reviewing the exquisite Angela Palm (RIVERINE, a memoir) for the Chicago Tribune/Printers Row

Oh my friends. Some very big talent has just walked into the memoir room.

My review of Riverine, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, by Angela Palm, in Printers Row (Chicago Tribune). Click the link here for the full review.

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On Writer Envy and The Narrow Door, by Paul Lisicky

I have wondered (not infrequently) if envy rankles writers more, deeper, better than it does organic farmers, say, or pastry chefs, or people who build fences. What is it about what we do that makes us, as a category, cagey, needy, whiny—quite sure that whatever success we have is hardly equal to the success we have (surely!) earned?

Why do (too many) teachers step away when their students seem, even for a moment, to out-write them?

Why do (too many) friendships falter in the wake of one person's good news?

And how many writers have felt themselves forced to subsume their own dreams and bury their own gifts, so as not to challenge the presumptive status quo? I shall listen long to you, they say to the Supreme Other, their heads bowed slightly. I shall sing the song of you. I shall see you, always, as the True Talent, and I shall never tip this balance, never hope that you'll read me, never hope that you'll root for me, never hope that you'll truly see me.

Oh, writing. Oh, writers. Why does our blood run green, or thin?

In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky takes a devastating, and devastatingly beautiful, look at the two treasured friendships of his life—the one that developed early in his life with the novelist Denise Gess, and the one upon which his marriage to a poet he calls M. is based.

Denise is sexy, consuming, interesting, seductive—and while these two talk of many things, sometimes for hours every day, Lisicky manages (perhaps because Denise does most of the talking?) to keep from her his secret affection for men. Denise will tuck her arm into Lisicky's, take him on novel-building adventures, allow the world around them to imagine that they are a happy couple, read her best lines to him. She will name a character for him in her second, less-successful novel, she will betray him, they will lose touch, and they will enter, again, into each other's orbit—deeply. Lisicky will be there for Denise as she lives the final hellacious months of a deadly cancer. He will love, and eulogize, her.

M., meanwhile, is already famous when Lisicky becomes his lover, then husband—famous and famously grieving for a man who has died of AIDS. M. is the well-paid poet-celebrity. Lisicky is the talented, handsome lover—the one with whom M. has important conversations, and the one whom Lisicky, it is suggested here, is never to overshadow.

Not only that but, perhaps, Lisicky is not to overshadow the long-gone former lover. Lisicky, helpless, tries:

To think you can love someone so well that he'd forget the dead, forget his pain. To think of love as a laser beam of attention. To think you could beam that attention toward him in such a way that he wouldn't even know you were doing it. To learn that your attention is doomed. Unwelcome, better having been put to other uses: helping the poor, working for the environment, for animals. To learn that you are only a pale winter sun, when you once thought you could have made the hillsides green.

This is a book built of slipped time and interweaves. We see Denise vibrant, we see M.'s charms, we see the turns these friendships will take, the toxic releases, the unspoken hurts, the flailed anger, the unstoppable rise of Lisicky's talent and the costs of that said talent. Denise is near death; she is alive again. M. and Lisicky are in love; the love is breaking; the love is new. Propelled forward. Slung straight back. The year is 2010, 2004, 2010, 2012, and what does it matter what order the numbers fall in? And in between, the gnarly earth hurls lava up through volcano spouts, tsunamis speed toward shorelines, hurricanes smash into lives; Joni Mitchell sings. The world may be so much bigger than one man's woes, Lisicky says. But also: the world speaks directly for and of them.

What is Lisicky to do—with the talent he has, the love he feels, the respect he has not just for those in his circle, but for his own abilities (deeply proven here) with language? Can the practiced accommodator at long last be accommodated?

For heaven's sake, let's hope so.

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In writing about the young, embrace complexity: what we learn from Per Petterson in Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

My dear friend Alyson Hagy sends gems through the mail. All kinds of art I would never otherwise see. Stories and poems and images that elevate my trust in this world, our capacity, as humans, to transcend ourselves.

Alyson also knows of my great passion for Per Petterson and not long ago sent me Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, a story collection Petterson wrote early in his career—and has recently been released by Graywolf.

