Lucia Berlin/A Manual for Cleaning Women: Reflections

It's a beautiful object. It's a collection of, to borrow Lydia Davis's reference, auto-fiction. It's the galloping work of Lucia Berlin, who is no longer with us, who is famous now, on all the lists, some ten years since her passing.

What would she make of her fame? What would she do with it?

You read these stories and you think—perhaps they're not stories. Perhaps they are the beads of an abacus—pushed in this direction, pushed in that, always (reliably) adding up to something. These pieces may be insistently compact, but they are never rushed, they are never a detail short, they are never mere asides. They're some of the most intimate interludes I've ever read—parabolically witty and (at the same time) deeply unsettling.

We meet:

A child who helps her grandfather pull all of his teeth. A woman who believes herself to be generous in ways others do not. An alcoholic who cannot help herself. A sister who reconciles with a dying sister. A seductress who shows up in all the stories men tell. A nurse. A cleaning woman. A daughter tending an unwell mother. An unwell mother mothering sons. An unfaithful adventuress.

And then the stories cycle through and some of the same characters with the same names appear again and we already know them, we bring our growing knowledge of this singular storyteller's band of characters to every story that she tells.

Like Colum McCann in Thirteen Ways of Looking, Berlin sometimes dabbles in the meta, comments on the commentary, leaves overt clues regarding how her stories get made.

From "Point of View":

You'll listen to all the compulsive, obsessive boring little details of this woman's, Henrietta's, life only because it is written in the third person. You'll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens.

Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet. What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can't help but feel for her.

At other times, as in her title story, Berlin appears to be rattling off observations about the houses she cleans, but that's not really her point at all. Her point is what happens when the pattering noise of her daily living gets interrupted by the deep abyss of sadness that she feels:

My friends say I am wallowing in self-pity and remorse. Said I don't see anybody anymore. When I smile, my hand goes involuntarily to my mouth.

And you stop. You press your hand to your mouth. You feel her pain.

Berlin creates a familiar terrain, but she doesn't repeat herself. She generates a recognizable voice, but it has energy, it is not dulled by repeated use. I had the feeling, reading these stories, that I got when I read Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. Something new, I thought. Something bold. Something classic. Berlin is alive on these pages.

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narrative risktaking, the inherent lessons in the work of Colum McCann

I have a place on my shelf reserved for Colum McCann. An Irish man. A global citizen. A risk-taker.

In his newest book, Thirteen Ways of Looking, McCann provides a master class not just in storytelling, but in story making. The title novella is, on the surface, the story of an elderly man's unwitting final day—his roiling thoughts, his disgust at all the ways the body betrays us, his docking and decking of time, his relationship with his nurse, his lunch with an unfortunately distracted son. It's also a detective story, a whodunnit, and a meditation on the intersection of poetry and life.

Poetry as life?

Life as poetry?

From the novella:

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn't occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

What strikes me as particularly exceptional here is McCann's talent for manipulating the eye of the story—the old man's un-wary first person seamlessly held within the frame of a third-person voice that already knows how this story sadly ends. You could study the mechanics of those transitions for days. How thought bends to action, how interior monologue becomes dialogue, how all the cameras in this story keep titling their angles.

McCann proves how resplendent the effect can be when one leaves every line open to the possibility of a shifted POV.

Watch this:

How many mornings, noon, and nights have I walked up and down this street? How many footsteps along this same path? When I was young and nimble and slick I would dart across the road in Dublin traffic, horse carriages, bicycles, milktrucks, and all. Jaywalking. Jayshuffling it is, now. The jaybird. Mr. J., indeed. On the Upper East Side. A lot of volume in this life. Echoes too.

—Just fine.

Sally's hand lies steady on his elbow now. Gripping rather hard into what is left of the muscle. The walking stick in his other hand, propping him up and propelling him along. And why is it that the mind can do anything it wants, yet the body won't follow?....

A few weeks ago, when I thought I'd have some time, I planned an essay on narrative risktaking. Had I written that piece, I would have included these seamless POV shifts within my accounting. For this is the kind of risk that interests me—a true master sidestepping the expected not just in what the story is, but how it gets told.

It doesn't read like flashy pyrotechnics.

It reads like something far smarter.

