In Chicago Tribune: Books with purpose demand urgent reading

Earlier this summer the impeccable Bill Wolfe invited me to write a short piece for his beautiful blog, "Read her Like an Open Book" that focuses on the work of women writers (their methods, their work). I had been thinking a lot about books that matter and the clicking tock, about the world we're in and the role of writers. And so I wrote a quick piece on the topic that began an interesting conversation out there in the virtual world.

A few weeks later urgency was still on my mind, and my dear friends at Chicago Tribune gave me room to expand on the thesis. This time I included books—both fiction and nonfiction—that have lately impressed me as significant.

That piece runs here today.

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The Yellow Birds/Kevin Powers: Reflections

It's a rare thing when a book of exquisite literary merit is also a national bestseller. Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See is one current example. So is Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds.

I should have read Powers' astonishing book sooner—when it was nominated for the National Book Award, when it was named my own city's One Book, when the reviewers clearly couldn't find words, when my neighbor Jane quoted from an early page, when Serena said I should. But I am glad that I read this book on this week, when the wars of the world have sent a deep laceration through my heart, when the news (so terrible) has required me, at times, to look away. By the force of his language, by the intelligence of his structure, by the hallowing, intimate truths on every page, Powers does not allow us to look away. This war that he writes of, his Iraq, his losses, his guilt—this may be a novel, but those losses are real.

If nothing else you have ever read calculates, for you, the cost of war, this book will.

There are spare moments of beauty, too. And because we are all feeling whacked by the news, I share the most stunning here. Two soldiers, the key characters in this book, have been covertly watching a female medic. Our narrator tells us this:

And I thought it was this and not her beauty that brought Murph there over those long indistinguishable days. That place, those little tents at the top of the hill, the small area where she was; it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we'd ever know. So it made sense to watch her softly sobbing in the open space of a dusty piece of ground. And I understood why he came and why I couldn't go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. So sure, Murph wanted to see something kind, he wanted to look at a beautiful girl, he wanted to find a place where compassion still happened, but that wasn't really it. He wanted to choose. He wanted to want. He wanted to replace the dullness growing inside him with anything else.

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Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill/Reflections

Among the writer friends whose recommendations I instantly trust is Katrina Kenison, whose memoirs have inspired countless readers and whose many years as both an editor of books and the series editor of Best American Short Stories refined, or perhaps announced, her exquisite readerly sensitivities.

One day before I left for Alaska, Katrina wrote me a note including this line:  Have you read Dept. of Speculation?  That's my latest favorite.  Also very short, but oh, piercing.  

So of course I ordered Jenny Offill's newest novel at once. I read it before the plane left the ground.

Forty-six chapters in 175 pages. A Carole Maso, Kathryn Harrison, or Cynthia Reeves like intensity. A woman broken and her story broken and each brief paragraph like a scream from the deep dark of a well. Help me. A late-in-the-game inversion of point of view that knocks the reader around and carries the story to an even higher plane.

Our narrator is a woman who half loved, then loved, then married, then had a baby with swirls of hair on the back of her head, then watched that marriage fall apart. Our narrator is a woman who is trying, before our very eyes, to regain her footing, to know who she is, to find a rope in the well. Our woman is so stunned by the cruel possibilities of life that she can barely speak more than a few sentences at once.

Example of a single paragraph, cordoned off by white space:

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Example of another single paragraph:

Sometimes she will come in complaining about seeing things when she closes her eyes at night. Streaks of light, she says. Stars.

It's like this, in Dept. of Speculation. It's harrowing and brave and (to my way of seeing) deliciously odd. It feels uncalculated (though of course it isn't) and raw (though a book like this takes extraordinary refinement and planning). It feels alive and desperate and worried through, and don't we all have times like these, and doesn't that make this fiction true?

Yesterday I wrote of a long book of many chapters—the fantastic Anthony Doerr. Today I wrote of a short book of many chapters—the brave and talented Jenny Offill. Tomorrow, here, I will write of a more ordinary book, one that I didn't read breathlessly during my time away. 

What do we have as readers? We have choices. Is there anything sweeter than that?




 

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All the Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr (Reflections)

In Alaska, a new friend asks me what I am reading and I say Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. I show her the book's first page, and she says, "Read it to me. Out loud." I demur. She insists. I read. In the belly of the boat while the glacial mountains float by. "Leaflets," I say, reading the chapter title. Then:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

I hear my own breath catch. I look up into Kristi's face. She isn't sure, quite, about the passage I've read, wants to know why it has enchanted me. I read phrases out loud again, verbs, that word incendiary webbed into the lush lyric of the cartwheels, the flutter. How can you speak about what you love? How can you convey the genius of Anthony Doerr, who has never been more genius than this new novel of his—541 pages long, ten years in the making, and it reads too fast, you could read it in a day, you cannot read it in a day, for there will be nothing like it again or soon. Doerr is like Ondaatje, Doerr is like McCann, Doerr is like McDermott, Doerr is like Hagy, Doerr is a writer, pure.

And this new book—about a blind girl in France and a smart boy in Germany and the war that brings them together but only after terrible journeys and terrible losses and only for a moment—this new book is wrenching and glorious. Wrenching first. Glorious because of its deep and tender soul. Because Doerr embraces life even in the midst of dying. Because Doerr inclines toward science as he writes his art, which is to say that he inclines toward the curious mysteries of our world. Snails. A massive diamond. Electromagnetic waves. The cell that divides and divides again, until it is a human, howling.

I love this book. I believe in it, wholeheartedly. I believe in Doerr. Why do books still wear labels—YA or A, historical or contemporary, literary or not? Banish them. Now. Anyone who loved The Book Thief will be astonished and grateful for this book. Anyone who swoons over an Ondaatje sentence will recognize the power here. Anyone who wishes to return to France or Germany at the time of a devastating war will be returned in a fresh way, an eyes wide-open way.

Anyone who reads will emerge brokenhearted but also grateful that Doerr doesn't just break our hearts. In surprising and redeeming ways, he heals them, too.

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the story is what got you here: Gail Caldwell and other books of summer

I have a dream, and it is this: to make this, the summer of friendship, also the summer of books. Both things at the same time. My idea of heaven.

(Throw a few good meals in, and it would be exponential heaven.)

Recently, with readerly hopes, I went out and bought some new books. To add to the piles of books not yet read. I don't know. I could not help it. On my list:

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us (James Nestor)

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The Frangipangi Hotel (Violet Kupersmith)

Hungry (Heather Swain)

Sekret (Lindsay Smith)

I also bought Gail Caldwell's new memoir, because of course I had to; anyone who loves memoir must. Caldwell's truth talk is exemplary, which is to say that her stories are always bigger than herself. Caldwell never talks at us, as some memorists do. She draws us up at her table, gives us some tea, and makes room for conversation.

New Life, No Instructions is a slender volume—a story about a woman who has never married, who has no children, who has recently lost her best friend and her beloved parents, whose hip is finally giving way. What will send her living forward? What lessons are there in the intimacies of friendships that are built out of years and proximity?

Caldwell doesn't have all the answers; she doesn't pretend to. But she searches with such tremendous authenticity, she yields such simple and lovely vignettes, she honors those who have passed on, she is alive, she is on her river.

And she talks to us about telling the truth about the stories that have made us who we are. Words for all of us:

I've also been asked if I was resentful about getting a new diagnosis as late as I did, at least a decade beyond the initial symptoms that indicated my hip was failing. The answer is no, and not because I'm trying to be valiant. I think it's because of all the years I've spent in AA meetings, listening to people's stories. They can be terrible stories, full of anguish and fear and disrepair. But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

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