Cordelia Jensen, Peter Gardos, Cynthia Kadohata: writers to know

This Is the Story of You, my monster storm Jersey Shore story, launches tomorrow. Out into the world.

Whoosh. There you go.

But in the days leading up to now, I've been spending time with the stories of others. For who among us will ever believe that our own work is the work? Who should believe that? Who does not think that, at the end of it all, the best thing about being a writer is finding the excuse to curl up with someone else's fine tale—the story another loved, hoped for and through, and found a way to launch?

Today I want to celebrate:

Cordelia Jensen's Skyscraping, a novel in verse to which I have previously alluded on this blog. Before I met Cordelia a few weeks ago in New York (odd to be meeting her there, for she lives not far from me here), I knew that she was my kind of writer—soulful, attuned to language, serious about producing lasting work. Skyscraping tells the story of Mira, who learns the secret of her parents' marriage during her senior year in high school and needs to find a way to forgive her father before he is gone from her world. Some novels in verse are just novels written with shorter lines and white space. This is a novel in actual verse, written by an actual poet, who has pondered this story for years. This is a novel whose narrator understands time and stars, the cosmos and the particulate, but is never safe (no one is) from hurt. Mira is speaking here about her mother, who has been absent for much of Mira's life:

I used to imagine she saw us as a train
she could ride at will,
instead of a station,
fixed, every day.

I wonder now if maybe
a family is neither of those things
but something stable,
yet always changing,
because the people inside it are.
 

Peter Gardos's Fever at Dawn, sent to me by Lauren Wein, an editor you know I love. It's a story based on the real-life tale of the author's parents—Hungarians who, in 1945, find themselves in Swedish hospitals miles apart. They are not well. They have been seared by death camps, racism, horror. They allow the letters they write to one another become their most extravagant form of hope. Miklos sends a blurry photograph to Lili, so that she cannot see his metal teeth. Lili stashes the political book Miklos has sent—unread. They know nothing about each other, actually, until, increasingly, they are nothing without each other. They are seducing each other, even as Gardos, in a book that seems (but isn't) utterly simple, seduces us:

That evening the men sat out in the courtyard with the radio on the long wooden table. The light bulb swung eerily in the wind. The men usually spent half an hour before bed in the open air. By now they had been playing the radio for six hours without a break. They had put on sweaters and coats and their pyjamas (stet) and wrapped blankets around themselves. They sat right up close to the radio. The green tuning light winked like the eye of an elf.

Finally, Cynthia Kadohata's National Book Award winning The Thing About Luck, which wrapped me around its many fingers this weekend. Let's just say this: Anyone who thinks writing for teens is easy should spend some time in the company of this book, which has everything to teach about mosquitoes, wheat harvesting, combines, and dinners on the road—all within the frame of one of the most likable narrators yet written, a young girl named Summer, who discovers, over the course of many exotic bread-basket weeks (yes, I know what I just wrote), that luck is made, not found:

I don't know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That's just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can't use and then turns it into something that can feed us.

Before I go, I extend Happy Book Launch greetings to Robin Black, whose collection of essays, Crash Course, debuts tomorrow in grand style. Robin will be taking the stage with grammar queen Mary Norris, at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Life Drawing/Robin Black: Reflections

Think of the artist at work—the fits and starts, the long, unhappy spells, the sudden epiphanies that shrink pitiably with the light of the next day, the not knowing, the not ever actually knowing, the blind and buoying faith, the fissures of faith.

Think of a partnership of many years—the slow or sudden love, the deep and necessary trust, the private needs that are not spoken, the small infractions that are, perhaps, lies and isn't any lie a betrayal, and doesn't every betrayal hover afterward, shift the scene and change the light? Doesn't every betrayal threaten a cascade of betrayals? Where will they come from? Will we be ready?

Think of friendship—the tricky, sticky slopes, the little envies, the perfect hours, the grave misjudgments, the accusations, the cowering aftermaths, the ones left wounded on the path. Think of how easy friendship seems, and how utterly fraught, and how nearly impossible to heal when it shatters.

Think of the spooling away of memories—of a mind lost to a disease, of a man and his memories remade, of conversations that have little footing in reality, even though, of course, they are reality, they are what is happening right then. The Alzheimer's father talks. The daughter listens. Nothing is irrefutable, except for how it feels in present time.