A young boy named Arvid who lives just outside Oslo stands at the heart of these linked interludes. Petterson rushes and hushes us into his world with language that splits seams. He is too young to understand and filter at first. We watch him want, concede, defy, question, and finally grow from childhood into manhood through an act of singular compassion. Arvid's childhood is a most remarkable transformation built of most ordinary moments. It's an astonishing trick, this tiny book. A master class in writing from a child's perspective, a book for adults, certainly, in the same way that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is for adults. But it is also a book for anyone working within the middle grade/young adult realm.

This is character development.

This is knowing.

This is art.

This is what the brains of the young are capable of seeing, feeling, thinking, and this is what we must aspire to as writers, no matter what age we think we are writing for. The minds and lives of children and young people are complex. They cannot be realistically distilled into issues. They don't organize neatly around obvious plots. They are the last thing in the world from nuance-free one-liners.

One passage of many. He is speaking of his mother.

She'd looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

He cried, and said to his mother:

'I don't want to get older. I want to stay like I am now! Six and a half, that's enough, isn't it?' But she smiled sadly and said, to every age its charm. And time withdrew to the large clock on the wall in the living room and went round alone in there, like a tiger in a cage, he thought, just waiting, and Mum became Mum again, almost like before.

It is not, contrary to the opinion of some, easier to write for younger readers. It should not be. Our job, I think, is to keep on seeking ways to embrace and elevate the complexity that makes us true and hurt and human.

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Everything I Never Told You/Celeste Ng and Citizen: An American Lyric/Claudia Rankine

There are books that fill you with the clamor of something new—the risk of them, the innovation.

There are books that silence you—how honest and aching and true, how beautifully levered down into the soul.

This morning I am silenced by Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng's impeccable first novel about a daughter whose inexplicable death cracks open the vault of a family's secrets and regrets. A novel about children submitting to their parents' dreams for them, and the woeful consequences. Bill Wolfe had named this his favorite book of the year. Sarah Laurence had put it on her list. So many others, too. Believe anyone who tells you that you must read this book. Believe me. You must.

Ng is a master of the omniscient voice. A brilliant webber of divergent perspectives. A calm creator of sentences. A woman capable of writing with enormous clarity and tenderness about racism, silence, the terrible burdens of doing one's duty, the steep weight of holding that science book in your hand because your mother wants you to, the wretchedness of being the less-loved child. How do you take a heartbreaking story and still leave the reader with hope? You do it by writing through a powerful knowing not just of the past but of the future, too.

I am one of those people who writes in her books—outlining, defining, questioning. I did not write inside Ng's pages, preferring to keep them pristine. I turned back the ear of but one, knowing it would be the page that I shared, the thing that lies most at the heart of this novel. That word "different" and how we use it or abuse it in our lives.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. 

I was reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric the same time that I was reading Ng. I was thinking of how many times I have likely gotten it wrong in my own language—despite all these years now with my own Salvadoran husband, all these years fighting labels in life and on the page. Even those of us who should fully understand the nuances of prejudicial language can, horrifyingly, get it wrong, and will again. I mean to take nothing away from Ng's magnificent novel by including words from Rankine in this post, but they do, I believe, go together. They must—both these books—be read.

You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine?

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

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A Seahorse Year/Stacey D'Erasmo: Reflections

One hour before I was scheduled to meet Stacey D'Erasmo in a hotel lobby, I took a walk through the residential streets of Decatur, GA. There, near the local library, stood this magnificent magnolia tree, bent but not broken, mature but incredibly alive, shadowy and cool except for that break of sun. It was, I thought, like the novel I'd just read, the complex and complexly brilliant A Seahorse Year. 

No doubt every D'Erasmo novel is as rich as this one is—as thoroughly considered, as masterfully developed. I chose A Seahorse Year because it has two teens at its interwoven heart and because it is ultimately about the repercussive impact of one on many. A child gets sick and: His biological parents (Nan and Hal) are stricken. His step-parent (Marina, Nan's lover) finds herself on the margins, and straying. His Dad's new lover (Dan) is not sure he wants to be absorbed into such a broken family. The boy's girlfriend (Tamara) believes (with all the assurance of youth) that she can be a saviour. Tamara's parents are furious, spiteful. Nan's brother does the wrong thing. Everyone separated by degrees. Every catastrophic turn sparking seismic implications. Every nuance nuanced. And somehow Stacey D'Erasmo keeps track of it all. Produces a novel about relationships, which is also a novel of suspense. Writes with such intimate knowledge of her characters and their worlds that it is no wonder that Graywolf Press chose her to write The Art of Intimacy, the book Stacey and I had come to the magical Decatur Book Festival to discuss.

