New Year’s Eve. What is it about New Year’s Eve that makes it—for some of us—a little hard to take?
It’s a day weighed down by resolutions to make, promises to keep. It’s a day that carries the expectation of what the next year will bring to us.
And within that weight and pressure are the wishes for prosperous times ahead. Luck. Love. All good things.
If only it were that easy.
In Mavis Gallant’s story “New Year’s Eve” we see that the idea of this last day of the year plays a part in the lives of the characters in remarkable ways.
Mr. and Mrs. Plummer host a young woman named Amabel. Their daughter, Catherine, died years before and Amabel had once been her childhood friend.
Amabel is going through a divorce and wants to spend the holidays with the Plummers.
They go to the opera. They don’t know what it’s about, don’t know the players and don’t speak the language. That all seems emblematic of the ways in which they face their lives.
Mr. Plummer hasn’t necessarily been true to his wife. She has her own small secrets. They are finally at this stage in their marriage—well entrenched in routines. Amabel’s inviting herself is a nuisance—as is her insistence that the last day of the year and what occurs then is so supremely important.
“Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” she says.
The Plummers have been through a lot over the years. The idea of a New Year’s Eve freighted with so much artificial importance will not be convincing for them as it is for the 22-year-old Amabel.
And yet … And yet … We see a glimmer of something. It happens in passing. It is something so quick and ineffable, almost imperceptible. It would be easy to miss it if we don’t pay attention. That’s kind of how it is with Mavis Gallant's stories.
In "New Year's Eve," we see the ways the characters enter and exit the rooms of memory, come to discover the ways doing so affects the present moments in that theater in Moscow on New Year’s Eve—and imagine (maybe still hope a little) about what the future can possibly bring.