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Colum McCann, on the readerly reaction that would complete us

In this week's New Yorker, in a piece called "The Word Shed," Colum McCann writes of his father, a features editor and author, typing away in a shed. McCann, at the time, was a kid. Wanted to play soccer. Didn't pay his father's two-fingered typing much mind.

Until a book his Dad wrote appeared, written for kids, called "Goals for Glory," the story of a boy without much money who dreamed of soccer triumphs.  McCann read the story by flashlight, he says. One year later, when the book was published, he took it to school, where his teacher read one chapter per week to McCann and his classmates.

I pick up McCann's telling of this perfect story here:

I will never forget Christopher Howlett, my red-headed desk mate, jumping around like a prayer in an air raid as Mr. Kells reached the final page. Georgie scored the winning goal. The classroom erupted. The kid from my father's shed—that tangle of hair that had somehow sprung up from behind a typewriter ribbon—was carried with us outside the school gates, down Mart Lane, through the swamp, and into the field at the back of Dunnes Stores, where, with a soggy leather ball at our feet, we all became Georgie, at least for a minute or two.

Two days ago, I wrote here of why I write, of how it calms me, of how it releases me, for a spell, from the world. I'd like to amend that post to say this as well:

I write for that one reader (there need be only one) who may "jump around like a prayer in an air raid" while reading toward or listening for the story's end.

Do we love Colum McCann? Oh, yes we do. Do we love his dad? That, too.

(Oh how I came to own three copies of Transatlantic, and other McCann love.)

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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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reflecting on urgent historical fiction in this weekend's Chicago Tribune

What makes for urgent historical fiction? Having pondered the issue while writing my own backward-glancing novels, I decided to tackle the question for Printers Row/Chicago Tribune and see what some careful consideration might teach me.

I'm grateful, as always, for the privilege of time and space in that wonderful publication.

My piece, which reflects on all historical fiction (which is to say no boundaries between Adult and Young Adult) begins like this:

“There is no real anonymity in history,” Colum McCann writes in the acknowledgments of TransAtlantic, his gorgeous time traveler of a book.

No anonymity. No facelessness. No oblivion.

           

Life is specific, and so is history. It’s emergent, conditional, personal, and absurd.

Why, then, does so much historical fiction land like a brick, with a thud? Why does it hint of authorial Look what I know, See how I found out? Why do so many writers of historical fiction seem to prefer the long way around the heart of the story? Why ignore the truth that the best historical fiction is as insistent as now?

And continues here.

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The Goldfinch/Donna Tartt: Reflections

As the last few days unfolded—through Christmas gifting and hostessing, through cooking and cleaning, through stripping an old kitchen bare in anticipation of remodeling, through the quiet pile up of real work with ticking deadlines—finishing Donna Tartt's 775-page The Goldfinch became a point of pride. I'd never read Tartt before, as I've written here previously, and I'm naturally inclined toward the kind of compact, complex, emotionally engaging, linguistically inventive novels that writers like Alice McDermott, Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann, and my friend Alyson Hagy (among many others) write. But I'd bought The Goldfinch and I wanted to read The Goldfinch. I fought to find the time.

The plot can be boiled down to a few sentences: A boy, Theo, loses his mother in a museum explosion and hurries off, in the numb aftermath, with one of the world's most treasured paintings under his arm. A rich Manhattan family will take Theo in. Next a dear antiques refurbisher/dealer (the book's most wonderful character, in my opinion). Next Theo will move with his wayward, gambling father to Las Vegas, fall in with a wild friend and all manner of drugs and disrepair, then return to Manhattan, the implications of that missing painting escalating through it all. Old characters will turn up in new places. Addiction and dealers, sordid transactions and unenviable mistakes will consume much of Theo's time, and much of the tale.

It's a story Tartt takes her time telling—sometimes with the slow ease of old-fashioned nineteenth century novels, sometimes with the hurry of a caper film, always with great attention to every detail. Tartt knows antiques and paintings, drugs and obliteration, snaggletoothed, double-dealing friends who have just enough "good" in them to redeem their presence in Theo's life, and in the reader's. She can write brilliantly and she is, above all else, patient, never hurrying (to say the least) to complete a scene or to get to the next bout of stolen-painting-induced action.

She writes, with expert atmospherics, like this:

Through the dusty windows I saw Straffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate falence birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor.

