The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story/Joan Wickersham: Reflections

I'd wanted to read this intermingling collection of short stories for a long time. It has sat here, a tease—bought when I bought Elizabeth Graver (The End of the Point) and Jessica Keener (Night Swim). Set aside for a special time.

I was already familiar with the power and inventiveness of Joan Wickersham's voice. Her The Suicide Index would have been included as a stellar example of the memoir form in Handling the Truth had I read it in time (as it is, I list the book on my additional recommended reading list here, on the blog). I had, in addition, read the reviews of the story collection. And yet I was utterly unprepared for the impact The News from Spain would have on me. I was staggered after reading these seven stories through, each story (brilliantly) called "The News from Spain." I sat there on the couch, unable to will myself to stand. Arrows through my soul. Ache for the world and the women of the world, who love and want and hurt and try and wound and are left wounded.

The News from Spain is a sandblasting of the heart.

Readers comment on Wickersham's precision. That is the word, in a nutshell. Nothing escapes Wickersham's eye. No small detail. No minor hurt that becomes a remembered hurt that becomes the defining truth in a marriage, or in a mother-daughter relationship, or in an unrequited affair. Love is so beautiful, some of the time, and love is so brutal, much of the time. It is the war that wants only peace but keeps finding reasons to war. It is the thing that saves us. Wickersham understands it all. Her readers fall to their knees.

How twisted and smart Wickersham is, christening each short story with the same name. Makes it kind of impossible to pull them apart, to speak of them individually, and that is part of Wickersham's point. So I will just say that there's a story in this book about a dancer who has fallen ill, paralyzed. She is cared for by a young man in love with another young man, and their relationship deepens while her husband, still key in the dance company, is away, having an affair with a young dancer. The dancer tries to live on, tries to be smart, tries to be witty, even, and the caretaker tries to be whom he thinks she wants him to be—available and invisible by turns. This story devastated me. It has one of the most unforeseen and sensational endings of any story I have read.

And it is matched by the other stories in this work of art.

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Summer Reading (and last day for the HANDLING contest)

With work on the first draft of my last novel now done, I can, as I mentioned a few days ago, turn to the piles upon piles of books that have been waiting for me. (As well as all the titles I've downloaded on my iPad.)

Recently I have shared my thoughts on Caroline Leavitt's Is This Tomorrow, Katie Haegele's White Elephants, Chloe Aridjis's Asunder, Jessica Keener's Night Swim, Marie Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Susan Tekulve's In the Garden of Stone, and Elizabeth Graver's End of the Point.    

Throughout the next few months, you'll be hearing from me on books like the following:

Someone, Alice McDermott
The World is a Carpet, Anna Badkhen
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, Patricia Engel
Still Writing, Dani Shapiro
Country Girl, Edna O'Brien
Reality Boy, A.S. King
The News from Spain, Joan Wickersham
Norwegian by Night, Derek Miller
Grace Before Dying, Lori Waselchuk
River of Dust, Virginia Pye
Perfect Red, Jennie Nash
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
Yesterday's Weather, Anne Enright
Some Nerve, Patty Chang Anker
Margot, Jillian Cantor


I'll also be sharing thoughts on a number of classic memoirs.

Speaking of which: Today is your last day to enter to win my last copy of Handling the Truth. The details are here.

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The End of the Point/Elizabeth Graver: Reflections

You can go to school and hope to learn to write. Or you can read Elizabeth Graver's fourth novel, The End of the Point. How are words turned into people—true people, real people, you know you've met them people? How does land and sea—silent, mutable, endangered, persistent—become not just character but plot? How are generations whooshed across pages, their presence felt? What is the alchemy of omniscience? What is alive inside the novelistic I? How is time stippled and stopped? What do you do with all that you have come to know (with what you have researched) so that no one ever guesses that you weren't born with all that knowing in your head?

(The names of birds, the dimensions of a porpoise skull, the chemical cousins of Agent Orange, the terminology of madness, the songs of WW II, the rules of 1940s dance halls, the economics of development, the name of a condition signaled by coke-colored urine.)

