Landscaping our prose (Virginia Pye, Vaddey Ratner, Chloe Aridjis)

Today (among so many other things) we're talking about landscape in memoir, about the ways that topography and visual detail elevate and suggest a story. We've read two chapters in Howard Norman's I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place. We've written responses. And now we'll talk.

I'm going to be sharing these three very different approaches to landscape (each drawn from novels). I now share them with you. What do you learn from them? What do they teach you about possibilities?

First, from the courageous first novel (River of Dust) from the dear Virginia Pye, this evocation of a dusty province in China, 100 years ago:

On springtime mornings like those, when the rain had finally stopped, they waded out toward the creek that had been rising for days. From farms upstream floated all manner of tires, cut logs, old boots, and once a bloated cow, swirling in an eddy until it was skewered by the limbs of a fallen tree.

Now a snatch of London from Asunder, by the amazing Chloe Aridjis:

The dusk of Millbank had filled with the amber lozenges of unoccupied black cabs, miners with lantern-strapped foreheads rushing towards or away from the city centre, as I made my way to meet Daniel at the Drunken Duck, a pub a few streets from Tate Britain.

And now from my friend, Vaddey Ratner—words originating from Cambodia, from the deservedly bestselling In the Shadow of the Banyan:

In the courtyard something stirred. I peered down and saw Old Boy come out to water the gardens. He walked like a shadow; his steps made no sound. He picked up the hose and filled the lotus pond until the water flowed over the rim. He sprayed the gardenias and orchids. He sprinkled the jasmines. He trimmed the torch gingers and gathered their red flame-like blossoms into a bouquet, which he tied with a piece of vine and then set aside, as he continued working. Butterflies of all colors hovered around him as if he were a tree stalk and his straw hat a giant yellow blossom.

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Katie Hafner, Kate Christensen, Nathaniel Popkin: what I'm reading now

This past week I read Howard Norman's beautiful (and Michael Ondaatje endorsed!) I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place as well as Rebecca Solnit's fierce and bracing The Faraway Nearby.

Now on my desk sit Katie Hafner's Mother Daughter Me and Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special, along with my friend Nathaniel Popkin's first novel, Lion and Leopard, due out in October from the new Philadelphia publishing house, The Head and the Hand Press.

So much wrong can happen each day. But a good book close by is transformative.

I'll be sharing word about these books as soon as I can.

In the meantime, those looking for a good memoir to read (beyond the nearly 100 referenced in Handling the Truth) can find a few recommendations here.

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I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place/Howard Norman: Reflections

Today I went to a garden searching for an image worthy of Howard Norman's new memoir, I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place.

There was this, above, a suggestion of the many vivid parts that constitute this surprising memoir's whole—Norman's summer as a fifteen-year-old employee of the local bookmobile (not to mention lover-in-training, thanks to his brother's girlfriend, Paris, and amateur outsdoorsman, with terrible unintended consequences, and son of a mostly missing father), Norman as a young man trying to find his way in a cold and bitter Canadian city (to pay off an auction debt, to be worthy of a woman he might have loved, to keep company with an older, regretful man), Norman among the Intuits (their folklore, their landscapes, their whale-spume horizons, their birds), Norman in Vermont (it was the summer of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary; it was the summer of wells and hallucinations and fevers), and Norman as the man who tries to reclaim the home that he lent to a poetess and her young son—the home in which she committed a ghastly and famous murder-suicide.

So the parts. The vivid parts of Beautiful Place.

But also the alighted nature of the memoir's structure, the intricate workings among and between things. The time shifts, the slight but never precious self-effacements, the humor within the melancholy within the humor, and his overt address to each. The way art—Norman's art—comes into this, but only slightly and only sometimes. Beautiful Place is not a "how I became a writer" memoir—not in the least. It's a book of true, landscape-framed stories—five chapters circling five discoveries in five eras of Norman's life. Norman twice recalls the Robert Frost line about the best way out being through. He shows himself circling, regretting, freezing, succumbing, lying, and being a better man. He shows himself in the company of birds, and in the company of dying things, and in the light of the moon by the shore.

It's gorgeous writing, every sentence calm and clear and (again) vivid: "The novels I was reading at the time deftly orchestrated implausibilities along a clear narrative line, but I could not locate such a line in my own life." "As he dusted each globe with a moistened cloth and inspected it for hairline cracks, Michael also turned it upside down and them right side up so that the fabricated snowflakes inside fell like confetti on interior tableau." "In 1990, the second full summer in our 1850s farmhouse in Vermont, everything I loved most happened most every day, with exceptions."

I read many books that I love and many I want to share, and then there are those books that I read and think: This is a book that I must teach.

I will teach Howard Norman to my students at Penn next spring.

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Backstory

I have been thinking about backstory and its choreography—the rise and fall of what is happening right this instant in a story, set against what is remembered, what comes before. Transitions between the present and the past and back to present again become as important as plot. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that perfectly executed transitions are plot.

I've been thinking about those authors who are masters at this sort of thing—Michael Ondaatje, of course. Wallace Stegner. Alice McDermott. Jayne Anne Phillips. Alyson Hagy. Ann Patchett, in her newest novel, RUN, does an exquisite job (I think) of slipping between the now and then of her characters' lives. So does Howard Norman in THE BIRD ARTIST, Ron Carlson in FIVE SKIES, Debra Dean in THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD, and Sarah Waters in THE NIGHT WATCH.

Sometimes an author will slide forwards and back, take nearly imperceptible steps through time. How does that happen? And sometimes the transition is declarative, abrupt. Why can that work so well? When does it fail?

I'm interested in gaining your perspective.

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