Sol

Sol is Frances’s first husband and a figure in an imagined scene where the living and the dead mingle with characters from her past. His brief appearances establish an irreverent familiarity between the former spouses: Frances recognizes his vanity and remains fond of him, while their joking recollections turn the sequence into both a reunion and a critique of how she makes a story of her life.

Appearance in Frances’s imagined scene

Sol appears on a sleigh journey Frances is imagining with her friend Gillian. While Frances scatters words from her books across the sky, Sol sits at the back of the sleigh with Henry, smoking cigarettes and using catapults to eliminate adjectives they consider unnecessary. The episode folds Frances’s authorship into a playful fantasy: the books she has written become a source of words, and Sol takes part in editing them even as Frances tells him to leave the words alone.

Marriage and mutual familiarity

Frances describes Sol as an egotist but finds him attractive, and fondly identifies him as her first-ever husband. Sol agrees, adding that Frances was his second-ever wife. Their exchange makes clear that they were married, but offers no fuller account of the marriage or its circumstances. Instead, the humor rests on their easy familiarity and on Frances’s knowing description of herself as someone who liked being a second wife.

Frances’s life as a story

The imagined encounter also places Sol among the people who comment on Frances’s tendency to treat her relationships as narrative material. When Frances says that the events are not real and that she is making the story up as she goes, Gillian responds that Frances’s plots could be better structured and applies the same criticism to her life, especially her changes of husband. Frances counters that Gillian had made this criticism while alive. Sol’s presence in the scene thus connects Frances’s fictional improvisation with the history of her marriages, while the exchange with Gillian frames that history as a pattern Frances may not have planned in advance.

Narrative role

Sol is not developed here through an independent plot or detailed biography. He functions as a familiar presence in Frances’s imagined gathering, where remembered relationships and imagined conversation can coexist. His shared recollection with Frances gives the scene warmth and comic ease; Gillian’s sharper observations keep that reunion from becoming merely nostalgic, directing attention instead to Frances’s habit of moving from one relationship to the next.