As the novel progressed, I felt, at times, more keenly aware of Tartt's strategies (as a sentence maker, as a storyteller) than I perhaps wanted to feel. I also felt wearied away by the deep seediness of the majority of the characters, save for Hobie and Pippa, the antiques dealer and his young charge, and Theo's absent mother. Theo can barely rescue himself from the tortured person that he is, from all the bad that he reeks and reaps. There are, in all these many pages, few instances of light. At times all the rot began to weigh me down, no matter how immaculately Tartt evoked it:

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

Still, Tartt rises, symphonically, at the end. Asks the big moral questions about how much control any of us really have about who we are, what we want, how we see the world, how we navigate through it. Indeed, I found the final pages of the book—after the caper elements of the plot had long been put to rest—to be the most thrilling in the book, the mark of all that greatness for which Tartt is justifiably famous.

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The week that was, the events that will be, an A.S. King road trip, and thank you, Library Matters (and Serena)

It has been a remarkable week of sun, then clouds, now storm. In the midst of it all I traveled to Rosemont College to meet with Anne Willkomm's class to talk about the making of Dangerous Neighbors, my centennial Philadelphia novel. (Bonus: I got to see the program's fearless leader, Carla Spataro.)

On Tuesday evening I was at Villanova University, at a program honoring the memory of my mother. (Bonus, Colum McCann was in the house.)

Yesterday morning, I had the great privilege and fun of joining my dear friend Elizabeth Mosier in her Bryn Mawr College classroom to talk about both Dangerous Neighbors and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. (Bonus: Any time spent with Elizabeth Mosier is a bonus.)

Yesterday, I was also featured on Book Country, in a discussion about researching memoir.

Tomorrow I'll be at Rosemont College for the Push to Publish event, joining friends on a memoir panel. We encourage you to join us.

Next weekend, two great things are happening: On Saturday, October 19, I'm reading with Liz Rosenberg at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore, in Mount Airy, PA. The event begins at 5 PM. All thanks to Minter Krozer for making that possible. Liz will read from The Laws of Gravity. I will read from—well, I'm still figuring that out. But Handling the Truth will definitely be part of my story. I may debut Going Over, my Berlin novel, just for the fun of it as well.

On Sunday, October, 20, I'm participating in the Memoir Summit at Rosemont College with Linda Joy Meyers, Robert Waxler, and Jerry Waxler. This event, featuring four free workshops, is free and open to the public, and according to Fearless Carla Spataro, registrations are coming in from all up and down the east coast.

Finally, on Monday, October 21, the amazing A.S. King and I are taking a road trip to western Pennsylvania, where we will have a chance to meet with the wonderful librarians of Pennsylvania. Amy won the Carolyn W. Field Award for her fantastic Ask the Passengers. My Small Damages was named an Honor Award recipient.

There's a client trip in the middle of all this—a chance to learn about a part of the world I've never seen. Think of my hair blowing in the wind.

Finally, today, I am heartened by these words in the Library Matters, in the Greene County Record, about Handling the Truth. Serena Agusto-Cox let me know. What a fine friend she is.

If you’ve ever thought of telling your life story but aren’t sure where to start, pick up a copy of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, by noted author Beth Kephart.

This beautifully written volume offers advice on finding your voice, framing your story and developing themes. Kephart, a National Book Award finalist for her first memoir ... and a teacher in the University of Pennsylvania’s creative writing program, is a capable guide on the challenging path to finding your truth.

 

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Honoring my mother at Villanova, and how I came to own three copies of Colum McCann's novel, Transatlantic

We honored my mother last evening at Villanova University—the Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series being one of my father's lasting gifts in her memory. Ray Takeyh, PhD, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, spoke brilliantly (and with appreciated sparks of humor) on "Iran in Transition." An early meal with Paul Rosier, who chairs Villanova University's History Department, Paul Steege, who helped identify Dr. Takeyh as a speaker, the wonderful Reverend Kail Ellis, and so many special Villanovans got the evening off to a fabulous start. My sister came with her dear daughter Claire. My blue-eyed brother arrived and entertained. My father wore one of his many beautiful ties and was the elegant man that he is.

And then there was the moment, early on, when Father Peter M. Donohue, the charismatic president of Villanova, mentioned that there was a certain writer also in the house last evening at Connelly Center. An Irishman, he said.

Not Colum McCann, I said.

