Carolyn grows up fatherless and relatively poor in Ashland, a small community in rural New Hampshire, and title of the debut novel by Dan Simon. At 20, in search of a role model, the protagonist suspects she is doomed to repeat her mother's life, including an early pregnancy and a series of low-paying jobs. She has come to think of herself "to be a bit like smoke... a nameless silhouette, a shadow.... People like me know in our selves we might not love, or have enough love, or enough self, that these are choices, and artifices, and not choices at all, impediments in us...."
The women in the family launch as free spirits, “when her whole life to come spread out before her like a beautiful landscape.” The search for love leads to entanglements, children and obligations, and the women become “paralyzed and rooted here, and forever unfree.”
Life presents as sets of contradictions. Carolyn believes in self-reliance, but admits that it’s human nature to need some “outside help” and also “help others” as “an essential part of our nature.” She then adds, "To imagine people losing sight of that is to imagine the worst outcomes for all people.”
Neighbors offer a combination of kindness and distance. Gordon, an elderly neighbor, concedes that “people are generally disappointing.” He believes that each person lives “with a paradise nested inside their hearts, a place where people treat each other always with great forbearance and kindness and gentility.” But fear corrodes that paradise, adding complications of “hypocrisy and betrayal, plain stupidity,” prompting him to live by the motto, “Don’t count on people and you’ll never be disappointed.”
Gordon, deeply attached to his wife, later tries to convince Carolyn that romantic love “is life, the whole thing.”
Carolyn keeps a diary and repeatedly taking a writing class with the same instructor. Her writing and insights about inequality, religion, community and family dynamics are strong and she considers that an individual’s thoughts and words lead separate lives: “In our thoughts we fool ourselves utterly. In our words sometimes a truth or revelation that’s larger than us pops out and we let it lie, large and astonishing, making us see.”
Carolyn observes and listens to the handful of people in her life, respecting their motivations, decisions and lives, transforming these into fascinating stories - even as she loses control over planning her own. In a brief conversation toward the book's conclusion, the writing instructor convinces her that she has enough pages for a book, and that is the source of the haunting novel known as Ashland.
