How Lack Affects Aloma’s Relationships

C. E. Morgan’s novel “All the Living” shows how lack can lead to a cyclical pattern. The lack of rain leads to a lack of crops and lack of crops leads to a lack of money, but lack is featured most prominently as an aspect of relationships. Aloma’s relationships both feature the lack of something - emotion with Orren and honesty with Bell - and that in the end leads to a lack of satisfaction.

What Aloma finds lacking in Orren and Bell is clearly represented by their pianos. Orren’s is old with a “sunken frame” (4), and is so out of tune that it sounds “spoiled like meat” (5). Orren is similarly sunken, not in his physical frame but in an emotional sense. He’s allowed himself to submit to the tragedies of his life and it’s made him into an emotionally dimmed man. Because he exhibits so little emotion, his relationship with Aloma lacks any amount of passion that you would expect from love. The only time there is any semblance of passion between Orren and Aloma is during sex. He is able to provide for her physically - both in a sexual sense and in that he gives her a home and money for food - but his lack of emotion directed at Aloma causes him and Aloma to become more and more distant throughout the novel because he cannot give her the emotional care she needs.

Bell lies on the opposite end of the spectrum. Aloma is so starved for emotional connection that, much like his piano, he looks complex and interesting from the outside. She is intrigued by the idea of someone who could provide for her in the way Orren can’t. However, as she discovers with his piano, the fascinating exterior gives way to something a lot less satisfactory, much like the notes from his piano are disappointingly “sagging and unclean” (135). After her experience with Bell’s piano she realises that she made some assumptions about Bell and now she is unsure if he could care for her in the way she needs. If he can’t care for a piano how could he care for her? Despite his own lacking however, it is Aloma’s own lack of honesty that leads to the downfall of their relationship. Bell confesses on page 172 that he had some feelings for Aloma but that she was the one to ruin their relationship when he says, “maybe you think it’s some small thing to stir up love, but you’re wrong.” Bell had the capacity to be emotionally present for Aloma, even if he could not care for her physically.

In the end Orren displays a short-lived fit of emotion that I think convinces Aloma that she could be happy with him despite everything that would indicate otherwise. She thinks, briefly, that he might have the capacity to provide the emotional care she needs, and she marries him. I think she convinces herself in that moment that she might be genuinely happy with him.