Trad quest for hippies: "Sanrevelle" by Dave Eggers

Let's start with the name Sanrevelle, which is both the title of the story and the name of the woman the main character Hop falls in love with and spends most of the story trying to locate. It's not a traditional name, although it seems to mimic one. Characters in the story comment on the name, unsure if it even belongs to a person. In the real world, there is a Revelle College as part of the UC San Diego campus, but neither San Revelle nor the one-word combination really show up on any map or in any directory. Google tells me that it is a "rare Portuguese woman's name," although its sources are divided on the meaning. The "San" part would indicate a saint, but the latter half of the name is a mystery, and in any event, Sanrevelle herself shows a lack of interest in the history of names when Hop starts to explain his own. In the context of a boat parade of Christmas lights, it might be fair to do a little bit of association and go from "revelle" to "revel." She is the saint of Christmas revelry, and Hop is on a quest/pilgrimage to reach the saint. 

A pilgrimage to a saint is a pretty traditional formula, and so is Hop's hoped-for fix to feeling lost in the maelstrom of life by looking to the love of a good woman. These traditional formulas are in opposition to the new-age gobbledygook that surrounds Hop. His boss, co-founder of one of the largest personal injury firms on the West Coast, has gone a little insane, and has started looking to every phony, hippie-dippie system on Earth to help him make sense of the world. He's started a list of grudges against his long-dead parents, consulted with mediums, and gone off to be part of a cult in Europe. Meanwhile, he's left Hop to man the ship at the law firm, and ship from which one lawyer after another is jumping.

The firm is located in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, a building known mostly for how it began to sink soon after construction was completed because it was built in soft clay. That alone sounds something like a Biblical parable about building your house on rock, and, because it's set in San Francisco, sort of the epicenter of liberal, flower-power culture and its modern descendants, the story comes across as a bit of a rebuke to that culture and a suggestion that answers to life's questions might, on occasion, be better looked for somewhere else. Hop, who eventually starts living in the tower full-time at his boss's request, finds himself looking out of the window and wishing for a way out. He sees the bay, which leads him to try sailing lessons, which leads him to meet Sanrevelle, the sailing instructor. 

Hop's passivity

Part of modernity's endless boring discourse has to do with the manliness of men, with conservatives criticizing weak, passive, "cuck" or "beta" males. Hop fits that description. He assures Sanrevelle that he isn't a "middle-aged thumbsucker" with "mommy issues," but I beg to differ. Her boat is called the fucking Cradle for Christ's sake, and if that's not an indicator that he is looking for a mommy to fix him, I don't know what is. 

By making Sanrevelle Hop's instructor, the story encourages the reader to see her as more than just a mentor in sailing. She is a guide to him trying to figure out his life. He quickly falls in love, but he is too afraid to make a move. She is somewhat guarded, although she does put out some signs that she's open to dating him, but he is too passive and uncertain of himself to take a risk, up until the final act, which makes up most of the story. She's getting ready to go on a long wished-for trip to the Sea of Cortez. She needs a crew, and there have been hints between Hop and Sanrevelle that if he wanted to go, she might be amenable to that. But he hasn't gotten up the nerve to tell her how he feels. 

Traditional narrative within non-traditional trappings

And so we come to the Love Actually-esque scene that, with interruptions for backstory, makes up the plot. Hop has decided to throw caution to the wind and find Sanrevelle on the night that the flotilla of boats with Christmas lights is supposed to cruise through the bay, which is a San Francisco tradition. The setup to this scene isn't exactly clear. She apparently told Hop that she would be on her boat a little before the parade started, and if she wasn't, she'd be in the barge-made-bar she likes to hang out in. It isn't clear if she had asked Hop to be part of the flotilla with her. In any event, she isn't at her boat, nor is she at the "Waterfront Social Club," and she isn't answering her phone, so Hop, suddenly encouraged by Sanrevelle's friend who seems to have had a change of heart about him, takes a canoe and goes out to find her. (She is called "Sanrevelle's skeptical friend Joy," a name as pregnant with meaning, along with a description as on-the-nose as anything Hawthorne might have written.)

Come to think of it, Love Actually, with its attempt to package traditional love stories in hip, modern packages, kind of reminds me of "Sanrevelle." On the one hand, Hop's travails as he goes from one mistaken location to another in search of Sanrevelle are so traditional they could probably neatly fit into a Joseph Campbell-inspired diagram. He accepts his call to adventure, faces trials, and eventually perseveres by showing his steadfastness of heart. It's a very old formula, one that's set against all of the weird, new answers to life that only lead people astray in the big city. 

On the other hand, it doesn't end with Hop becoming the traditional male lead of the relationship. He has just enough agency to go ask Sanrevelle for help, and when he does that, the story ends. It ends with Hop getting what he wants, which is for Sanrevelle to show him the way. The last line is: "And so he let her guide him." Having shown enough agency to have looked for her and expressed his real interest, she relieves him of further need for agency by taking over guiding him. 

Liberals flirting with traditional answers

"Sanrevelle" is perhaps not a complete rejection of hippie culture. Hop does, after all, get his canoe from the communal pile of watercraft next to the social club. It is, however, a story about a man who escapes the spiritual confusion of living in modern San Francisco through heterosexual love, a love that ends with a trip to escape San Francisco and its tottering society built on sand. There is an implied critique there of the answers to life's problems that "San Francisco"--the symbol of all kinds of New Age flim-flam panaceas--offers. 

Hop doesn't declare Jesus Christ as his lord and savior at the end. It's not that kind of traditional. But it does, by bringing in a large number of Christian symbols, and by poking fun at the silliest excesses of New Age thinking, at least re-introduce old answers as possible cures to the ills of modernity.   

I don't think it will be terribly controversial if I posit that the editors who determine what gets published in literary fiction such as the O.Henry Anthology skew toward the politically liberal. The New York-based establishment of publishers skews heavily left in its politics. Unlike a lot of claims of bias, I think this one is pretty hard to argue against. But every now and again, for reasons I don't quite understand, someone--typically an older, white male--is able to sneak in conservative messages that are accepted pretty much whole cloth by the literary establishment. I think Cormac McCarthy was the prime example of this. I have no idea how his novels, which in some cases featured sympathetic characters fighting evil while also railing against modern explanations of evil, were accepted by the literary establishment as they were. 

Part of the answer is probably that people aren't very good readers and they may not even understand the themes of the books they read, but I also think that liberals have had enough time go by to realize that not all of the things they hoped were true two generations ago have panned out. That doesn't mean they want to go back to 1955 like MAGA does, but they do seem, on occasion, to be willing to look to the past for virtues that might be worth salvaging and trying to incorporate into a modern setting. "Sanrevelle" attempts to do this, and by slipping Jesus in among the lights and Dean Martin, it does it unobtrusively. But its implied critique of at least some of the worst solutions "San Francisco" has to offer is hard not to read in at least a partly political sense.