first paragraphs: Haruf, Petterson, Harding, Hagy

In the swell of fever and flu, my mind molten, my thoughts barely latching in, I read (not so random) first paragraphs of favorite books.

These for the melodies that do not interfere with the economy of the stories unveiled. For how, in mere lines, we know who we're in with, the stretch of the world, the mood, the names of the places or the insignificance of names.

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were. — Kent Haruf, Plainsong

Early November. It's nine o'clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don't know what they want that I have. I look out the window at the forest. There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water. — Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house. — Paul Harding, Tinkers

She was a gift, though he did not think of her that way for a long time. He paid twelve hundred dollars for her, money that came straight from his single account at Cabin Valley Bank. She was halter broke, and trailer broke, and she had been wormed for the spring. Someone had taken a rasp to her feet. She had seen her dam, Sally's Quick Ticket, win more than one prize in cutting horse competitions.... — Alyson Hagy, Boleto

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stopping to remark on the slender novels I've loved

Of course I teach, write, and write about memoir. Of course I write, and write about, young adult literature. Of course I take my stab at poems.

But don't think I'm not also in love with, perhaps most deeply admiring of, novels written for adults. Because I have not found a way to do this work myself. Because I don't know how.

Yesterday I raved about Swimming Home. This past weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, Reply to a Letter from Helga. A few weeks ago, The Colour of Milk, and before that You Remind Me of Me, The Orchardist, Boleto, Book of Clouds, Out Stealing Horses, The Disappeared, American Music, The Sense of an Ending, the Alice McDermott novels, the books featured in this yellowing snapshot above (and others). These slender books that devastate with their shimmering, dangerous sentence, structure, form. These books that have left me staggered on the couch.

I don't know what I would do without them, truly. I don't know that I'd have the same faith in humankind if these books were not now in my blood, if they were not (fractionally) mine.

There is still room to do what no one has ever done before. There are still stories untold. I may be getting older, but: there are more stories to be found. Genius abounds.

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It's Fine By Me/Per Petterson: Reflections

When I am asked what author I recommend to thoughtful teen readers of the male persuasion, I don't blink.  Per Petterson, I say.  It doesn't get much better, in general, than a Per Petterson book.  And with his often adolescent male protagonists, his compelling Norwegian landscapes, his deliberate lonesomeness, his inclination to tell the truth about how growing up feels, Petterson speaks especially well to young, literary-minded male readers.

Out Stealing Horses ranks as one of my favorite novels of all time.  It's Fine By Me, Petterson's newest (translated by Don Bartlett) is equally strong—a coming-of-age tale about a working-class teen who won't remove his sunglasses when he steps into his new school and doesn't want the world to know, well, anything at all about him.  Audun Sletten stands on the outside, brooding.  He wrestles with his own story (a drunken father, a dead brother, a sister he loves, a girl he might like) discontinuously.  He makes a friend despite himself, yields a little because he has to, wants to protect his family but sometimes anger is all he has, all he is.  Anger and the Norwegian landscape, the white winters, the bracing lakes, the one or two teachers who notice, the men at the printing plant where he ultimately works, that best friend again—wry and helpful. 

The world recedes when I read Petterson.  I find his intelligence essential.  I talk about crossover books—YA to A.  But may the tide reverse and may Petterson's work cross into high school classrooms and become standard reading fare not just for adults but for teens.

A passage:

And I don't see any animals, but long Lake Elvaga is glittering in the sunshine.  About halfway, I stop and slide down and sit on the slope by the bank.  It is fine and open here, and the trees are naked.  I take out the roll-up and a little notebook I like to think is similar to the one that Hemingway used in the Twenties in his Paris book, A Moveable Feast.  I light the cigarette and try to do what he did:  write one true sentence.  I try several, but they don't amount to any more than what Arvid calls purple prose.  I give it another go, and I try to get down on the paper the expression on Dole's face when I dragged him by the leg across the floor of Geir's bar.  It's better, but not very good.

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To Siberia

Those who read this blog know just how much I love Per Petterson's novel, Out Stealing Horses, which I bought by near accident while awaiting a train, and read on the way to Manhattan and back. I had a student, then, whom I was teaching—an emergent poet. I wrote to him that evening, insisting that he read the book. K. hardly ever did a thing I suggested (he did his own thing, better). But this time he listened. This time he read. And in an email just following K.'s high school graduation he wrote, The part when Lars shoots Odd and Jon is sinking to his knees outside the house, and his father comes storming out of the forest like a giant. It's all there, I can see it so well the way it is written.

It's all there. That's the writer's job: To bring the reader right there, where everything happened. Yesterday and early this morning, as I sat reading To Siberia, another Petterson novel, I marveled over Petterson's patience—how he waits a very long time to sink the reader into this story about a young woman growing up in the hard, white cold of Jutland. The novel is, for the longest time, a sensory slide. It is reminisce and recall, and the elements are fragments, until somewhere deep into the novel the reader understands that this is the story of a sister's love for a brother who ultimately (it is war time) disappears. True, Petterson signals this early on. But he doesn't make the reader care, he doesn't make it clear that this is the place where everything happens—that the entire story will live inside this vulnerable, nearly illicit love.

So that To Siberia feels submerged and coded and then, only then (but it takes time), essential.

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A Return to (some) Favorite Books

There hadn't been time in a long time to return to my shelf of books, but this morning I did. I felt like I do on those Saturday mornings when I leave in the near-dark for the Farmer's Market and stand (in advance of jostling crowds) before cases of fresh cheese, fat shrimp, silk chocolate, blueberry muffins. Rich. That's how I felt.

I pulled Elizabeth Graver's Awake to my lap and read again the last 50 or so pages—one of the finest renderings of maternal guilt and regret that I have ever read. I pulled down Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and decided to read it all the way through again tomorrow, so that I could remember fully why I loved it so much a few years ago. I took Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses into my hands, and resolved to read it again on Sunday. I returned to The Cellist of Sarajevo and remembered: Another book of multiple voices, masterfully done.

And then I started reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and oh my, truly. Have you ever seen so much poetry in a novel's opening lines? Almost like reading Carole Maso's Ava—every detail an awakening, a surprise.

For you today, then, from Hansen:

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water spout....

Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.

White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

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On Style

I am thinking today about style—about what makes a book brilliant, a story stand apart.

I am thinking about The Book Thief and The Road Home and Out Stealing Horses—three books that could not be more different from each other and yet all earn "brilliant" as the first accolade, all are manifestly genius. I am thinking about a conversation I had late last night with a young writer who is so talented, so emergent, so on the precipice. Who asks, Is writing worth it?

I decide this today:

Style is tenacity, authority, authenticity. An idea shaped and held to by words. Style is a writer writing toward the true, shafting the superfluous, wading in deep to places others won't go. Style is not blinking until the work is done.

Style is surviving the journey.

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Out Stealing Horses

Took Per Petterson's OUT STEALING HORSES with me on the train to New York and I didn't want to move an inch when the train entered that long tunnel. What a mesmerizing book this is, how technically brilliant, a textbook lesson in the use of time and haunt, so that I began to scribble in its margins, sketch out a diagramming code. The story itself is extraordinary; take that as a given. The simple chunking of simple words into long, breathtaking sentences. The ridiculously perfect last line. The transitions: seamless, emotionally true.

When you write, you read; when you read you learn to write; and it doesn't matter how many of your own books sit on a shelf, how many unwritten books stir within, how many possibilities seem just within reach: a book like Petterson's throws you right down, out of yourself. It says, Start again. Work harder.

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