In her penetrating and perfectly calibrated first novel, Life Drawing, Robin Black plumbs the depths of art, love, friendship, and memory and surfaces with a book of transcendent clarity. Life Drawing is a book about consequences—the consequences of an affair, the consequences of instinctive but perhaps not well-placed trust, the consequences of honesty, and anger.

Gus, the artist, and Owen, her writer husband, have retreated to a quiet country home in a land of spectral greens; the pond before them is perfectly round. The two are at work on their respective canvases. They abide by conversational rules laid down to protect each other from the things that must not be said or discussed in the aftermath of the affair Gus had several years before. They are interrupted by a neighbor who has escaped a violent husband and whose daughter, Nina, will show up before too long. Gus has a father with Alzheimer's, whom she frequently visits. She has a student, a young woman, with whom she has formed a meaningful connection.

The book is taut, smart, a closed and inexorable world, a stunning page turner. We know from the outset that Owen is dead, and so we want to know why Owen is dead, but even more compelling, at least to this reader, are the questions: Does anyone survive the wounds they have inflicted? Is love bigger than the past?

We turn the pages because we trust Black to know. Because we believe that she has something to say—inside the novel but also outside of it—about how we live our lives. Black is an intensely intelligent writer—nothing superfluous here, every thread that rises needled back down to the open-weave cloth, every color in the tapestry checked for what it tells us about lived entanglements. Her book, deeply emotional and resonantly rendered, is, remarkably, complete. No stone unturned.

We who write, we who create, we who live—we know how elusive, how difficult, how nearly unattainable completion is. A completed conversation. A completed work of art. A completed story, told.

Life Drawing is complete.

I loved it as much as I loved Black's collection of short stories, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, which I read while I was in Berlin several years ago and reviewed here.

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When YA and A are valued equally, with thanks to Main Line Today and Main Point Books

Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about labels. Applied to people. Applied to literature.

Still, those of us who write young adult fiction must, at times, face those who suggest that it is a lesser form, not nearly as important as the work written expressly for adults—a problem I discussed in a story for Publishing Perspectives titled, "Removing the YA Label: A Proposal, A Fantasy."

(Those of us who write quote-unquote literary contemporary YA fiction must also endure the suggestion that John Green has singlehandedly ushered in this genre's golden era, but that's a topic for another conversation, and we must be careful not to blame John Green for what is written about him.)

The problem with the YA-is-lesser assessment is that the YA writers I respect aren't writing down, aren't writing in haste, aren't writing with any less literary ambition than those who write novels for adults. We're just writing stories that happen to have younger protagonists at their heart; often we're writing "whole family" tales. Always, if we're serious about this stuff, if we're writing not toward known trends but toward felt story, we're writing as best as we can.

And so I will admit to feeling equal measures of joy and peace at finding Going Over on the Main Line Today list of 10 great beach reads by local authors. Not 10 YA books. Just ten books by authors ranging from Robin Black and Jennifer Weiner to Kelly Corrigan and Ken Kalfus. Ten books curated by Cathy Feibach of Main Point Books, who has made it her business, in this, the first year of her store's existence, to get to know who is writing what and to evaluate each book on its own terms.

I am honored. And I am looking forward to next Saturday, when I will drive down Lancaster Avenue and stop in Bryn Mawr and spend an hour signing both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir in Cathy's store. My signing caps a full day of signings, the details for which are here. And when I'm not signing, you can be sure that I'll be buying the books I want, seeing straight past their labels.

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This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories/Johanna Skibsrud: Reflections

It had entered the realm of the absurd:  I had been carrying Johanna Skibsrud's collection of nine short stories with me everywhere I went. This Will Be Difficult to Explain was so slender, after all, and had arrived unbidden from W.W. Norton.  I didn't know this author, but I was intrigued.  Consider the comparators: Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson.  Nicole Krauss, even.

The book traveled on the train, to client offices, to Body Combat, to ballroom dance, to the library, and in the passenger seat of the car, just for the apparent heck of it.  Meanwhile, weeks of inane insanity went by—a battle cry of must-do-right-now's.  I had carved out this very afternoon to work on my own Berlin book.  Time, at last, I thought, to advance my novel forward.  And then I decided:  It's now or never for Difficult.  I curled up beneath my patchwork quilt and read.

