Jim Finley, following in the tradition of retired high school English teachers everywhere, is always ready to offer his literary insight. Without much prompting, he’ll tell you that, according to Wallace Stevens, “a good poem resolves the tension between sentimentality and seeing things as they truly are.” If only Jim could do the same.
The narrator of Mark Ernest Pothier’s debut novel Outer Sunset, Jim has been looking forward to living out his golden years cozied up next to his wife Jackie, reading books, drinking wine, and waxing nostalgic in their newly empty nest. Instead, as soon as the kids are gone, Jackie abruptly declares that she has fallen out of love with him and leaves him at the first opportunity.
Outer Sunset begins three years after this rupture, when Jim’s newly rekindled dating life coincides with a looming crisis concerning his thirty-year-old daughter Dorothy. Needing space and stability in this trying time, Dorothy moves back in with her father shortly after she’s set him up with Carol, an age-appropriate divorcee who shares Jim’s love of literature and who treasures Dorothy’s friendship. Jim, who had been stewing in boredom for so long, suddenly has a lot going on.
The tension between “sentimentality and seeing things as they truly are” permeates virtually every interaction in the novel. When he was living alone, Jim could’ve tried to reconcile the marriage that existed in his head with the one that existed in the world. He instead chose to use that time clinging to “every hateful thing [Jackie]’d said in anger,” and “gripp[ing] them close.”
It becomes apparent that Jim missed a lot of what happened under his own roof. He thinks that adult Dorothy’s ordeal is “the first time either kid ever made us truly afraid.” But it turns out Jim’s carelessness with his young daughter’s safety had led to the single biggest fight in his marriage. It seems at least one of the parents had experienced fear!
A fog of uncertainty shrouds all the memories, and it gets amplified, most evenings, by an actual fog that descends upon Jim’s Outer Sunset home. (The novel’s title refers to the unhip, not altogether safe neighborhood on the San Francisco coast where Jim and his wife raised two kids, while also evoking a certain stage of life.) The “ocean air that seeps in” runs “through the open door, chasing out everything stale.” It’s enough to have any of us reaching for a blanket and heading for their favorite chair—preferably an old one, like Jim’s, that has acquired a custom “depression.”
San Francisco’s harsh beauty is a constant presence in even the most mundane of errands. A doctor’s office “would have felt suffocating if not for the tinted plate glass…with its view of Pacific Heights.” At the Safeway, “wet winds corrode the big lit letters of its sign and brine the carts so heavily they’re hosed down each week.” It’s no wonder Jim often retreats to the comfort of his chair. But comfort is a cousin to complacency, and it’s worth asking if Jim’s contributed to his obliviousness.
Only when watching a home movie of his nine-year-old daughter enacting an elaborate prank to terrorize her five-year-old brother, does Jim see, decades later, “how cruel that had been” and question how it must’ve felt for his son “hearing us laugh at him all these years.”
Even as it slowly dawns on Jim how much emotional weather he has missed, he continues to make similar mistakes in his old age. He expresses offhand surprise at how “tone-deaf” his ex-wife Jackie could be about their kids’ moods. It’s an especially rich observation coming from a man who has just realized his adult children are capable of generosity: “when you discover your kids doing something more compassionate or altruistic than you, it’s a stunner.”
Stunning Jim isn’t all that difficult, given how willing he is to rewrite the past. He idealizes his new love interest, Carol, to the point where he seems to wipe clean the entire history of his marriage: “I can’t recall ever feeling so at ease in front of anyone else, not even my ex-wife.” And the contortions he goes through to fault Jacki for leaving him would tie anyone’s stomach in knots: “I still care for your mother. Even if who she thinks she loved no longer exists, for her.” To be fair, Jim seems to know his rambling explanation is inadequate, as he adds, “I was once again left wondering if I’d provided the right words.”
Outer Sunset’s greatest strength is its clear-eyed portrayal of a man losing control of his own narrative. While Jim’s life story rearranges itself in his mind, he becomes less sure of even the most basic information about his loved ones. When Jim hears that his daughter attended an AA meeting, he scrambles to fit her secret alcoholism into the mental picture he’s always had of her. (It turns out she was there only to film the session.) As he engages in good-natured debate with Carol, he sacrifices logic to maintain joviality: “I myself had lost sight of which side I was arguing on, but I raised my empty wineglass to toast them both.”
Although it’s technically accurate to call Outer Sunset a debut novel, its assured voice and its willingness to linger in quiet moments through plain, unadorned prose give it a much lived-in feel. Indeed, in the Acknowledgments, Pothier says it took him thirty years to tell this story. He’s clearly more interested in the story itself, than in trying to dazzle us with pyrotechnics. The book is unafraid to begin its final, climactic chapter with the sentence: “My bedroom is at the end of the hall, on the back corner of the house opposite the porch.”
The tension between Jim’s sentimental version of the people closest to him and their lived reality drives this novel more than any given plot point. But as the fog rolls in yet again over Jim’s familial homestead, the gulls cry out, the waves bubble and fizz, and we’re made to believe that Jim is finally seeing his family as if for the first time, it’s hard to trust him. In the end, I’m not sure the tension is ever resolved.
Outer Sunset, by Mark Ernest Pothier. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, May 2023. 266 pages. $17.00, paper.
Matt Matros lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son. His work has previously appeared in Electric Literature, Chicago Review of Books, Full Stop, Necessary Fiction, The Washington Post, the Ploughshares blog, and The Westchester Review, among other places.
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