Belva Plain’s Looking Back: Complex Entertainment

by Leonora Seinfeld

     Belva Plain’s Looking Back has been rightly praised as an engrossing tale with startling turns in plot. However, many forms of entertainment, both literary and cinematic, offer their fair share of shocking twists and revelations. Plain offers us more with her remarkable ability to weave compelling plot twists without spoiling narrative credibility. On our journey with the protagonists and "three musketeers" Cecile, Norma and Amanda, the reader is able to suspend disbelief when confronted with scenes of betrayal, scenes that may have easily been played out with contrivance and melodrama under another author’s inferior craftsmanship.

     The key to Plain’s success as a storyteller lies in her ability to develop multidimensional characters. While each of the three protagonists initially falls into an archetype based on class, intelligence and beauty, the author goes further to explore their interiority and motivation. By the time we reach the pivotal July 4^th climax, the reader has spent enough time in Amanda’s head to understand her need to confess the true parentage of her child. The familial chaos and disintegration that then rapidly ensues also inspires credibility, including the sudden stroke of the child’s true father, a stoic patriarch with enough vulnerability to render his collapse plausible. However, Plain’s readership is still shocked and arrested by Amanda’s accusation and the demise that follows; while we don’t question the scene’s authenticity, we also were not able to predict it. Mixing surprise with credible character motivation, Plain becomes a master of her craft.

     Moreover, Plain refuses to punish her characters didactically or to stereotype them based on their deeds. In spite of Amanda’s transgressions, she is still, as Cecile says, "…something more than a tramp without a conscience. She’s a complicated human being, as we all are." A character can do something evil, but it does not mean that her essence is evil: "…I can despise what you did without despising you." In a Q&A with the author Plain substantiates this claim, asserting that we need to comprehend evil, which does not mean to excuse it.

     In Looking Back, Belva Plain absorbs the reader into an intricate, dramatic tale without trivializing or demeaning her characters. Our adulterers, instead of coming off as tawdry and flat, compel us to examine the complexities driving human action. A character that we have come to trust also ends up subverting reader expectations, and we find ourselves having to delve even further for understanding. In the end we may not have concrete answers, but that is ok too; part of the complexity of human nature, Plain seems to imply, is that our actions do not have simple answers.