How do we write atmosphere, and give it tension? What I learned from Eva Figes' Light: With Monet at Giverny

I have Ivy Goodman to thank for Eva Figes. Ivy, a writer I first encountered long ago, when asked to write a review of her collected short stories, A Chapter From Her Upbringing, for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Ivy has been an essential part of my writing and reading life ever since—her reach is wide, her mind is gleaming, she whispers the names of important books into my ear, and often sends something unexpected my way.

I am grateful for Ivy.

A few weeks ago a slender novel called Light: With Monet at Giverny made its way to me, a gift from Ivy. Its author is Eva Figes, a writer born in Berlin in 1939. Yesterday, while a single carpenter banged away on kitchen cabinets, I stole upstairs, to my son's room, to read. My son has the largest room in this old house. It feels empty with him gone. I'd never sat there before, and read in his chair, but that was the place to be, for oh, my, what a book this is, and absolute quiet is the sound I needed.

Light recounts a single day in the life of Monet, at his estate in Giverny. In the early morning, he rises to paint. Down the hall, his grieving wife does not sleep, and in the house grandchildren stir, and stepdaughters are about, the help, an anxious cook. We will watch Monet in his pursuit of light, in his return to his house, in his lunch hour, in a walk with a friend, in a stroll through shadows with his saddened wife, but we will also come see, thanks to graceful tricks of authorial omniscience, the thoughts and regrets and dreams of the others who have come to Giverny and live through this day.

Little Lily will wonder "for perhaps the thousandth time why the sunlight should be full of dancing motes, gleaming and moving, when the rest of the air seemed quite so empty." Alice, the wife, will "lose all sense of time, as though she had been in a different place, somewhere that belonged to the night and what was left of her night thoughts, where, habitually now, she spoke to those who had only existed in the dark of her own head for years." Marthe, the spinster aunt (and step-daughter to Monet) wonders "what it would be like to do something, anything, from choice." And Jimmy, Lily's brother, will allow a balloon to escape.

But light—on the river, above the shadows, through the slats of window shutters, on the crisp of rose petals, in the wine—is really the protagonist here, and Figes draws it out so spectacularly that I held my breath as I read. This is atmosphere as suspense. This is weather as plot, and I must quote at length from one of many brilliant passages to show you what I mean:

Five o'clock. The top of the willow tree still shone in the green light. The same light was visible on the slope beyond the house, and on the open fields between the railway track and the river. But the water of the lily pond was sunk in the cool shadow, and only the air above it still gleamed fitfully in the slanting light, soft and tenuous as it came through the trees, playful as mist on the substances of shadow below, which it could not disturb. It was as though a tangible split had occurred between sunlight, shadow and substance, and now earth and water were sinking into themselves, taking leave of the sky. Dragonflies and a swarm of midges could still cross the divide, hovering in the air above the depth of shadow, catching the fitful gleam, but the lilies had begun to close up their colours as the water darkened and the sky withdrew from its surface and stood high above the trees.

I read Light after reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Melissa Kwasny's Nine Senses. I read it following review work on two other books. Like Kwasny, Figes reaffirmed for me what it is that I am truly looking for on the page, and what I must learn to do to be the writer I hope someday to be.

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Everything in This Country Must/Colum McCann

Ivy Goodman—writer, teacher, and quite loved friend—sent me a book over the holidays.

She does things like that. 

Every book that Ivy has ever sent has been considered, right.  Most of the time these are books that I hadn't known I needed.  Often, they make the trip to my classroom at Penn.  This newest one, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story edited and introduced by Anne Enright, is no exception.

Last night—too tired to write, too early for bed—I turned to Ivy's gift and thumbed through toward the end, where Colum McCann, a writerly hero of mine, has a very short piece titled "Everything in This Country Must."  The first lines sound like nothing he has ever written, and for the sound of this story alone, it must be read.

A summer flood came and our draft horse got caught in the river. The river smashed against stones and the sound of it to me was like the turning of locks. It was silage time and the water smelled of grass. The draft horse, Father's favourite, had stepped in the river for a sniff maybe and she was caught, couldn't move, her foreleg trapped between rocks.  Father found her and called Katie! above the wailing of the rain. I was in the barn waiting for drips on my tongue from the ceiling hole.  