How very odd, I thought, as I sunk in with Skibsrud.  How delightfully odd.  Not Munro, for the stories aren't nearly that domestic, that relational.  And not Robinson nor Krauss, for the language here is not their kind of lush (I am thinking of early Robinson as I write, Housekeeping Robinson, and I am thinking of all of Krauss). These are stories advanced by oppositions—by things presumed, recanted, tested, withdrawn.  These are characters who want to know things, but, frankly, they often don't.  They want to declare, but is such declaration wise, or honest?  They want to describe, or even understand, but they are missing the words, the signals.

What might have been a series of straight-on tales—about a divorced father seeing his thirteen-year-old daughter for the first time in eight months, about a young maid catering to a strange man in France, about a blind woman speaking French to her English-languaged helpmate, about one ancient Clarence and the young journalist who sets out to interview him—becomes instead a play (and there is play) of juxtapositions.

The stories grew on me, the point of view.  The aperçus I didn't see coming.  The Timothy Schaffert (The Coffins of Little Hope) oddness of, say the title story or "Clarence."  The eloquent stumble toward truth, a la Robin Black (If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This) in a story such as "Signac's Boats." The stories grew on me, and not just a little.  I liked this Johanna Skibsrud.

I'm going to close with the final paragraph of a story I loved.  Tell me what you think.  I'm behind again on my Berlin book.  But I'm glad I took the detour.

From "The Limit":

He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects.  The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on.  But out here, in the middle, it's possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles.  It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can't see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it's not because what's out there is covered up by anything, it's just—that's the limit.

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Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best

This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" — Jessica Francis Kane, The Report

Tapping a cigarette on the dashboard, Eric lights it and sucks, the smoke hits the back of his throat like a branding iron.  He holds his breath, then blows the smoke in a disappearing draft.  He wants to pop his chin, blow a smoke ring, but he's never learned how.  He isn't sure, either, if it's cool.  — Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Why She Left Us

I judge their hands.  I say to myself, yes, that guy fights fires in the mountains.  Or no, that guy's not a roofer, no matter what he claims.  Armand has spadelike hands, troweling hands, and they convince me he speaks a certain kind of truth.  He woos me with the fused joint of his ring finger, the corrugated grasp of his palms.  —Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain. — Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You

For a single moment she accepted the situation and had the kind of prosaic thought that gains weight in the timing of its application—that her time had come, as it had come to many before her and would to many again.  Then she felt a split second of peace, during which she continued to make sense of what was happening in the odd, lofty way that came upon her every once in a while and made her wonder about herself. She thought with an amused clarity that her ingrained sense of her own insignificance was finally coming in handy, enabling her to accept being blown where the wind took her, like a piece of dandelion fluff. — Alice Elliott Dark, "Home"

She would waken and find herself trussed and pinned to the earth with violin strings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. — Karen Rile, "No Ear for Languages"

Before dawn, when the souls of the dead hovered in the greying sky, the women gathered in the synagogue courtyard.  Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight

This final excerpt is from Kathryn Davis's miraculous The Thin Place.  She is not a friend, but we're going to be talking a little about magic realism in the class (thanks to one of the submitted workshop pieces), and so she is necessary:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake.  One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.  This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do.  The dead souls no longer wore gowns.  They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.  — Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

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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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If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This/Robin Black: Reflections

It had gone on too long. "Robin Black," I kept hearing. "Robin Black's short stories." Urged to read Black by writing friends whose taste I trust, I finally and at long last did, savoring a story or two from her debut collection, "If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This," each day, thinking about her characters in crowded places or while almost alone on this or another strange and unfamiliar street.

Eleven stories written over the course of a decade. Eleven stories both immaculately precise and involvingly odd, so that we know these people but can't always guess what they will do, can hear the hurry of their exasperation, feel the claustrophobia of their secrets, but can't protect them from their own determined, isolating brokenheartedness.

Black's characters do wrong, but are not bad people. They bury things to protect themselves or another, but protection is thin and wears quickly. They ache, but their ache isn't always rightly answered. They live complicated inner lives inside ordinary circumstances. I found them compelling. I found Black smart and succinct and lacerating and funny.

Her dialogue is some of the best I've read. Her stories wedge inside and stay.

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