Loneliness as a universal condition of American life

Loneliness as a universal condition of American life is both a social diagnosis and a lived condition in Rabo Karabekian’s account. It touches the wealthy as well as the poor, informs his mother’s practical understanding of American society, and recurs in his own years of isolation. Yet solitude is not simply an emptiness to be endured: it helps explain the friendships he keeps, the invitation he extends to Circe Berman, and the circumstances that prompt him to write.

A Social Diagnosis

Rabo’s mother understands loneliness as a pervasive American affliction, one that does not spare people at the top of society. She recognizes that lonely people may respond readily to attractive strangers who approach them warmly. That insight becomes a practical strategy when the family tries to reach Dan Gregory, a successful artist whom Rabo’s parents regard as a possible mentor for their son. His mother tells Rabo to present himself as Armenian, express admiration for Gregory, and seek to become an artist like him. Rabo writes roughly twenty letters in childish handwriting before she considers the appeal persuasive. The episode makes loneliness more than a private mood: it is a vulnerability that can be recognized and acted upon, and an opening through which human connection may be sought.

The account’s reach is also historical. Rabo’s parents came from families larger than either of the two families he later found in America, but their relatives in the Old World were blood relations lost in the massacre of Armenians. The family’s American life begins in the shadow of that rupture. In Rabo’s telling, the contrast between a large kin network and the lonely individual who survives it places American isolation beside the far more devastating loss of a community and its relatives. Loneliness is thus not a single, uniform experience: it can mean the absence of nearby companionship, but it can also follow the destruction of an entire family world.

Rabo’s Years of Isolation

Rabo recalls having endured loneliness as a boy and for several years in New York City during the Great Depression. He later describes another, deliberate period of separation after his first wife and two sons left him in 1956. Having abandoned his hopes as a painter, he did not merely find himself alone; he went looking for loneliness and lived as a hermit for eight years. He recounts this period with the dry, self-deprecating humor of a wounded veteran describing a full-time occupation. The joke does not erase the duration or severity of his withdrawal; it shows how he has learned to frame it as something he could withstand.

His isolation returns in old age after Edith dies. The friends Rabo and Edith shared had been Edith’s friends rather than his, and painters keep their distance because the ridicule directed at his own work helped encourage the view that painters were charlatans or fools. Rabo says he can stand being lonely if necessary. That claim has a history behind it: boyhood solitude, Depression-era years in New York City, and the eight-year hermitage after his family left. His resilience is not proof that isolation has no cost; it is a practiced ability to continue in its presence.

Friendship and the Limits of Solitude

Paul Slazinger is the friend Rabo describes as his own. Like Rabo, Paul is an older wounded veteran of the Second World War. He lives alone in a house next door to Rabo’s old house in Springs and comes over almost every day. His visits fill the landscape of Rabo’s account with ordinary possibilities for company: watching a tennis match, sitting on the beach, playing cards with the cook, or withdrawing to read on the far side of the potato barn. The friendship does not depend on constant conversation or shared work. Its closeness takes the form of frequent presence alongside room for each man to keep to himself.

Rabo worries that Paul no longer writes much, while he himself no longer paints. He will not even let himself doodle on the telephone memo pad: when he catches himself doing so, he breaks the pencil and throws it away. Against that self-imposed artistic silence, Paul’s continued insistence that he can write only at home becomes a boundary Rabo cannot persuade him to cross. Rabo repeatedly offers to have him move in, pointing to the space available and to the fact that neither man is likely to have a wife or girlfriend again. He jokes that they look like a pair of wounded iguanas, and promises that they would not bother each other. Paul’s reply varies little: he can only write at home. When he calls Rabo’s house a museum, he identifies the difference between hospitable space and a place in which he can imagine working. Their friendship is close, but it cannot abolish either man’s need for a separate home.

An Invitation That Begins a Change

Rabo’s understanding of loneliness also makes the arrival of Circe Berman a turning point. She has moved into his house without an invitation, as he initially remembers it, and objects to seeing him do nothing all day. She challenges him to do something—if nothing else, to write his autobiography. Her intervention gives Rabo a new occupation and prompts him to describe himself as an old painter attempting literature while holding on to his job as a museum guard.

Rabo later corrects his own account of how Circe came to live with him. After a conversation about his parents’ deaths, he tells her that the jewels his mother found during the massacre helped make his family’s emigration to America possible; that disclosure leads him to invite Circe to his house for a drink and supper with Paul. When the meal ends, he offers her a place to stay and gives her the same assurance he has often given Paul: he will not bother her. He admits that he, not an unexplained turn of events, invited her. The correction matters because it reveals Rabo’s part in the companionship he had first described as something that simply happened to him. His loneliness does not only isolate him; it can also make him offer shelter and company.

Inherited Loss and Recurring Ironies

The family history behind Rabo’s loneliness is sharpened by the parents’ different experiences of survival. His father hid during the massacre and later carried a painful sense of having survived when relatives and fellow villagers had not. Rabo says his father was ashamed that Rabo’s mother had survived as well. His mother’s experience differed: she lay among the dead, pretending to be dead herself. Rabo argues that she had still greater grounds for survivor’s guilt because she had been at the center of the killing. The family’s solitude therefore carries the marks of a historical catastrophe, not merely the absence of present-day company.

The novel also places Rabo’s personal isolation beside the loneliness he sees in the art world. His collection attracts visitors who travel from Switzerland and Japan, and he sells a Rothko from his wall to a representative of the Getty Museum for a million and a half dollars, but Circe remains unimpressed by the collection. Rabo’s paintings, including his former monumental work at the GEFFCo headquarters, have titles he describes as deliberately uncommunicative; Circe argues that art should communicate. The contrast does not reduce loneliness to a problem solved by public recognition or market value. Paintings may draw crowds, command large sums, or become objects of ridicule, while their owner remains isolated from the artistic community and uncertain how to communicate.

That irony reaches its bleakest formulation when Rabo says that ridicule of his paintings helped make him a comic footnote in art history. He imagines his surname entering dictionaries as a word for a person’s disastrous destruction of his own work and reputation. The imagined definition converts public notoriety into a kind of solitude: Rabo may be remembered, but as a fiasco rather than as a painter among peers. Across these episodes, loneliness connects private survival, inherited trauma, failed recognition, and the tentative acts by which Rabo makes room for other people.