A Step from Death

Reviewing books forces me to try to see a story, a structure, an approach, an attitude from an author's point of view, to decide what is worthy of judgment, to speak authentically of my own necessarily idiosyncratic response. Two weeks ago, I read Larry Woiwode's new memoir on behalf of the Chicago Tribune. Because this book gives writers a lot to think about, and because I hear mostly from writers on this blog, I reproduce my review here.

www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-stepbw15mar15,1,2982770.story
Larry Woiwode's "A Step From Death"

By Beth Kephart
March 15, 2008

A Step From Death
By Larry Woiwode
Counterpoint, 272 pages, $24

Perhaps the hardest books to write are those that hold themselves accountable to no conventional boundaries or forms. Those that permit time to spill across their pages -- backward, forward, a rush of movement, a sudden stilling, returns and retreats. Those in which one thought juts deeply into the core of another, in which elisions are story, in which one is at a loss to define a true end or beginning. Books like these cannot hold their readers, let alone survive themselves, unless they are perfectly calibrated -- orchestrated as if by some higher power, so that all the fragments do at last become a gleaming, self-sustaining whole.

Larry Woiwode's new memoir, "A Step From Death," is a book of interweavings, to use his terminology, a book that rides on the understanding, in Woiwode's words, that:

"All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."

"A Step From Death" takes as its first impulse a near-fatal accident on Woiwode's farm. It branches toward childhood memories, writerly obsessions, failures, breakthroughs, and as it swims and swirls it addresses Woiwode's only son, Joseph, for whom Woiwode has sought to be a love-deserving father and in whom Woiwode recognizes the weight and opportunity of inheritance and heritage.

But to return to the accident that precipitates this memoir: It involves a machine, a hay baler attached to a tractor. It involves a jacket that Woiwode, knowing better, chooses to work in on that August day. He's off on his own when he becomes caught in a tangle, baling hay in a rocky stretch when one of the rocks appears to get caught in the mechanism.

"I get off and gather [the stones] up, dazed by the hours of noise, and think of how Indians revere rocks as primal material and speak to them, a view that's altered my take on rocks, which to farmers are a nuisance and scourge: Grandfather Rocks. I reach up for the toolbox, feel a tug at my jacket, realize I haven't shut off the [power take-off], and think, My God, this is it, and in a whirl, I'm gone."

Note the back-stepping in that passage -- the sly pause around the idea of Grandfather Rocks just as the author is about to be spun into the teeth of a machine. A less-patient writer would have put the reader right there, in the crescendo of trouble, but Woiwode waits, holds his breath, lunges. Woiwode, as he tells us, prefers language that is "allusive but solid enough to allow comic somersaults within its gravity, while meaning radiates from its premises to wider realms."

Cut, three of his ribs snapped, his jacket wrapped so hard around one arm it's as if the arm has been dressed with a tourniquet, he looks for help and finds none, calls out and can't be heard. If he can't cut himself loose, he'll lose the arm. Cutting himself loose means enduring pain that is already unbearable. Woiwode chooses survival. The next days and weeks are spent in the throes of such excruciating pain that all he can do is try to sleep standing up, or sleep with his head wedged upon his desk.

An accident, but not the first in Woiwode's life, and not the worst, for the worst, we learn, as Woiwode addresses his son, lies in the past, when Joseph -- or critical parts of him -- were nearly lost, first in a horse accident and later to another farm machine. As the only boy of four children, Joseph is held particularly dear. He has been a companion, a work help, a steady guide; he has been there -- a son worthy of an extraordinary father, a son who listens. "A Step From Death" is addressed to this son's open ear.

Regrets, wants, self-disgust, confessions -- all of that is here, in the mad, bold waters of this book. The literati, however, will no doubt dwell on the passages that recount Woiwode's days as an impassioned reader engorged on a new book each day, as a New Yorker short-story writer working with the legendary William Maxwell, as a writer churning the same one manuscript over and over for a decade (jeopardizing his marriage, temporarily straining his sanity), as an author haunting the halls of his publishing house for the whiff of the tortured book's first review (grand reviews, by the way, great praise for this "Beyond the Bedroom Wall"). This material is powerful, muscular, raw, even thrilling. It is a handbook to the writing life like none other I have read.

But of course "A Step From Death" is meant to be so much more than that: a coming to terms, a reconciliation with self, a bid to understand fathers and fatherhood. It tumbles and stonewalls and enthralls and wounds, roping readers through the thick braid of its sentences, its unapologetic instructions on how to read the book. One senses no precocity here, no purposeful manipulations. One senses, instead, a struggle to find the best way to say the hardest things, to put a life into context.

I read with deep admiration, then -- not always certain I'd grasped every embedded connection, not entirely clear on the workings of those farm machines, but deeply grateful to spend time inside the mind and life of a man who has fought so hard to live an authentic life and to write authentically. I predict a groundswell of affection for "A Step From Death," and I think Woiwode has earned it.

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Beth Kephart's ninth book, "House of Dance," is due out in May.

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