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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The grammar of silence. Truth. Now.

I made the pot.

My husband took the photos.

I cling to these words as I write, as I turn the corner, finally, on a novel that has had me kicked to to the street and that I have at long last beaten back by digging deeper. There are no short cuts in writing fiction. I don't care what label they put on the book (children's book, young adult, crossover). A book won't come alive until each character is alive, until everything is known about them.

That everything includes, to borrow a phrase by Mark Slouka, who wrote brilliantly this weekend about Paul Harding's Enon, in The New York Times Book Review, the grammar of silence.

We cannot write, or I cannot write, until, in each book, I master the grammar of silence. The places in between the action. The words that can't be said.

This took me an especially long time this time around. I didn't give up. I'm proud of that. I still have work to do.

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Tinkers/Paul Harding: Reflections

It's a famous story by now—how Paul Harding's first novel, Tinkers, wended its way through a world of publishing no's until it arrived at the door of Bellevue Literary Press (NYU School of Medicine) and was welcomed in with a yes.  Early reviewers loved it; independent bookstores did, too.  A few countable days ago, Tinkers took the Pulitzer.

I ordered it at once, as I blogged I would.  It arrived yesterday and this afternoon, after much tinkering myself (the large garden now weeded, the old wood of the azalea lobbed back, a leaking room cleared for the men who will fix it, two weeks of laundry finally done), I sat down to read.  It's a small book; it can be read on either side of noon.  It yields to no one's idea of a novel but the author's own, which makes it one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time.  I'm not sure that it is entirely successful—this story of a dying son remembering an incandescent epileptic father who in turn remembers a father:  these tinkers, all three.  But books that take risks take risks; that's the point. They contribute something new, and we are grateful for what we've been taught.

Tinkers is deeply meditative, brilliantly descriptive, taking us inside clocks and lightening-lit brains, into backwoods, and up a new highway.  There's dialogue here, but you'll have to search long for it.  There's story, but it's cocooned within hallucinatory memory.  Someone appears to be reading a book, and the book is arcane, and it is difficult.  It is head scratching until, at last, on the second-to-last page, we understand its purpose.  Tinkers is thick with words like imbrication, ichthyic, and craquelure (these three appearing all on a single tiny page).  And every now and then, when we need it most, it smacks the reader with something deeply human and moving:

Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so.  No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place.  What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?

Indeed.

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Paul Harding, Tinkers, and Hope for the Soulful

There's a beautiful Motoko Rich story in today's New York Times about Paul Harding, his novel Tinkers, and his path to Pulitzer, which was paved by rejection letters, the assurance (by those in the know) that "nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book," a $1,000 advance by Bellevue Literary Press (who has an "empathetic" reader at the helm), a rare blurb by Marilynne Robinson, Indie book store support (I love independent bookstores!!!!!!!!), and smart critics (go Laura Miller, among others). 

Those writing books about heart and soul, about the ways in which the mind and memory work and about the workings of things must, I always say (I tell myself, when things get blue, and oh, they do get blue) keep going.  Paul Harding gives us cause.  Buy Tinkers.

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