Halfway through Eleni Park's third novel, a woman named Mara Vasilescu sits in a hospital corridor in Vienna and decides not to make a phone call she has been promising herself, for fourteen years, that she would make. The phone is in her hand. Her sister is in the next room. The call would, almost certainly, fix everything.
Park does not let her place it. The chapter ends. The next one opens four months later, in a different city, with everything not fixed, and the slow ruin of doing the right thing in a moment when the right thing would have cost almost nothing — has, instead, been allowed to cost everything.
i.The shape of the book.
"The Long Patience" is a novel about the small refusals that turn into large ones. It opens in Bucharest in 1989, follows three characters across four decades and twelve cities, and ends in a kitchen in Maine in 2024. Park is interested, in the way she has always been interested, in the quiet decisions made in the absence of an audience.
What Park does, and almost no one else in American literary fiction is currently doing as well, is give us morally serious characters whose moral seriousness is the source, not the resolution, of their suffering.
A novel that asks not whether the right choice is hard, but whether the right choice, made too late, is still the right choice.
ii.Where the book works.
Park's great gift, on display in her last two novels and even more in this one, is for the small interior gesture made invisibly. Her characters do not announce their moral defeats. They live them out, in lower-stakes scenes, decade after decade, with a precision that accumulates.
The Vienna hospital scene is the obvious centerpiece — and rightly so — but the scenes that will stay with this reader for longer are the smaller ones. A breakfast in Bucharest, fourteen years before the call, where Mara's grandmother quietly asks her granddaughter to do a thing, and Mara, twelve years old, agrees, and means it.
iii.Where the book strains.
The final 60 pages are, I think, the only place where Park's restraint becomes a problem rather than a virtue. The novel's last reveal — which I won't name here — wants to land with the force of an obvious accumulation, but lands instead with something closer to a polite reminder.
It is not a failure of writing. It is a failure of architecture. The book wanted, I think, to be 300 pages, and instead is 342, and what is in those last 42 pages is gentler than the previous 300 had earned.
Park's most ambitious novel, and probably her most important. The first 300 pages are essential reading for anyone interested in what American literary fiction can still do. The last 42 pages are kind, and a little soft, and would have been better as 20.