Wishing for more from Goldengrove

I finished reading Goldengrove yesterday morning, before setting off for another day of friendship and holiday camaraderie. It's a book that I am very glad to have read, for I'd wondered about it in theory and needed to appraise it for myself, in actuality. Goldengrove is the story of 13-year old Nico who loses her older sister, suddenly, in an accident at the lake. Little by little, Nico (the narrator) takes on (at the urging of the sister's boyfriend) the traits and appearance of her lost sister, while the father and mother each fall apart in their own ways.

It sounds promising, I know. But the book didn't sit quite right with me on a number of levels. There was its tone—too adult-knowing, too retrospectively infused, on the one hand, and bogged down with surface teen observations, even cliches, on the other. There was the molasses stick of passages (about, say, the side effects of arthritis medications) that advanced neither character nor plot. There was the promise of entanglement, even outright spookiness, but things moved along at too matter-of-fact a pace to lose this reader in anticipation or wonder.

There was dialogue, long passages of it, that sounded like this:

"How are you, Nico?" (the mother of Aaron, the boyfriend) said.

"Okay," I said. "I guess. How's Aaron?"

Aaron's mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.

"Not great," she said. "It's been hard."

"I know," I said.

"I'm sure you do," she said.

"Say hi to him for me," I said. "Tell him to stop by the store and say hi."

"I will," she said.

"Really!" I said, startling myself. "I'd really like to see him."

"I will," she repeated." Take care of yourself, dear."

Lots of "said's" in that, for sure. Nothing the least bit turgid or lean (one or the other might have spiced it), nothing original, nothing that draws a deeper portrait of the characters (this is a rare interaction with Aaron's mother; should she not have been distinguished somehow here, either by what she says, or how?). To me, this passage, like so many others, feels like placeholder writing—like an author sketching out an outline that will be later embellished or deepened.

Except that the "later" didn't happen.

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Sunday Prose

If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.

I have begun, as you can see, to read the Francine Prose novel Goldengrove. The wind is howling outside, and I spent the day's first waking hour hovering over The New York Times Book Review, admiring the work of David Barber, say, who, in his review of William Logan's new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, writes: "A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim, he's a poet who wouldn't be caught dead trying to dazzle or beguile, recoiling from anything that might smack of lyrical extravagance or bardic pomp."

I mean: Look at that sentence.

Imagine the thought and the knowing that lives behind that sentence.

I digress.

I have begun to read Goldengrove, and though Michael Pakenham, for whom I wrote countless reviews for the Baltimore Sun, once cautioned me never to express an opinion about a book until I was actually finished reading it, I already know and can express two things: This Francine Prose paragraph about Sunday, quoted above, encapsulates a thought I've had since I had the capacity to formulate thoughts (such as they are). I was that child looking out a Sunday window—waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Where is everyone?, I wanted to know. What are they doing? Why have I been left alone, to Sunday?

But then there is this second thought: Not counting the lines that I've italicized above (which are tight and telling and so quintessentially Prose-esque), there is unexpected space between the words in Goldengrove, and I'm not referring to the typesetting. Sentences that feel not yet fully slashed or tightened. I've been spoiled by reading Liz Rosenberg's Home Repair, I know, which is at once taut and affecting, chiseled and heart big. Spoiled by Aleksandar Hemon and David Barber. But still, reading Goldengrove, I want to scrunch up many of its passages—clump them together, break them apart, pound out some of the air.

True: I feel that way every single time I read something that I've written.

Also true: It may be that such airiness is precisely what Prose needs to tell her story. I am intrigued. I am reading on.....

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What I'll Be Reading Next

In which I share (under terrible light on a rainy day, with my hair in my face and...(well, I could go on and on, but we're speaking of books here not fashion, and I've run out of parentheses)) a few words about the books that sit here on my glass-topped desk. I've not had time to read like this in perhaps 20 years. Each book making me hungrier for the next.

After thought: Roy Blount Jr. would never be my friend were he to watch this vlog. Because I use the term "of course" too much, for starters. Because I keep saying the anemic "I'm looking forward to...." I'm looking forward, of course, to improving my spontaneous speech in the year to come. I can and will resolve to resolve the same on New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to that. Of course.

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