The Blue Bistro
a bad romance
So, yes, I am low-key re-reading Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels. Because I love them. Because I want to postpone my reading of Swan Song, which is to be the last. Because Hilderbrand had the talent and skill to study at the most prestigious MFA program in the country and the chutzpah and self-knowledge to bring that talent and skill to a career in commercial fiction. And because I think there is a lot to learn — about what makes a book interesting and readable and resonant — by studying her work.
Fair warning: there are going to be a lot of spoilers in this post. I actually like spoilers in most cases; my reading experience is more enjoyable when I know what to expect. On a craft level, I like knowing where the plot is going so I can see the wheels turning to get it there. While there are certainly genres that benefit from suspense (e.g. mystery) in most cases the important part is not what happens but how.
This is especially true of romance novels, and although I would not categorize it fully in the genre, The Blue Bistro is the first of Hilderbrand’s novels that could be called a romance novel. I say “could be” because, although there is a central romantic relationship that is tested and endures, it is neither the center of the novel nor a very good relationship.
A Lost Protagonist
I am getting ahead of myself. The Blue Bistro does not begin with romance but with its protagonist, Adrienne. This is the first of Hilderbrand’s novels to have a singular protagonist and a mostly-singular point of view,1 and it’s an interesting choice because Adrianne is nobody much, and that’s the point.
A resort worker in her late twenties, Adrienne has been on the move since she lost her mother fifteen years before. First with her father — Dr. Don, a dentist — and then on her own, she has changed cities every couple years, discarding schools and jobs and boyfriends as she goes, seeking a new port in each storm. She arrives in Nantucket looking for a life that will last the summer, falls into work at The Blue Bistro, and falls in love with the restaurant and its family. And Thatcher, the most unavailable man in the world and therefore perfectly suitable for her.
The Blue Bistro is a cozy, indulgent novel full of descriptions of food and scenery — but with the deep undercurrent of sadness and loss that underlies so many of Hilderbrand’s works. Adrienne experienced the loss of her mother as a loss of her sense of self; she lies compulsively about her past and cannot anchor to any place or identity. Despite her preternatural adaptability and close relationship with her father, she feels herself to be a woman adrift:
She couldn’t count the number of times she had been asked, “Where’s your home?” And when she couldn’t provide an answer, the well-intentioned soul might ask, “Where does your mother live?” Even at twenty-eight years old, home was where her mother lived. Everywhere. Nowhere.
This passage made me cry when I read it, and I teared up when I typed it out. Years ago, my own mother — middle-aged, with a husband and a mortgage and a career — told me that as long as my grandmother was alive, wherever she lived would be home. It befuddled me at the time, but now that my mother lives in a house I did not grow up in, I experience it, too. Home is where your mother lives. Of course.
Adrienne’s mother is gone, and her sense of home has never recovered. Her summer on Nantucket only magnifies her sense of dislocation. She is set apart from The Blue Bistro’s staff by her newness and her position as their supervisor and, soon enough, by her relationship with the owner.
Thatcher is exquisitely unavailable. In addition to being very busy, and Adrienne’s boss, he is enmeshed in a romantic friendship with Fiona, the restaurant’s chef, who is dying. Fiona is far from perfect, and she is even less available than Thatch — in addition to the dying, she is having an affair with someone else — but these facts only strengthen her hold on Thatcher.
Bad Romance
Adrienne is not as bothered by this as she might be. She is used to love being doomed. And she is distracted by her father, his concern for her, and his evolving romance.
Mavis has been Dr. Don’s hygienist since before his wife died and his romantic partner since shortly after. But Adrienne is reluctant to give this relationship much credit: Mavis is not her mother, she says to anyone who will listen. Mavis — who lives with her father, relocates with him, travels with him — is her father’s hygienist. Mavis, Adrienne is certain, is temporary. So when Dr. Don tells her he is settling down and that he and Mavis are getting married — building, finally, a new life that Adrienne’s mother is not part of — Adrienne feels shocked and betrayed.
But she accepts it as well as she can. It is this moment of resignation,2 two-thirds of the way through the book, that heralds all that is to come. Mavis and Adrienne’s father are engaged; Adrienne’s mother is (still) dead. Then it is August, the busiest month of summer and also its end. Fiona gets sicker and sicker; at the end of the month, The Blue Bistro will close its doors for good.
The restaurant doesn’t make it to the end of the month, and neither does Fiona. Thatcher marries her, hours before she dies, in a hospital ceremony that is the exact opposite of romantic. We are given to understand that being married means something to Fiona — she is a devout Catholic and has always wanted to be married, although not to him — but for Thatcher it is a promise to love someone forever. Someone who isn’t Adrienne.
The Break
Nearly all romance novels have a third act break — if not an explicit breakup, an existential conflict of some sort — and they are so hard. The break must be an existential crisis for the relationship but resolvable within thirty pages, and most novels fail. Either the crisis is too small and the characters seem immature for caring so much, or the crisis is too big and the ensuring reunion is implausible or doomed.
In The Blue Bistro, Thatcher marries another woman and doesn’t even bother telling his girlfriend. It seems crystal clear that any relationship that might have existed between them is over. What could Thatcher possibly do to convince Adrienne that she is more important to him than the woman who was his best friend his whole life, the woman he has run out on dates to eat dinner with, the woman from whose deathbed he ghosted her, the woman he was so eager to marry?
Nothing, as it turns out. He returns to Nantucket, weeks later, without explanation or excuse. There are no grand declarations, no flowers, no jewelry.
And it doesn’t matter. This is a story Adrienne already knows — the doomed first love, the second chance at happiness — and she resumes her place in it without hesitation. She sees her father in Thatcher’s affability and sadness, her mother in Fiona’s devoutness and love of food — and suddenly, in herself, she sees Mavis. The woman who comes after, who accepts her second-comer status in return for the companionship and affection that is left over when first love has perished
I don’t like this ending. I would not want to be Adrienne; this is not what I consider a Happily Ever After. But my liking it is beside the point, and — because this is not, actually a romance novel — so are Happily and Ever After. This is the ending that makes sense, for a woman whose life is defined by its center’s loss: to bond with a similarly wounded partner and assume the only other role she knows. To become, since she is too much a survivor to be shipwrecked, the port that will suffice — the port, if she is able to mimic Mavis, that will thrive — in life’s storm.
Near the end, a few sections are told from Thatcher’s point of view. I don’t think these sections add much, and little real information is imparted here that Adrienne and the reader don’t know. Reading them again, their tone, placement, and content make it entirely possible that they are actually Adrienne’s imaginings of his side of the story.
I originally wrote “maturity”. They are often the same thing.