Yes. Colum McCann, he said.

A raised eyebrow. A rapidly beating heart. A blurt: Colum McCann is my third favorite writer, I said.

Which would sound like a compliment to anyone who has seen the hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of books in my house. There's a lot of competition. Only Michael Ondaatje and Alice McDermott stand above.

I had read McCann's newest, Transatlantic, the week it came out, and had written of it here. That didn't matter. A young man named Daniel disappeared and returned with a copy of the novel, signed Colum McCann. Later, Father Peter himself greeted me with a second copy of the book, this time signed specifically to me.

I told him he is your third favorite writer, Father Pete said.

You didn't, I said.

Oh yes I did.

A good man never lies. A good reader should never rank.

Thank you to Villanova University, Father Pete, Reverend Ellis, Paul Rosier, Paul Steege, Diane Brocchi, Ray Takeyh, and everyone else who made last night a success. Thank you to my father for having this idea in the first place.

And special thanks to Elizabeth Mosier, Chris Mills, and Nazie Dana, who made the night even more glorious.

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Transatlantic/Colum McCann: Reflections

Art. Yes. That's what Colum McCann produces, every single time. Read all his work. Read his short stories. You'll run out of ink underlining the extraordinary images, the soul-giant gestures, the coined terms, the Irishisms. You'll feel as if the clock of time just wedged itself apart, showed you its gears.

Transatlantic, the new novel, is no different. In fact, I feel this book transcends McCann's National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin. There is greater structural integrity, more generational reverb. Most reviewers seem to be talking about the elements of the book—the distinct chapters and historic characters that wend their way through the pages. A 1919 airplane flight. A glimpse of Frederick Douglass, the freeman, in 1845 Ireland. George Mitchell at the height of the Good Friday peace talks in 1998. I believe, however, that the genius lies in the seaming—in all that these chapters actually share, which is to say the generations of women who bind these historic crossings and events. Real people and imagined people populate this book in nearly equal measure. Both have been deeply imagined.

Look, for example, at these three paragraphs. The first two describe an historic character, one of the 1919 pilots. The second describes a McCann creation. History and possibility don't collide here, stiffly. They need one another:

At night Brown spends a lot of his time downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, sending messages to Kathleen. He is timid with the telegraph, aware that others may read his words. There's a formality to him. A tightness.

He is slow on the stairs for a man in his thirties, the walking stick striking hard against the wood floor. Three brandies rolling through him.

An odd disturbance of light falls across the bannister and he catches sight of Lottie Ehrlich in the ornate wooden mirror at the top of the stairs. The young girl is, for a moment, ghostly, her figure emerging into the mirror, then growing clearer, taller, redheaded. She wears a dressing gown and nightdress and slippers. They are both a little startled by the other.

Yesterday I wrote about the sound of McCann's sentences, the legacy he shares with Michael Ondaatje. Today I want to answer the NYTBR reviewer, Erica Wagner, who, in her very lovely review of the book asks why the final chapter of Transatlantic must be written in first person. I suggest (though I'll never actually know) that it all has to do with the book's final sentence. Which could not have been written any other way, and which left me weeping early this morning.

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Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann: the words between them

At Herbsaint Restaurant, on St. Charles, in New Orleans, I turned to look at the wall to my left, and there these musicians were. "That's Buddy Bolden," I said to my husband. And because Coming Through Slaughter is one of those rare books that I've convinced my husband to read, he knew what I was talking about. He knew that Buddy, the horn player, stood at the center of Michael Ondaatje's first novel. He knew that Ondaatje had captured the sound of the man's New Orleans crack up, during a parade down Canal. He knew that few writers thrill me the way Ondaatje does, that I've studied Ondaatje, that once Ondaatje wrote me a postcard in response to a long letter I'd written, and that once my agent, Amy Rennert, gave me a signed copy of Ondaatje's brilliant memoir, Running in the Family, a book I teach at Penn.

Ondaatje's postcard and that signed book two prized possessions.

Meet Buddy Bolden, in the early pages of Coming Through Slaughter:

He puts the towel of steam over a face. Leaving holes for the mouth and the nose. Bolden walks off and talks with someone. A minute of hot meditation for the customer. After school, the kids come and watch the men being shaved. Applaud and whistle when each cut is finished. Place bets on whose face might be under the soap.

