Well, I finally purchased and read "You Must Remember This" by Joyce Carol Oates, hoping to find some glimpse of why our Lyle might have associated with this book's character of the same name.
A brief summary of the book can be found at
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/02/specials/oates-remember.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I'll quote here a brief section of the aforementined article that specifically mentions Lyle:
Lyle is different. Though he has none of Felix's adrenaline or Enid's single-mindedness, he is memorable. For in Lyle, Ms. Oates has given failure a habitation and a name. We feel the punishing sameness of his routines; we sit with him through the beers and shots that blur them for a few hours. His decline begins when a McCarthyite zealot denounces him as a Communist sympathizer because he keeps books in his shop and knows where the Soviet Union is. Lyle's morale never fully recovers from the police interrogation. And later, when a pretty client rejects his attentions, he all but collapses.
Of note, the character Lyle is
not the one involved in an incestuous relationship (in fact he has no knowledge of it), nor does he actually kill himself in the book. However, he does contemplate hanging himself with a rope at least twice during the course of the novel.
Lyle takes solace in the fact that he has a basement in his store where he stores a length of rope behind a packing case. It's his "refuge" and his "sanctuary." He thinks of how people that know him see him as "a vigorous tireless ebuillient soul, a go-getter" but laments that "Lyle Stevick was otherwise, phony and tattered..." His desperate prayer, like that of Lear, was "
O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!," and he was extremely worried about thermonuclear war, even going into debt in order to build a bomb shelter in the backyard for his family.
It's difficult to speculate upon why our Lyle might have associated himself with the literary Lyle, especially because Lyle Stevick was one of the more minor characters in the book. In fact he was a middle aged man and father of four. If our Lyle had identified with literary Lyle's half-brother Felix, we would have all kinds of titillating scenarios to wonder about. The only thing that really stood out to me is the underlying current of death throughout the novel. Other characters deal with an attempted suicide, an abortion, a presumed mafia-related murder, serious illness, and deadly and near-deadly accidents and beatings.
I have to wonder if our Lyle really identified with the book's Lyle Stevick, or if he had simply read the book recently and liked the name. :waitasec:
