The Guncle Abroad

After the bachelorette party, Patrick stays up with Greg and listens to his brother’s worries about the upcoming ceremony. In this interaction, Rowley continues to convey that The Persistence of Grief can become intertwined in a large variety of conflicts. Greg begins to doubt that marrying Livia is the right decision for his children, believing that they are still too deeply devoted to Sara to accept her. Patrick’s own responsibility is brought into question. Greg accuses Patrick of making this process for his children difficult because of the way he immortalizes Sara in their minds with stories. Patrick knows that “each memory had a way of amplifying in importance, lest they, too, be lost forever” (208). He realizes that in the process of helping his young niece and nephew heal from the loss of their mother, he has also set them up not to move on. Patrick’s stories instilled them with a sense of comfort, but now they hold onto that comfort too dearly. This conversation provides major character development for Patrick as he comes to see how grief has led him to create problems and not just solve them.

Patrick’s greatest challenge in The Guncle Abroad is helping the children to accept Livia, despite the way he has immortalized Sara for them. After spending time with Livia and seeing her and Greg interact more closely with each other, Patrick realizes that his brother and Livia are truly in love and good for each other. He tries desperately to make Grant and Maisie see and understand this, but cannot get them to look past their own dislike for Livia. He spends this section “hoping the kids would see and recognize at last that this was a union to be built up and not torn down” (219). Patrick knows from firsthand experience how love can shape a person’s life. The children do not recognize The Impact of Love on Self-Perception because they are so young. They cannot understand how Livia’s love for Greg will make their father happy and bring him a peace he misses since Sara’s death. They also do not understand how it will impact them, as having a mother figure in their lives will bring more structure and support. 

As Patrick wrestles with his influence, Palmina emerges more as a sage figure; he sees her as antagonistic, but her characterization develops in this section when she proves herself to be both “cool” and thoughtful. As Palmina’s influence over Maisie grows, Patrick becomes jealous, realizing that Palmina can offer Maisie support and advice that Patrick simply cannot. Part of this is due to gender and partly to age, as Palmina is a younger role model. Palmina recognizes this and credits it as a reason for Maisie actually needing Livia in her life: “Irony was a bit strong of a word for Patrick’s liking, and he didn’t like the suggestion that he wasn’t enough to light Maisie’s way” (241). Though Patrick wants to be there for Maisie, he simply cannot be for certain crises and moments, not as she enters this new phase of her life. Patrick’s struggle to accept this causes tension with Maisie, as he tries to adapt to their new relationship and allows jealousy of Palmina to influence his judgment. However, ultimately, he turns to Palmina for help after the rehearsal dinner, suggesting that his love for his family is overcoming his jealousy.

The rehearsal dinner is the climax of the novel. Tensions have been building toward this scene, as Maisie has threatened to unravel the wedding, and each character will finally come together with their own motivations and problems. The SayHi translation app exemplifies how Rowley has structured the rising action to climax at this scene. In Chapter 6, Maisie used it to translate at the tearoom in Paris, representing her attempts to gain independence and find her way in an unfamiliar world, particularly as her father is marrying in a foreign country. However, at the rehearsal dinner, her translation has failed and she has misunderstood Livia, suggesting that she needs to learn to listen and communicate while she grows up. The translation error also underscores the point that each character realizes: that the wedding needs to happen closer to home for Grant and Maisie and not in Italy.