Now meet Emily, a character in Colum McCann's expansive and predictably wonderful new novel, Transatlantic. McCann, another of my very favorite writers, a man I once met at the Philadelphia Free Library, my friend Aideen at my side. A man whose friendship with Ondaatje is legendary; acknowledged in the back of McCann's books, Ondaatje is also here, on McCann's website, in conversation.

In this scene from Transatlantic, it's just ahead of the stock market crash. Emily is an American writer born of an Irish mother who is taking a trip with her photographer daughter. She's one of several characters from several time periods who cross back and forth, across the ocean, between Europe and the United States, on the high wire of hope and time, in pursuit of freedom, a word with two syllables and many meanings.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann hear the word—and scribe the world—with the same meter. I can't read one without thinking of, or hearing, the other. Those spliced sentences. Those hushed sounds. Those surprising images. Ondaatje and McCann are come-closer writers. Come closer and pause. They are two men whose books are risks ribbed together by pierce and poem. Their sentences smoosh, then stand erect. They whisper, then they startle. They cut each other off and the joinery shocks us, as much as the flow of syllables.

What wouldn't you give to learn from either one? And then to forge your own sound, your own meter.

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Summer Reading 2012: Responses to a Questionnaire

Back in mid-April, while living those few glorious days beside the ocean's gentle roar, I was asked some questions about my hoped-for summer reading.  Two months have passed, and some of my predictions for myself have held true. Some predictions are still waiting to be fulfilled.  Some books were in fact what I hoped they would be.  Some (or, to be specific, one) severely disappointed.  

This beautiful girl lives, by the way, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  She's one of my teaching aides for the upcoming VAST Teacher Institute.

But here is who I was or thought I'd be, in mid-April, when contemplating these questions by the sea.

What are you reading this summer?

I have an exquisite pile of books waiting for me—Cheryl Strayed’s WILD, Katherine Boo’s BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS, Adam Gopnik’s WINTER, Loren Eiseley’s ALL THE STRANGE HOURS, and the GRANTA BOOK OF THE IRISH SHORT STORY (edited by Anne Enright and including such gems as the Colum McCann class “Everything in This Country Must”).  I like to mix it up—new and old, memoir and fiction.

What was your favorite summer vacation?

Favorite is a hard word for me.  Love is easier.  I loved my family’s summers at the Jersey shore when I was a kid and my father taught me how to dig for the clams with our toes.  I loved Prague and Seville with my husband and son.  And last summer I fell head over heels for Berlin.  Anybody would.

What’s your favorite book about summer?

Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD isn’t about summer, per se.  But all of its most lush and important parts happen within and under the summer heat.

What was your favorite summer reading book as a kid?

How boring, how obvious, how true to admit that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY that enchanted me, again and again, as I sat collecting sun on my face with a piece of tin.

What is your favorite beach read?

I never read on the beach.  I walk and look for dolphins.  I read at night, when my body is still.

What’s the last book you devoured on a long flight?

The last time I was on a long flight I re-read BOOK OF CLOUDS by Chloe Aridjis.  I was glad I did.  I took off from Heathrow.  I landed in Philadelphia.  And in between I’d lived Berlin.

What’s your go-to book to read when you know you only have a few uninterrupted moments of peace?

I read Gerald Stern’s poems.  They fix my migraines.

What’s a great book about discovery or travel to read on a long road trip over several days?

Steinbeck often works.

What would you re-read?

I will be re-reading Alyson Hagy’s BOLETO when it comes out in May from Graywolf.  I read it in galleys, my Christmas Day present to myself.  I was literally jumping off the couch to read phrases to anyone who’d listen.

What are you stealing from your kids’ shelf?

I wish my kid would steal from my shelves!  I have even offered enticements, but he’s refused. In any case, two of my most loved books of all time — THE BOOK THIEF (Markus Zusak) and CARVER (Marilyn Nelson) — were published for younger readers.  Which is to say, they were published for the best parts of all of us.

What book transports you to another time or place?

Anything Michael Ondaatje writes, but let’s stick with his memoir, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, which takes readers to Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  All right.  I can’t stick with just one.  Let’s add his remarkable COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, the fictionalized life of Buddy Bolden.  That one takes you straight to the wild songs of New Orleans.

Who is your favorite character/hero/heroine?