Ask a question; find its answer here. Study every sentence of this magisterial, evocative novel. Read it very slow. Tell those who wish to interfere that you are doing something important. You are reading Elizabeth Graver. You are learning how to write.

Graver's novel—about a jut of land called Ashaunt Point and the generations of one family who take their peace and healing there—is a stunning achievement. "With grace and subtlety, Elizabeth Graver illuminates the powerful legacy of family and place, exploring what we are born into, what we pass down, and what we preserve, cast off, or willingly set free." That's what the jacket copy promises, and that indeed is what Graver delivers—in sentence after sentence of most immaculate prose.

I could flip through, quote from any page. Here: I present Elizabeth Graver's gardens, though I could just as easily have given you her birds (you know my obsession with birds), or the notes between a child and her nanny, or the disappointments that rise up between a mother and her son, or an old marriage healed. But here are Graver's gardens:

Her focus has narrowed, she knows what she wants; in this case; it's the flowers—to look and look. At night, and in the afternoons when the pain clamps her hard inside its jaws, the garden follows her, a dreamscape unspooling, brighter than the wildflowers and the white-pink roses grown spindly on her own trellises; brighter too than her own walled garden, bee balm blooming now, asters on the verge, the lupine (over) with its fuzzy, blackened rattle pods that could be cracked for seeds to nick, soak, plant.

Such a book. And for those who wonder, who keep track of such things—I have known Elizabeth through the ether for years, but I insisted on buying this book. On reading it for this blog. On giving myself that pleasure.

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thanking David Levithan, Books of Wonder, Ed Goldberg, and New York City for a special Sunday

Yesterday, in New York City, I joined the great cast of writers that the truly great David Levithan had gathered at Books of Wonder, a store famous and hallowed and grand. I met a student with a future, a librarian with a heart, a blogger with whom I'd corresponded, an AP English teacher, a science fiction writer, a screenplay writer, super cool Wonder staff, others. K. M. Walton and I compared war stories (we always do; this time I won). A.S. King swore she'd been practicing her salsa (but I don't know; the girl does write fiction). David revealed some of the new work on his Scholastic list, and I sort of begged, I hope that's okay, for one of the ARCs. He also talked a bit (only because I asked) about his own Invisibility (with Andrea Cremer), due out this summer.

(David Levithan did not reveal, however, how he maintains his fresh-faced good looks after his long and uber successful week of moderating and hosting countless (all right, so someone counted them, probably even David himself) YA panels and conversations.)

And then something else amazing happened: Ed Goldberg, who wrote to me following the launch of HOUSE OF DANCE and who has remained in touch ever since—a stalwart cheerleader in times both green and fallow, a teacher, a librarian, a garden lover, a dad, a man in love with his Susan—took the train into the city and surprised me. Yes, indeed, the surprise was gonzo. And Beth Kephart, born on April Fools' Day, does not easily surprise.

After the signing, I wove through New York City. I share my quick snapshots here.

On the train there and back, I was reading Elizabeth Graver's new novel, The End of the Point.Help me, Rhonda: I can't wait to tell you about her book. (That is, if you haven't already read about it everywhere, my friend Elizabeth now on bestseller lists everywhere.)

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A Return to (some) Favorite Books

There hadn't been time in a long time to return to my shelf of books, but this morning I did. I felt like I do on those Saturday mornings when I leave in the near-dark for the Farmer's Market and stand (in advance of jostling crowds) before cases of fresh cheese, fat shrimp, silk chocolate, blueberry muffins. Rich. That's how I felt.

I pulled Elizabeth Graver's Awake to my lap and read again the last 50 or so pages—one of the finest renderings of maternal guilt and regret that I have ever read. I pulled down Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and decided to read it all the way through again tomorrow, so that I could remember fully why I loved it so much a few years ago. I took Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses into my hands, and resolved to read it again on Sunday. I returned to The Cellist of Sarajevo and remembered: Another book of multiple voices, masterfully done.

And then I started reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and oh my, truly. Have you ever seen so much poetry in a novel's opening lines? Almost like reading Carole Maso's Ava—every detail an awakening, a surprise.

For you today, then, from Hansen:

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water spout....

Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.

White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

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