Talk:Digging to America

I disagree that in the end Maryam concluded that Dave was a threat to her boundaries ... in fact, I felt the novel ended just as Maryam was coming to her own conclusions about the values of the boundaries she had set and observed throughout her life. While the story's ending was not explicit, I wouldn't say it was ambiguous, either. The ending was actually pretty sensational compared with the careful and detailed way most of the story was told. For most of the book, there are so many details and observations that the reader is lead to be as analytical and particular and superficial and judgmental as Maryam herself is presented to be, enclosed as she is by her boundaries.

There is a brief moment in the middle where the reader is surprised ... where we gain some insights into Maryam's life via outsider's perceptions, such as when Maryam's son Sami tells his wife, Ziba, what he felt Maryam's marriage was like (and the foreshadowing and complement of Maryam's own adoption, Moosh the cat).

These moments signal a change into the second half of the book, where we get inside Maryam's boundaries and get to read more of Maryam thinking and feeling and reconsidering her ideas, rather than being presented with Maryam's cold rationales as in the first half of the novel. We get to meet a far more intense and sensitive version of Maryam, than is presented at first.

Then there is the ending, that begins when Maryam's discretion falls away and we allowed a revelation ... we get to know how she and Dave ended things after the spectacular marriage proposal and its failure, that haunted the novel's second half, that I think signals the end of the novel's second and more conclusive phase. The novel's last scene, consisting of the Donaldson gambit, is typical of the brash Donaldsons and typical of life itself. In the end we see Maryam finally acting on her feelings ... she shakes off her lethargy and constraints and runs out to meet this serendipitous second chance by accepting the Donaldson gambit ... which is just the icing that finishes this yummy cake of a novel.

I loved how the story was made ... the contrast of the first and second halves ... the long trip through the mood of stagnation and restraint and even cruel restriction in the first half, the brief revelations of other viewpoints in the brief middle, the evaluative and conclusive mood of the second half, and the serendipity of the unrestrained (finally!) ending.

-- Karen

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