It takes about four years, Stacey told me, to write each of her novels. It is time enormously well spent. She invests deeply in her characters. Knows every detail of their rooms and their souls, the roads they walk on, the paths they walk, the fights they're not having, the words they hoard. She knows the mistakes they make, which are the mistakes we make. She is patient. She allows her stories to evolve. I bookmarked so many passages in A Seahorse Year that I am hard pressed to choose a single one. Because I must choose, I will choose this one, below—proof of what the right details do to illuminate character. Here we see Nan's house as Marina sees Nan's house. We are given the space, we are given two characters. We are given a story:

Flitting through Nan's house, Marina felt like a bird that had flown in and couldn't find her way out. Nan's house, like her bedroom, was slightly underfurnished, not austere so much as elementary, in the way of someone who would think with satisfaction: well, this is everything we need. The only extravagance was in the living room, where more than a few new, lavish books were stacked on the mantel. A thick biography of Madame Tussaud. An entire set of Proust with silvery corners. Otherwise, the house was like a collection of simple verbs: eating, sitting, watching TV. A red, child-size hooded sweatshirt was crumpled against the arm of the sofa. A few little robot men slept, still locked in combat, on the coffee table. Several plastic trucks were suspended in a convoy into the dining room. Standing half-wrapped in the damp towel, Marina's feet were cool on the cool floor. She stood there looking for something, but she didn't know what. Evidence—though the extravagant books weren't it—of some intractable bitterness, strained rope tethered to rusted stake, some wormhole that would end this thing before it had properly begun. She didn't want another complicated wife. Nan, the night before, had been very quiet and determined, like someone building something. Marina thought warily, Why?

My conversation with Stacey D'Erasmo at the AJC Decatur Book Festival will always be a life highlight (a photo here). Stacey's book on intimacy is not to be missed, my thoughts about that here. And look for Stacey's new novel, Wonderland, out next May. It's about an aging rock star, she says, and Stacey went on tour to get the details right. I cannot wait to see what she saw, and how she transformed it all to fiction.

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The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between/Stacey D'Erasmo

Always a cause for celebration when a new volume in the The Art of series is released by Graywolf Press. Edited by Charles Baxter, the "series is a line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism." The Art of Subtext (by Baxter himself), The Art of Time in Memoir (by Sven Birkerts—a book I love and teach and feature in Handling the Truth), The Art of Recklessness (Dean Young), The Art of Attention (Donald Revell), The Art of Description (Mark Doty)—these are ingenious encapsulations of a working writer's best thinking on the making of stories, sentences, and poems.

Yesterday, Stacey D'Erasmo's contribution to the series—The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between—was released; I had it on my iPad by dawn. D'Erasmo is a writer and reader worth heeding—an honored novelist, a professor at Columbia, a critic whose reviews are often better than the studied books themselves. Here, in this book, she does exactly what her title promises—explores "the nature of intimacy" and "the space between us" through chapters with titles like "Trying to See," "Meeting in the If," "Meeting in the World," "Meeting in the Dark," "Why Meet?," and "Distance." Old favorites like The Secret Sharer, The Rainbow, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Beloved, and To the Lighthouse are reinvigorated here, reviewed with an eye toward blurred, encapsulated, empathetic, and haunted spaces. Lesser known (to me, anyway) texts such as Dennis Cooper's My Mark, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Yoko Tawada's "The Bath," are likewise studied, quoted at length, turned over like conical shells.

I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing thrilling—viewing texts through the eyes of a skilled, practicing writer. D'Erasmo has ideas; she makes assertions. "I have noticed that the intimacy we feel as readers is often generated far less by characters turning to one another and saying intimate things or doing intimate things than it is by a kind of textual atmosphere, or maybe one should say a biosphere, a gallery, a zone that both emanates from characters and acts upon them very deeply and personally," she asserts early on.

Later, she addresses her readers as probable writers:

The harm, it seems to me as a struggling writer among other struggling writers, is that piety of any kind is never especially good for art. Characters can, and should, believe all kinds of things, passionately and with brilliant wrongheadedness, but the book is, generally speaking, up to something else, something broader, something less sure of itself. Questions the writer might ask herself as she struggles to bring a sense of intimacy onto the page are, What assumptions am I making about what intimacy is? What received ideas about intimacy am I perhaps unwittingly reproducing?

