Women in Bed/Jessica Keener: Reflections

Jessica Keener and I became friends slowly, through social media, though both of us are, in fact, very much real-people people. Look you in the eyes people. Grab a cup of tea and talk people. Walk up Newbury Street in the freezing wind speaking of flowers in the summer people.

Which is what we got to be when I went to Boston for a few days recently.

Last May, while traveling by train to Washington, DC, to surprise my niece on her thirteenth birthday, I read and loved Jessica Keener's much-heralded debut novel, Night Swim. In Boston, Jessica gave me an inscribed copy of her new and gorgeously produced collection of nine short stories, Women in Bed (The Story Plant). Once again I was reading Jessica while traveling—this time through the raucous Tuesday skies from Boston to Philadelphia.

Today, Thanksgiving, I woke to finish these shimmering and unexpected stories. These originals. Like Alyson Hagy, Jessica Francis Kane, Alice Elliott Dark, Susan Straight, Robin Black, Alice Munro, among others, Jessica Keener is an exquisite writer of the shorter tale. She has mastered that nearly impossible trick of condensing entire lives into compelling and telling brevities. Of finding just the right image. Of stealing just the right snatches of dialogue from what, in a novel, would run as full-fledged-and-then-he-coughed digressions or scenes.

We don't need anything more than what Jessica gives us here. We are convinced, persuaded, brokenhearted by these women who don't have what they want, or don't know what they can have, or can't find the proper language of desire. They run, they walk, they sit, they wait, they steer a boat out onto a chlorine-colored sea, and always, always, they return in their thoughts or in their lives to a lying-in place, to sheets and pillows.

Consistently the language is thrilling. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes not.

Look at this paragraph, from "Boarders":

In the shadows of the backyard, pine trees lacing the property appeared more distant than they actually were. The lawn, stiffened with frost, bent like thin, wire mesh under her feet. She headed for the small swing set and began to swing under a big, leafless oak. She knew it was cold but felt nothing.

Now look at this, from "Woman With Birds in her Chest":

In April she struggled in her sleep. Her dreams became shadows of fingers, and the night, a troubling piece of lint in her throat. Beside her Miles slept with his arm heavy on her thigh. She wanted to wake him. Something wrong? Everything okay? he would have asked. But she didn't.

She didn't know. She didn't know.

Lawn like wire mesh. Night like a troubling piece of lint. These are two stellar images among countless stellar images written not to declare a brilliance but to elucidate a moment, a woman, a mood.

I have learned from Jessica Keener, reading this collection. And I think that you will, too.

A sweet Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

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The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story/Joan Wickersham: Reflections

I'd wanted to read this intermingling collection of short stories for a long time. It has sat here, a tease—bought when I bought Elizabeth Graver (The End of the Point) and Jessica Keener (Night Swim). Set aside for a special time.

I was already familiar with the power and inventiveness of Joan Wickersham's voice. Her The Suicide Index would have been included as a stellar example of the memoir form in Handling the Truth had I read it in time (as it is, I list the book on my additional recommended reading list here, on the blog). I had, in addition, read the reviews of the story collection. And yet I was utterly unprepared for the impact The News from Spain would have on me. I was staggered after reading these seven stories through, each story (brilliantly) called "The News from Spain." I sat there on the couch, unable to will myself to stand. Arrows through my soul. Ache for the world and the women of the world, who love and want and hurt and try and wound and are left wounded.

The News from Spain is a sandblasting of the heart.

Readers comment on Wickersham's precision. That is the word, in a nutshell. Nothing escapes Wickersham's eye. No small detail. No minor hurt that becomes a remembered hurt that becomes the defining truth in a marriage, or in a mother-daughter relationship, or in an unrequited affair. Love is so beautiful, some of the time, and love is so brutal, much of the time. It is the war that wants only peace but keeps finding reasons to war. It is the thing that saves us. Wickersham understands it all. Her readers fall to their knees.

How twisted and smart Wickersham is, christening each short story with the same name. Makes it kind of impossible to pull them apart, to speak of them individually, and that is part of Wickersham's point. So I will just say that there's a story in this book about a dancer who has fallen ill, paralyzed. She is cared for by a young man in love with another young man, and their relationship deepens while her husband, still key in the dance company, is away, having an affair with a young dancer. The dancer tries to live on, tries to be smart, tries to be witty, even, and the caretaker tries to be whom he thinks she wants him to be—available and invisible by turns. This story devastated me. It has one of the most unforeseen and sensational endings of any story I have read.

And it is matched by the other stories in this work of art.

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Night Swim/Jessica Keener: Reflections

I took this photograph from a crowded Amtrak train, headed home to Philadelphia following a day spent in DC. I had gone to surprise my thirteen-year-old niece on her birthday, to see my sister and her family. Hidden within my bag of gifts was a single book, Night Swim, by Jessica Keener.

It's a book I'd bought months ago, a book that has always sat right there, on the top of my massive TBR. Jessica is what they call a Facebook friend, but she has always seemed, to me, far more substantial than that. When she comments on something, her words have gravitas. When she shares a moment in her life, it most often acts as a form of outreach, as an idea bigger than herself.

It was, then, with that sense of tugging familiarity that I began to read Night Swim, a debut novel for adults that has a teen at its center. Sarah Kunitz (lovers of poetry will recognize the power of her last name) is growing up in the 1970s, in a suburb of Boston, in a home of muted stresses. Her mother—beautiful, loving—occupies a buffer zone, needing pills to dull her aches, parties to bolster her confidence, a live-in maid to clear the dishes, more wine. Sarah's professor father, meanwhile, is strict and, in his own way, remote, losing control of his four children as time goes by. Sarah's mother almost dies, and a hush settles over the house. Then Sarah's mother does, indeed, die, and this hush is disturbing, tilted, suffused with a terrible drowning sound. Sarah is sixteen. She'll have to find her way. But the path ahead isn't marked.

Jessica writes quietly, forcefully, and with great knowing about remorse, wrong choices, brief releases, forever shadows. She writes with heart about a daughter's greatest loss—a mother. Just days before I read this novel, I had sat on a bench beside my own mother's grave, trying to tell her stories, wishing there was some way to get through. And so, on that train to and from DC, and then again in the quiet hours of this afternoon, I felt Jessica's own understanding of something we almost all come to face, in our lives. I felt, with this sadness, less alone.

From Night Swim, bought long ago, but perhaps read at the right time:

I turned over but repositioning my body didn't help at all. I turned back over. Mother's death became my life sentence, a different kind of imprisonment, and I realized that Eliot might be right about ghosts. This one had slipped inside me, pacing for public recognition, seeking that salve of music, a restless, circular longing for condolence and release.

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