The Longest Ride

In many ways, the novel endorses a conventional, traditional respect for family. In the two stories offered here, the family is a solid and dependable absolute, a tight unit in which members offer to each other unwavering commitment, emotional support, and deep understanding. Parents are supportive, encouraging, sacrificing, and understanding; children are dutiful, respectful, and protective. Traumas never divide the novel’s families, or create schisms that never entirely heal. Instead, lengthy separations, divergent backgrounds, financial hardships, relationship crises, medical heartaches, the harsh intrusion of bad luck and misfortune, only make the novel’s families stronger.

Children even when they are grown remain loyal to their parents. Growing up, Sophia is deeply influenced by her father’s love of art. Ira does not imagine a life beyond assuming the operations of the humble shop his father starts. Luke rides bulls to express his love for his dead father and takes care of the ranch for the sake of his mother. Ruth becomes a teacher in part to honor her father’s stalled career as an academic who had to flee the Nazis. Relationships between grown children and parents matter. Sophia wants her parents to meet Luke, who accept him without any qualms that their formerly ambitious daughter may be making a mistake in marrying a farmer. Luke introduces Sophia to his mother as a key step in committing to her.

The novel’s insistence on the primacy of family is most marked in its treatment of Ruth and Ira’s infertility. Unable to have biological children, they briefly hope to adopt Ruth’s student Daniel; when that fails, they decide to think of their art collection as a kind of progeny. Ruth and Ira define family on their own terms, a tight and absolute unit of commitment and support that defies even mortality.

Both two love stories hinge on the power of art to bring people together; the novel’s reward system also revolves around the distribution of an incredibly valuable collection of art.

Ruth, whose father was a respected academic in the field of art history, grew up appreciating the discipline and rigor of art. When she shares her insights into the contemporary artworks they collect across four decades with Ira, however, all he sees are as canvasses with squiggles and lines without aesthetic merit. He values their collection only as something he shares with Ruth. He loves how blown away Ruth was by the paintings—the collection is the child they never could have.

An art appreciation course at Wake Forest converts the blue-collar Sophia into a lover of art. She dreams of a career as a museum curator despite the dismal job opportunities in the field. Luke knows nothing of college, art, or culture—his understanding of Sophia’s world is so minimal that he is hesitant to even come to an art auction for her sake.

In the end, Ira and Luke’s views of art prevail. The novel rejects the cultural and aesthetic significance of important masterworks in favor of the sentimental value of a culturally insignificant object. Ira’s will includes a codicil that rewards anyone who buys a painting executed by a 10 year old, a crude and unsophisticated expression of a kid’s love for a teacher who took the time to care about him, in favor of one of the sophisticated canvases worth millions in the Levinson collection. Luke, who doesn’t care about the art Ruth prized, buys the child’s drawing as a gift for Sophia, who must discard her intellectual interests in favor of this sappy memento. Luke’s ignorance is immediately rewarded with ownership of the whole collection—which he and Sophia sell for monetary gain, again discarding the idea that the art might have a value to someone who has spent four years studying it.

The novel mocks the pompous family lawyer who pontificates shortly before the auction and the elitist crowd of snobby art collectors. The lawyer that the purpose of art is to create insight into human nature and the complexity of experience. The novel, however, rejects the idea that experience can be complex: Ira and Ruth share a magical love; so do Luke and Sophia. Ira’s belief about art is that it is not the painting, but who shares it that’s important. The novel agrees.