It's all fascinating to me—elevating my vocabulary as a reader, expanding my girth as a writer. And so, on this morning of vapid fog and gathering heat, I send it out to you, dear readers, as a book to buy and keep.

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It's Fine By Me/Per Petterson: Reflections

When I am asked what author I recommend to thoughtful teen readers of the male persuasion, I don't blink.  Per Petterson, I say.  It doesn't get much better, in general, than a Per Petterson book.  And with his often adolescent male protagonists, his compelling Norwegian landscapes, his deliberate lonesomeness, his inclination to tell the truth about how growing up feels, Petterson speaks especially well to young, literary-minded male readers.

Out Stealing Horses ranks as one of my favorite novels of all time.  It's Fine By Me, Petterson's newest (translated by Don Bartlett) is equally strong—a coming-of-age tale about a working-class teen who won't remove his sunglasses when he steps into his new school and doesn't want the world to know, well, anything at all about him.  Audun Sletten stands on the outside, brooding.  He wrestles with his own story (a drunken father, a dead brother, a sister he loves, a girl he might like) discontinuously.  He makes a friend despite himself, yields a little because he has to, wants to protect his family but sometimes anger is all he has, all he is.  Anger and the Norwegian landscape, the white winters, the bracing lakes, the one or two teachers who notice, the men at the printing plant where he ultimately works, that best friend again—wry and helpful. 

The world recedes when I read Petterson.  I find his intelligence essential.  I talk about crossover books—YA to A.  But may the tide reverse and may Petterson's work cross into high school classrooms and become standard reading fare not just for adults but for teens.

A passage:

And I don't see any animals, but long Lake Elvaga is glittering in the sunshine.  About halfway, I stop and slide down and sit on the slope by the bank.  It is fine and open here, and the trees are naked.  I take out the roll-up and a little notebook I like to think is similar to the one that Hemingway used in the Twenties in his Paris book, A Moveable Feast.  I light the cigarette and try to do what he did:  write one true sentence.  I try several, but they don't amount to any more than what Arvid calls purple prose.  I give it another go, and I try to get down on the paper the expression on Dole's face when I dragged him by the leg across the floor of Geir's bar.  It's better, but not very good.

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Jessica Francis Kane does it again with This Close: Stories

I met Jessica Francis Kane a few months after the publication of her electrifying novel, The Report.  She was in town, having a book conversation.  We had a chance to talk.  We've stayed in touch and not long ago the galleys of hew new book, This Close: Stories (Graywolf, March 2013), arrived by mail.  I was ecstatic.

I read the first four of these dozen stories while on the train home from New York City this past Saturday night. There is, perhaps, no better reading zone—a dark night, a quiet train, the lull of forward motion. Jessica's stories do what excellent short stories must; they involve their readers at once.  They settle in as if the characters were always there, as if you have always been privy to their secrets, their flaws.  "Lucky Boy" is, at first, matter of fact:  "Something about New York City makes a lot of people understand you should try to look your best.  Tourists, for example, often wear brand-new shoes and socks."  Hmmm, you think, why this as a place to start not just a story but a collection, and then it's clear:  There is something deep and soul-agitating at work right here, something profound being telegraphed about relationships between those paid to take care and those who pay, about innocence and dependence.

Time is brilliantly managed in "Lucky Boy."  Things happen at a rapid clip and yet we never feel breathless, never feel excluded from the months and years in between scenes, when a friend becomes a girlfriend becomes a wife becomes a slate of opinions our narrator isn't quite sure he buys.  It's quite a trick.  No, it's quite a skill.  The laconic narrator is deeply observant.  He lets on and lets in, but sparely, almost non-judgmentally.  Almost.

There's a deli Christina and I patronize now on the corner of Lexington and Seventy-Seventh.  To some I saw we're friends with the owner, but I recognize the relationship for what it is.  We are the parents with a jog stroller who buy lox when friends are in town and many other specialty items on a regular basis.  He is the owner who makes us feel special....

The next three pieces in the book are equally unusual, engrossing, unexpected.  The stories aren't extreme in their limning of modern life, nor are they are stories we've read before.  They are interesting and well-metered, small jealousies, odd victories, exploded scenes.  I can't wait to read the rest of the stories (some interconnected, some not), but I did not want to wait any longer to tell you (and to tell Jessica, too) how happy I am for her new book.

Welcome home, JFK.