Hana from Ondaatje’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT.  I fell in love with her.

What’s a classic summer book?

Don’t all girls read THE SECRET GARDEN (Frances Hodgson Burnett) in summer?

What’s a book that truly taught you something?

Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING taught me that it was okay to be fierce with language.  I’ve read it several times.

What’s a first line from a novel that you’ll always remember?

The first line of Colum McCann’s novel DANCER, about the life of Rudolf Nureyev.  It goes on for two pages. The first bit ends in a colon.  What was flung onstage during his first season in Paris: ......

What’s a book that thrilled you/surprised you/scared the living daylights out of you?

A WOMAN IN BERLIN: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary.  Published anonymously, this heartbreaking and still somehow gorgeous diary recounts the life of one particular German woman in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russians.  It scared me to death.  

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Everything in This Country Must/Colum McCann

Ivy Goodman—writer, teacher, and quite loved friend—sent me a book over the holidays.

She does things like that. 

Every book that Ivy has ever sent has been considered, right.  Most of the time these are books that I hadn't known I needed.  Often, they make the trip to my classroom at Penn.  This newest one, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story edited and introduced by Anne Enright, is no exception.

Last night—too tired to write, too early for bed—I turned to Ivy's gift and thumbed through toward the end, where Colum McCann, a writerly hero of mine, has a very short piece titled "Everything in This Country Must."  The first lines sound like nothing he has ever written, and for the sound of this story alone, it must be read.

A summer flood came and our draft horse got caught in the river. The river smashed against stones and the sound of it to me was like the turning of locks. It was silage time and the water smelled of grass. The draft horse, Father's favourite, had stepped in the river for a sniff maybe and she was caught, couldn't move, her foreleg trapped between rocks.  Father found her and called Katie! above the wailing of the rain. I was in the barn waiting for drips on my tongue from the ceiling hole.  

But there's far more than mere style in this brief McCann tale.  There's brilliance.  There's devastation.  It's the sort of story that feeds a hungry mind for a week.  I keep returning to it. 

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American Music/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Sometimes all I want to do is run up and down the street, and then to the mall and through the mall, and then to the beach and across the whole of the coastal shore, and then through an airport (among all those airport-bookstore-book toting readers) and then across an ocean to proclaim, I have just read the perfect book. 

I have read a book that held me, moved me, stirred me, awed me, restored and redeemed me—I have read that book.  It's called American Music, and by all rights I should have heard about this book since it was released in June; it's been O blessed and New York Times Book Review reviewed, and this is an author (Jane Mendelsohn) with whom many are already familiar, thanks to her debut novel, I was Amelia Earhart.  But I didn't know about American Music; I just found it in a bookstore and because I loved Earhart, I brought Music home, after the most cursory glance at the jacket.  Mendelsohn is that good.

No. In Music, she is that great.  I don't even want to try to explain this book, how it works.  I can't imagine wasting a second explaining (all right, the briefest bit of explaining) how the story involves a 21-year-old physical therapist, Honor, and the young Iraq War veteran she begins to treat—her hands on his flesh, her strength in his muscles releasing stories from generations past that both can see and hear, that not he, not she understand for the longest time.  Did that just make any sense?  It doesn't perhaps, it's not possible, perhaps, but it is utterly convincing and powerful and so well made and by the end it does not matter, because all the fragments of the stories released tell a real and aching larger story, and because every single line of this book is something approximating perfect.  You know I love Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann.  Mendelsohn joins that league of writer here, her Honor like Ondaatje's Hannah, her understanding of jazz music and the birth of cymbals and swing on a par with McCann's mastery of gypsy poets, say, or Nureyev ballet.

She pulled down the sheet and touched his back.  He listened closely to the music.  He heard the scrape of the recording and the piano like rain and the voice lifted above the music like a kite jerking and soaring above the trees.  

I said that I don't want to explain.  I simply want you to go out and buy this book—buy it and read it and see what literature can be, how a webbing intelligence electrifies and haunts and utterly defines the mood of a day, no matter how hot it is outside, how swampy.

As I write these words, thunder rolls in from some place north.  A storm brewing.  A prelude to your reading of Music.