But there's far more than mere style in this brief McCann tale.  There's brilliance.  There's devastation.  It's the sort of story that feeds a hungry mind for a week.  I keep returning to it. 

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Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best

This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" — Jessica Francis Kane, The Report

Tapping a cigarette on the dashboard, Eric lights it and sucks, the smoke hits the back of his throat like a branding iron.  He holds his breath, then blows the smoke in a disappearing draft.  He wants to pop his chin, blow a smoke ring, but he's never learned how.  He isn't sure, either, if it's cool.  — Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Why She Left Us

I judge their hands.  I say to myself, yes, that guy fights fires in the mountains.  Or no, that guy's not a roofer, no matter what he claims.  Armand has spadelike hands, troweling hands, and they convince me he speaks a certain kind of truth.  He woos me with the fused joint of his ring finger, the corrugated grasp of his palms.  —Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain. — Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You

For a single moment she accepted the situation and had the kind of prosaic thought that gains weight in the timing of its application—that her time had come, as it had come to many before her and would to many again.  Then she felt a split second of peace, during which she continued to make sense of what was happening in the odd, lofty way that came upon her every once in a while and made her wonder about herself. She thought with an amused clarity that her ingrained sense of her own insignificance was finally coming in handy, enabling her to accept being blown where the wind took her, like a piece of dandelion fluff. — Alice Elliott Dark, "Home"

She would waken and find herself trussed and pinned to the earth with violin strings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. — Karen Rile, "No Ear for Languages"

Before dawn, when the souls of the dead hovered in the greying sky, the women gathered in the synagogue courtyard.  Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight

This final excerpt is from Kathryn Davis's miraculous The Thin Place.  She is not a friend, but we're going to be talking a little about magic realism in the class (thanks to one of the submitted workshop pieces), and so she is necessary:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake.  One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.  This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do.  The dead souls no longer wore gowns.  They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.  — Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

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Living on the Margins, Writing Alone

Sometimes things just hit you—obvious aspects of yourself, known territories, that suddenly swoon large in your own self-opinion. Last night, watching the crowd gather at the bookstore, watching that community of authors engender and inspire that community of listeners, I was smacked about inside my head with this commonplace observation: I really am an outsider. I really do live on margins. The center of things eludes me.

Genetics? Circumstance? I do not know. I know only that my life as a writer is fueled almost entirely by correspondence (the essential literary back and forth with Jay Kirk, Buzz Bissinger, Reiko Rizzuto, Ivy Goodman, Kate Moses, Anna Lefler, Alyson Hagy) and the very rare phone call, not by gathering. That I write my books alone, extraordinarily so. That I miss the trends because I haven't been out among those trading news about them. That the few times that I have been out in person doing book-related things over these past many years is primarily because of one person, Elizabeth Mosier, who made it possible for me to join Patricia Hampl (one of my favorite memoirists) for dinner one evening, who drove me to Swarthmore to see Elizabeth Strout (another heroine), and who was the reason I ventured out last night to see writers who were very much worth the effort.

I have squeezed this writing life into the dark. I have made certain that it didn't interfere with the family dinner hour or the client expectation. I have gone off writing these books in my head without stopping to consider: Will they sell? Are they of the now? Will they find their readers? I have bludgeoned out this path for books, but it's a small path—whacked away and narrow.

Is that the way? Is this the way? Last night I had my doubts.

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Gogol, The Overcoat, and the Connective Book Life

While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.

"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.

It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.

Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.

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Time Erasures

Is it possible to write meaningfully without trespassing into melancholy, into a sense of things lost, or never seized? Time passing too quickly, time leaving time behind, time and the erasures that are time? When I think of the books I love—READING IN THE DARK, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW, ZOLI—I think of almost. Nearly. Once.

This morning, reading OBJECT LESSONS by Eavan Boland, a gift of a book sent by the deep and dear Ivy Goodman, I find these words, and I know them to be true. They make me want to write again, to try to wrestle the past from the past, to enter into once.

"This is the way we make the past. This is the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our violations, the past waits for us."

And on another note altogether (but maybe not really), good morning, Katrina Kenison. I'm privileged to share this early dark writerly space with you.

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