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Reading Boleto for Christmas

This afternoon, once the final big meal is cooked for our small but happy family of three, this will be me on the couch, the sun floating in, Alyson Hagy's Boleto on my quilted lap.  I started reading this gorgeous novel the day it arrived.  Irrefutable deadlines and pressures took the pleasure from me.  But just this morning—one boy upstairs still asleep (we passed in the night at 4 AM; he was just finishing a scene he had been writing and I was getting up to finish a client project), one outside in his workshop, making art—I began to read again. 

I have not yet been able to put words to just how much I love this book of Alyson's.  I cannot describe her talent, the deep and never show-boating knowing that fills her every page.  I cannot say what an honor it is to have an early copy of this novel in my home, or how lucky I am to have Alyson as an ever-enduring friend.  But I began to tell you something of Boleto here, when I quoted from the very first page, and in a moment I will quote to you from a page deeper in.

Somewhere in Wyoming, Alyson's preparing a dinner for six.  She's been out snowshoe-ing this morning with her son.  She's been looking for, in her email words, "deer trails, moose tracks, pine cones recently flaked by squirrels, chickadees, ravens." 

But before all that, she wrote this:

... He could always recall the peculiar stink of his mother's lilac blossoms when they thawed out in the spring.  He could practically write lyrics to the music the field mice made in his bedroom walls, or the midnight bawling of cows and calves.  These were the truths that were fixed inside him.  They hung like well-used tools on a workshop wall.  People were not fixed.  People slipped away like weather over a horizon.  You could love a person all you wanted, all that you were capable of, but a person would not settle once you left them behind.

If there is justice in this literary world, Alyson Hagy will become a household name in the year about to dawn.

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The Last Brother/by Nathacha Appanah: Reflections

There is a boy named Raj, and he is nine years old.  He lives in Mauritius;  it is 1944.  Raj was the middle son of three, but now he is the family's only son, and what, he asks us, is the word for a boy who loses both his brothers in one day?  What is the word for a boy whose love will be even more strenuously tested?  What is the capability and culpability of memory when an old man looks back and remembers?

This is the Raj of Nathacha Appanah's extraordinary novel, The Last Brother (Graywolf Press, translated by Geoffrey Strachan).  This is the landscape of a book that will take you deeply and unforgettably into the abundant and cruel Mauritius, into the childhood of one fated with a violent father and a healing mother, into the topography of bewildering loss. In The Last Brother Raj is an old man looking back on a friendship that erupted, mysteriously, during his ninth year—a friendship between himself and a boy named David, a blond Jewish exile whom he meets in the hospital ward of an island prison.  Raj then and now is haunted, confused.  He wants to know, precisely.  He wants to honor the past by reviving its details, by not looking away—but can he?  Can any of us?

The artfulness of this novel is directly tied to the lack of pretense in Raj's narrating voice—the tangles he gets himself into, the sentences that smudge punctuation, change tense, get lost in the scribble of time.  What does it mean to write authentically?  I think it means recognizing that an old man looking back on an exotic, fated childhood might remember and recall the world, without artifice, this way:

During those says spent all alone at Beau-Bassin, immersed in that somehow muted light, which now took on the color of the forest, now the color of the flowers my mother had planted around the house to crate a benign ring, or else that of the bluish mountains in the distance, I discovered a taste for hiding places.  I would lie low in corners, tucking my feet and legs in underneath me, I would climb up into trees and crouch in the forks of branches, my body coiled in on itself like a snake, I would dig holes beneath the squash plants in the vegetable garden and crawl in there, with my belly to the ground, my hands buried in the earth up to my wrists, my face hidden among the creepers.

The Last Brother, already hailed internationally, is due out in the States in February from Graywolf Press.  I was blessed to receive an early copy from the press itself.  Sent to me because they know, at Graywolf, that I love great books.  I hold them to my heart.

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(My) Imprints of the Year

At the close of this year, I'd like to sidestep the naming of favorite books to honor two imprints instead—imprints whose books most advance my faith in publishing and occupy much of my shelf space. The first, of course, is Graywolf Press, which publishes my dear friend Alyson Hagy (Ghosts of Wyoming), introduced me to my now-friend Jessica Francis Kane (The Report), publishes the brilliant Per Petterson (I Curse the River of Time), puts out books that consistently surprise me (take Vanishing Point, that fascinating riff on memoir by Ander Monson), and celebrates some of the best poets of our day (Jane Kenyon, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Thomas Sayers Ellis). Look for The Last Brother, a Nathacha Appanah novel being released from Graywolf in February.  I started the book this morning.  It is going to be an everlasting favorite.

