Borrowed Finery/Paula Fox: Reflections

A dozen years ago, Paula Fox published Borrowed Finery, her memoir of a fractured childhood. She had reached her mid-seventies. She had long before attended Columbia, published adult novels deemed "brilliant" and "devastating," gained a reputation (and many awards) as a children's book author (Maurice's Room debuted in 1966; some twenty books for younger readers later, in 1999, she was publishing Amzat and His Brothers), and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, my own alma mater, though I, never believing myself worthy of a "real" writer's education, foolishly lost out on the opportunity to learn from her.

She wrote Borrowed Finery to tell the story of her young life.

It could not have been more lonesome, nor more confusing, the life that Paula led. She was the daughter of two self-consumed parents who left her to a series of caretakers while they tooled around the world or lost themselves to a miasma of their own making. Paula's happiest years were her earliest years, when she grew up in the gentle care of a pastor/local journalist who introduced her to books, encouraged her curiosity, and gave her a safe haven. She had continuity then, love—two things that would soon elude her as she was moved from the pastor's home to Hollywood to Long Island to Cuba to New York City to Florida to Montreal, among other places. Often she was left to her own devices. Sometimes her mother appeared and made demands, or her father reached out, then snapped. There were good uncles and bad uncles. There were friends who came and went, a stint among plantation workers, a teacher whose kindness mattered until it, like all else, vanished.

Borrowed Finery of is a memoir fashioned out of scenes and white space, painful particulars, gorgeous lines, stunning autobiographical cliffs and plummets. Sometimes all that is remembered is a story half-told. Sometimes it's a detail—flowers that smell of subway stations, a great grandfather who counts priests in Barcelona, the awareness (Annie Dillard like) of becoming aware. Sometimes there are long exercises in trying to remember, confessions of gaps, delays in understanding, whorled what-ifs. Maybe this. Maybe that. How could she know?

As her readers we admire her self-constraint, her implied theme making, her way of finding answers for herself—or, if not answers, a way of moving forward, and not back.

Paula Fox is brilliant. She writes of her early life with her minister benefactor like this:

I can still recall the startled pleasure I felt that Sunday in church when I realized his sermon was indeed about a waterfall. I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.

For more thoughts on memoir making and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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Do e-books free us from distractions? Responding to Tim Parks

This morning Shelf Awareness serves up this quote of the day, and it stops me.  I think I might just move on, but I can't.

Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience.  Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad.  Sadly, I've left many of them stranded.  Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored.  Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading.  And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper.  But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format.  I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me.  I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.

I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books.  With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts.  I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.

Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by Shelf Awareness.

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."

--Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the New York Review of Books blog

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Desperate Characters/Paula Fox: Reflections

I read four books while I was away (beyond all that I read about Berlin). I reported on the first—If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black's crisp and smart debut short story collection—here. I'll be reporting on the others (The Paris Wife (hmmmmm) and The Coffins of Little Hope (a marvel!)) in days to come.

But this very early morning, I'm reflecting on the scouring brilliance of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. It's a book I'd always meant to read, an author whose story I have followed.  That doesn't mean that I was prepared for the hard, bright smack of Fox's sentences, the relentless disintegration of a domestic arrangement that may or may not hold. We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for helping to bring Desperate Characters back into print and wide circulation. We have, in the Norton edition, his essay that suggests that the book is, "on a first reading," "a novel of suspense."

As the novel opens, Sophie Brentwood is bitten by a stray cat; Sophie's hand swells. Sophie should have the hand checked, but she is afraid.  She can imagine dire consequences—rabies, even death—but other underlying fears persist and complicate.  Three days will go by, and the wound will keep molting, oozing, disfiguring, haunting, and this is the running tension—this cat bite, this not knowing, this unwillingness to find out, this false hope that comforts lie elsewhere (in drink, in friendship, in secrets, in lashing out).  Into this strange, unsettling frame Fox inserts the fractures of a marriage in naked near stasis. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are childless.  Otto is abandoning a business partnership with a long-time friend, Charlie—bating him, hating him, feeling abandoned and abused by him. Brooklyn, finally, is scathing and scabrous and ill-equipped, in these late 1960s, to wrap this couple in a numbing sheen.

Sophie and Otto know too much. They see too much. They both despise excessively and love forlornly.  Is this all that marriage is? All it offers? Is there refuge among the refuse? In whose arms can one trustingly take shelter? Desperate Characters is a brutal book, a lacerating book, and if that makes it a hard book to read, it also makes it an impossible book to put down. I, for one, read the bulk of it while being jostled about during a long wait at the Berlin airport.

There are easy books, and there are hard books, and I will be honest: I prefer the latter.  I want to be tested.  I want to think.  I want to study a book and ask, in awe, How in the world was this made?  Desperate Characters has me asking.

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Girls in Wash of Blue (and what I'm reading)

Glasses up. Glasses on. No glasses.

Don't ask me why (my own brain processes often elude even me, the owner of this most porous brain), but this photograph symbolizes my changing relationship to books as I try to decide what to read in hardback, paperback, and iPad2-ery.

Just now, I've ordered the following from the Kindle Store:

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (Margaret Drabble)
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox)
The Coffins of Little Hope (Timothy Schaffert)
Faith (Jennifer Haigh)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

These join the following to-be-read Kindle titles (I read both before, as real books):

Selected Stories (Andre Dubus)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

Now, from the iBook store:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

They all join Tara Altebrando's Dreamland Social Club—a real book, a hardcover, as my next reads.

I'll be reporting back, of course.

In the meantime, might I note how glad I have been to be hearing from my students during these summer days. Might I say, too, that I am grateful that there is a new generation of smart young souls who know how to use language—know where sentences begin and end, know, unprompted, how to eliminate their own redundancies, lean into the music. How you are needed. How valued you are. How you might save the world.

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