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The Literary List

Early in the Rutgers-Camden workshop we reflected on the auguring power of literary lists—what they can tell us about a story not-yet-unfolded, what they teach us about voice.  We used, as our exemplars, the opening pages of Colum McCann's Dancer, the extraordinary yield in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and the evocative early pages of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning.  We heard:

What was flung onstage during his first season in Paris:

ten one-hundred-franc bills held together in a plastic band;

a packet of Russian tea;

... daffodils stolen from the gardens in the Louvre causing the gardeners to work overtime from five until seven in the evening to make sure the beds weren't further plundered;

... death threats;

hotel keys;

love letters;

and on the fifteenth night, a single long-stemmed gold-plated rose.

(McCann, extracted from a much longer list)

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.  Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.

(O'Brien, and this is merely the beginning of his brilliant catalog)

These are the things I packed:

— Twelve blank notebooks (paper is more expensive in Japan, or so I'm told);

— Three hundred tablets of Motrin IB and a bottle of 240 of the world's heaviest multivitamins;

— Forty-eight AA batteries in case my tape recorder dies mid-interview once a week, every week, for the six months I'll be away from home;

— Twenty-four copies of my first novel to give as omiyage;

— Two never-opened textbooks on how to read kanji.

(Rizzuto, a list then answered by a second titled:  These are the things I know:)

All three lists featured here sit toward or at the very start of books—before we know plot or meaning, before we've been formally introduced to the characters.  And yet, the revelatory power of these lists is immense; it is instructive.  It forces us to look more carefully at the lists we make—the seeds that lie in shorthand, the provocations bound up in catalogs.

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Ruined

I first became aware of the power of that one word ruin when reading the poetry of Gerald Stern. It seems the very opposite of beauty, and yet how close the two words are often found on a page—how near and next of kin are beauty and ruin. Yesterday, reading Colum McCann on the train, there was that word again, often. When Michael Ondaatje speaks the word it is all shush and reverence.

"When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future," Christopher Woodward wrote in In Ruins.

Is that how it is for you, or is it just this thing that happens to the incurably love-riddled melancholy?

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One Thing Leading to Another

Every now and then (wait: that would be more than every now and then) I get myself into literary trouble. This holiday weekend I did it again. In the early hours of each day I was at work on this wild mash of an adult novel—a scene involving, among other things, a mind in the midst of repair. In the afternoons I was reviewing the final edits for the YA novel set in Juarez, The Heart is Not a Size. At one point I was answering questions about Nothing but Ghosts, and always, always, I was fighting for the time to read Colum McCann novel, Let the Great World Spin.

I was, in other words, all kaleidoscoped with voice and place and desperate to get traction.

I don't typically seek out such collisions, but when they happen, I try to learn from them. I study the first-person present voice, for example, for fault lines (when does it fail? what happens when it gets pushed too far? what happens when a story is a was and not an is?). I weigh interior monologues against dialogue chains against the power of the omniscient narrator, and decide: what yields, what confines, what exacerbates? I ask myself how I might have approached a scene in the McCann book (McCann's book begins with the famed 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers, a story also richly told in a documentary I recently watched, "Man on a Wire"), and then I try to imagine what McCann might have done had he chosen to weave insanity inside his book, or a south-of-the-border squatter's village, or a garden. What would McCann do with a garden?

As writers we are never finished; we never know enough. We write each book as if it is our first and also our last, and when we are brave, we go back and look over our own shoulders and ask, What might we have done right there to make this a better book?

We are always desperate to write the better book.

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Eureka, Gamma Waves, and Colum McCann

Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.

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Mirror Images

I read The Lazarus Project straight through to the end yesterday afternoon in the quietest room of a quiet house. The book has a surreal invincibility about it—you don't argue with its premise; you don't quibble with its construction; you surrender, and you surrender willingly. There's an implied hysteria in the tone—a desperation that goes comedic, even slapstick in places. There's the smashing about of a marriage, a ditintegration and then rebirth of the word 'home.'

Two (favorite) books came to mind as I read—Colum McCann's Zoli, in which a contemporary author (a quasi McCann) goes in search of a Gypsy poet of the mid 20th century, and Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, which brings to life Buddy Bolden, the legendary horn player of New Orleans. All three books are engined forward by authorial quest. All of them yelp with sheer alivedness. The you, the I, the them become, at one point, indistinguishable.

Oh, to write a book like that. To be here, where I am—nearly a dozen books in and still a novice.

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