Finding out about the ex-factor

Buy this book online from Amazon.co.uk

Karen Karbo is an American novelist and journalist who has allowed her feelings about Claudia, her ex-boyfriend?s ex-wife, to get the better of her.

Claudia is very annoying. She keeps livestock which she names after AA Milne characters and telephones Matthew, her ex-husband, 40 times a day.

Karbo has felt driven to tell friends, colleagues, strangers and indeed now the wider world all about Claudia, and although she?s long since packed it in with Matthew, Claudia appears to retain for Karbo the primary significance she perhaps always had, for she symbolises something about love, about how, as people get older, their embroilment in the world causes a form of emotional deterioration, so that they are dispersed in other people and other things and can no longer bring themselves entire to the experience of love.

This is a depressing thought, and one it would be convenient to blame on Claudia; but Claudia is nothing more than the proof that Matthew lost his innocence and cannot regain it, no matter how much the people whose paths he later crosses wish that he could. It is Claudia?s possession of that innocence, rather than her phone habit, that attracts and irks her (ex-) successor.

Karbo is part of what she and others have identified as a modern cultural phenomenon, that of the ?blended family?. Like the zorse, the blended family is what you get if you mix two (and occasionally more) separate animals. People living in blended families often have a surreal retinue of associates with whom they form unlikely relationships, and a number of emotional feats to perform about which, like walking a tightrope or window-cleaning the Empire State Building, it is better not to think while you?re actually doing them.

The world of the stepfamily is the world of the fairy tale, peopled by notions of abandonment and rescue, of virtue and wickedness, of trial and troth and happy endings: it has a fictional core refracted through emotional pain; it is scripted by adults trying to see their deeds through the eyes of children. For this reason adults can undergo a form of regression, a return to the violent emotions of their own childhood, as step-parents.

They experience feelings of powerlessness where they are at their most powerful, namely in their relationship to children who are not their own. They can be beset by urges both to make good and to destroy. They crave simplicity where complexity adheres to them most.

Karbo herself is a divorced mother of one who has now married again, to a divorced father of one. Matthew, who happened between these two marriages, was also a father of one. Husband number two is estranged from his first wife, who lives 1,500 miles away, and he has full custody of their child.

Generation Ex is not, as it sets out to be, a wisecracking ladleful of stepfamily zeitgeist: rather, it charts the process by which love comes to be superseded by facts. Karbo loved where she could not possess, and found it intolerable.

Her comic accounts of the modern family tree, with its labyrinths of exes and steps and halfs, its tangle of allegiances and enmities and the terrible weight of the past that it bears, is written not out of sympathy or compassion or even humour, but out of a deep and real aversion to the mess that it represents. She has sought simplicity determinedly, and she has found it, with her estranged man and his motherless child. ?One of the saddest things about being an ex,? she writes, ?is that you realise love doesn?t conquer all.?

Given that the broken family is our modern monument to our belief in love, this is indeed sad.