Beige Woman. Local Forecast. Fat Cat. Yoo Hoo. The Girl. A person always assumes a new name which depends on how irritating or funny they get. Harvey’s mind is an endless rant of the local weather and his brain almost always goes wild expecting hurricanes that might take his name.
At first, it was hard to understand where Jean Thompson’s Wide Blue Yonder was going. Many of its chapters were devoted to Harvey a.k.a Local Forecast as the world is thrown into the phenomenon of Global Warming. From time to time, chapters would lead to Rolando, a jack of all trades in auto theft and house break-in and about the trio Josie, Elaine and Frank – a messed up and broken down family who had to look after Harvey. It was only in the book’s final chapters that things started to clear up. There was almost an unexpected ending but then, it wasn’t really as unexpected.
Elaine’s personal struggles with motherhood and divorce from a lousy husband, Frank, isn’t pretty and was never in any case, encouraging. Most of the time, she appears know-it-all to her daughter but she was always confused. She is the perfect flawed mother a Universe can ask for: A human mother for a human daughter. Josie or to Harvey, The Girl is rebellious and angsty. She resents the boring Springfield life. That certain boredom led him to a life obsessing over Mitchell Crook. Josie claims to the righfulness of being young and beautiful , young and dangerous, young and impulsive, young and unreasonable all at the same time. And for one so young, apologies were never almost part of the plan.
Frank is an absent father to Josie and always strives to be calm, cool and collected no matter how distressing and upsetting things become. Like Elaine, he is at lost in building a healthy relationship with his daughter and always resorts to blaming Josie or Elaine for this. For many reasons, Frank is never likable both as a father or as a person; he is detached, cold and unaffected.
For a long narrative that goes in-depth about human errors and failures, Wide Blue Yonder is both testimonial and an exposé about ordinary people and their personal struggles of making things right in a world where everything seems to go wrong with the weather and with simplest act of buying ice cream and stealing house keys. Jean Thompson, however did not tell her story in pointless superhuman circumstances; each chapter is a story that tugs close to reality; one can almost taste and smell its bittersweet experience.
In the end, when they all meet at one sensationalized point, they realized that happiness is real. It was not as abrupt for the realizations to come but in an implied way, the book ends with a hope for new lives and new happiness especially for one who might just be too old to enjoy it.
Go there where it’s blue. Where it’s wide and blue.
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