divide by 2 and add 7..?

One thing that I was wondering as I was finishing Kindred is what effect Kevin's five year separation from Dana had on their relationship. For Dana, this separation was only several months, but we have several references from Butler that this time lapse has aged Kevin significantly. He was already older than Dana to begin with, and my musings led me to wish that Butler had given us more insight into their relationship once they returned to the present day together.

Kevin is already about ten years older than Dana (if I remember correctly), and this additional span of five years that he's stuck in the past without her merely adds distance between their ages. This is a pretty significant age difference, but Butler never seems to let on that anything has changed between them. While Mr. Mitchell did make the point earlier about Butler letting on to a potential "generational gap" between the two in certain situations, nothing else is every said about their age gap, even though, if I were in their position, I think it would affect me a lot.

For one thing, Kevin has now experienced a lot more than Dana has. Dana, while she's been having kind of a rough time of it, has only experienced life on the Weylin plantation. Kevin has had to make a way for himself and live by his wits up North, and we can see that what he's seen has changed him. I wonder that this would not make him jaded and cynical towards present day, and even to Dana. In some ways it does; springing to my mind is when he makes the reference to the woman he saw dying in childbirth, and this memory being spurred by a commercial on television. There we see the effect his experiences have had on him, but it doesn't show up in his relationship with Dana at all.

For me, the story would have been enriched by Butler's letting on that the couple has some issues between them to work out, perhaps having to do with their increased age disparity, or perhaps by Kevin's new experiences. As I saw it, there was an unrealistic (if this term is even relevant with a book like this) amount of calm in their relationship. I doubt that after not having seen your wife for five years that you would immediately adjust to her again, and that your only problem would be adjusting to your new house. Somehow that doesn't strike me as the natural course of things.

However, never having been in this situation, I wouldn't know for sure, but I would have liked it if Butler had given us a little more detail with regards to this aspect of Dana and Kevin's relationship.