Caleb's Crossing/Geraldine Brooks: Reflections

Several years ago I had the privilege of reviewing March, the book that ultimately won Geraldine Brooks the Pulitzer Prize, for the Chicago Tribune. I hadn't yet attempted to write historical fiction. I did not know the perils. I merely found my way inside Brooks' story and emerged with this impression:

It is harder, sometimes, to review a glorious book — to convey its power and influence without relying on suspicious adjectives.  Good books can be slotted, characterized, explained; great books often cannot.  I believe Geraldine Brooks’ new novel, March, is a very great book.  I believe it breathes new life into the historical fiction genre, the borrowing-a-character-from-the-deep-past phenomenon, the old I-shall-tell-you-a-story-through-letters tradition.  I believe it honors the best of the imagination.  I give it a hero’s welcome.  And that should be enough, somehow, but let me try to explain it....

In time, I would write my own history-indebted books. I would come to an earned understanding of how difficult it is to both honor the past and make it relevant and pressing for modern readers. One has to make decisions about authenticity, completeness, recorded truth, the shaping of language, the admission of now to then. One has to yield to the novelist's first obligation, which is to craft a moving, timeless story.

With Caleb's Crossing, Brooks' newest book, this far-ranging author finds her inspiration in a spare record concerning the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. We meet this young man in the wilds of mid-seventeenth-century Martha's Vineyard. We follow him through his troubled negotiation with two religions and languages. We come to know him, most of all, through Bethia, a Puritan minister's daughter, who discovers Caleb along the beach and dares to continue to meet him there—privately and at great risk to her fortunes and reputation. Ultimately the two travel to an early version of Harvard University, where the air is fetid and the quarters are close and racism and inequity are present evils.

The story is told by Bethia herself, in notes she sets down throughout the years. Our view of Caleb's life is restricted by Bethia's own necessarily limited encounters, but Bethia herself is a magnificent creation—fully alive to her times, utterly capable of capturing the mist along the shore, on the one hand, and the fetid, close quarters of mostly male instruction in early Massachusetts, on the other. Brooks gives us the language of the time, the odd chores, the strange antecedents. We believe we are there, but we are glad we are here, turning Brooks' care-invested pages.

A quieting passage. Bethia lies by the shore:

I lay down again and closed my eyes against the glare, listening to the sound of the surf as it arced all around me, the thrumming fall of breakers, the shush of the receding waves. Every now and then I felt my skin cool slightly as a cloud passed across the sun. From time to time a gull would voice a rich cry, high and urgent.

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The Books on my Shelves

The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships, it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:

Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...

A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 years. I was not a bookish kid (I was a writerly one, not a bookish one, which is truly not the right order of things) and did not come from a bookish family, which is not to say that I did not come from an educated one. It's simply that the home that I grew up in was not furnitured with books.

Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life ...

Natalie Kusz's Road Song was the first memoir I ever bought—the first I ever read. I was pregnant with my son. I was in a Princeton bookstore. The book was revelatory (you can write about your life? like this?) and I wrote to Ms. Kusz, never expecting a response. A few weeks later, one came. "As I am sure you know (because, judging from the elegance and insightfulness of your letter, you must be a writer yourself), writers are in the business of attempting to expose the human condition in such a way that our description resonates in the souls of other humans ... " A writer myself? Not then. Just someone who loved the sound of words, their puzzling together. By announcing to me a new genre—memoir—and by suggesting to me a possibility—an actual writer—Ms. Kusz and Road Song changed my life.

Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way ...

This past Friday six books arrived in a brown box, chosen by an editor with whom I've lately had the privilege of corresponding. I had mentioned that I sought, in my life, books that "put faith in the reader." She responded with generosity and with a telling eye and ear. Every one of these six books appears to be my kind of book. You'll be hearing about them here, over time.

Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves...

Since the books in that box aren't yet on my shelves (but on the coffee table, where I will leave them until they are read), the newest books were three: Book of Clouds, The Frozen Thames, and The Cradle. I've written of them all here. Book of Clouds also, in its way, changed my life, my way of seeing what is possible in story.

Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places...

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I've read it several times, in several places—in El Salvador while visiting my husband's family, in Orlando while helping to oversee a corporate launch conference, on the train to New York City.

Tell me about a bonus book that doesn't fit any of the above questions...

Two books that I felt strongly should win the Pulitzer Prize did, and they sit eloquently on my shelves: March by Geraldine Brooks and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There were shouts of joy here when both were announced. Both winners aren't just enormously talented writers. They are gracious people, which counts just as much.

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