,
until one day Iris finds out that her 20-year-old
daughter, Lydia plans to marry a questionable young
man whom she has known for all of three weeks. Iris,
stricken with guilt, realizes that she must step in
and fulfill her long-neglected! maternal duties to
Lydia, who had left Iris as a young teenager to live
with her grandparents. Iris becomes convinced that
part of this duty involves doing what she never
bothered doing twenty years earlier: seeking out
Lydia’s father, her college boyfriend, and telling
him that he has a daughter, a daughter on the verge
of marriage. Iris’s search for Jack--a would-be
modern-day Michelangelo whose egotistic delusions of
grandeur underlie his paradoxical
attractiveness--erodes the already fading
relationship between Iris and Carolyn and forces
Iris to confront the portrait-like reminiscences of
her past that in many ways are more alive to her
than her current quest.