The second honorable, wonderful, heart dance of an imprint is Black Cat, of Grove Atlantic, which publishes some of the most beautiful original trade paperback novels and nonfiction I've ever seen.  I first started connecting the imprint itself to actual book titles when I read Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds, an utterly sensational and surreal portrait of Berlin.  More fabulous Black Cat titles came my way (an angel sent them), and I was hooked.  This year The Disappeared by Kim Echlin engulfed me.  I laughed hard at Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist, and for Christmas I am buying myself Vida, the  Patricia Engle story collection that was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the Times. 

The end of real literature is not near.  It lives among gray wolves and black cats.

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Vanishing Point/Ander Monson: Reflections

"Am currently in the middle of Ander Monson's VANISHING POINT," Carl Klaus wrote to me, a few weeks ago, "and find it such a venturesome work of literary nonfiction that I think it might be of considerable interest to you and your students."  Since Klaus is himself the author of the venturesome The Made-Up Self, not to mention the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, I didn't much hesitate in making my purchase.  Yesterday and early today I've been reading Monson's essays (a Graywolf publication) through.

It's interesting stuff—quotable, inventive, daggered, asterisked, me-dominating and me-avoidant, not quite memoir, though Monson himself would be the first to count all the sentences beginning with (or featuring) that wily single letter "I."  Monson, like Klaus, like many of us teaching and writing personal pieces today, is full of rue and half-steps, full of self-disclosures that may or may not reveal the actual self.  Full, most of all, of the questions:  Can the actual self be revealed?  Can the we be known?  Is the I a reliable story? (Not a bankable story; that question, in the wake of so many bestselling memoirs, does not have to be asked.)

Monson is thinking out loud, in these pages, about truths and dares, about how the technology we write with may or may not shape what we write.  He is thinking about solipsisms and (magnificently) assembloirs, and he gets us thinking, too.  Perhaps the most powerful pages of this book are Monson's asterisk asides.  For example:

If we choose to represent our lives as story, it's no surprise that our stories converge, that we all want highs and lows, the reckonings with our pasts and flaws and loves that we are otherwise incapable of in real life.  Maybe we are the same, we are telling ourselves, no matter how much we try to invent our way out of this, and that's the thing we can't stand to hear or know.

I also like this:

The snap of art onto life is bothersome, too, a delinquent, a troubled fit.

What do we teach young writers, I kept wondering as I read, about truths and dares?  How do we talk about the flawed veracity of the assembled self without turning each and every one of them either to despair or to some version of David Foster Wallace (not that he was a bad thing, of course, but he was and should remain his own one thing)?  I want to speak honestly, want to teach truly, want to leave my students with something that means something.

Monson—playfully, insistently, self-defeatedly, self-aggrandizingly—puts even more at stake.   




 

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I Curse the River of Time/Per Petterson: Reflections

They sit together now, on the edge of my desk:  Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia, and I Curse the River of Time.  They are the novels of Per Petterson, an author born in Oslo and translated around the world, a man whose work draws the almost impossibly delicate balance between the deeply specific and the mesmerizingly vague.  Petterson's characters recreate the past, live the past, want to change it; they cannot.  Their present ticks toward the future, which is to say it ticks toward death.  No one is ever the person he or she would have wanted to be; no one can bear the mirror they throw up against themselves.

One must be patient with a Petterson book; one is rewarded, deeply, for one's patience.  One must accept the fugue state that the author visits upon his readers.  We are in places we don't recognize, but we know them.  We are among strangers, yet we live inside their heads.  We regret just as deeply, we crawl just as lowly, we hope more than we can should:  Where are we?

In I Curse the River of Time, due out shortly from Graywolf Press, Petterson gives us a 37-year-man on the verge of divorce and on the verge of losing the mother he disregarded in his past (she had offered a way out of his working-class heritage; he threw it back in his face; can they recover?).  I say 37-year-old man, but Avrid is boy-like, in so many ways—heartbroken for himself and, when he de-shrouds himself long enough to escape his own self pity, heartbroken for his mother.  He has followed his mother to a place where she has gone for peace.  He is haunted by memories; he's often drunk.  He needs caring for, but he must prove that he has the capacity for caring deep within himself.  It is 1989, and all across Europe, things fall apart.

The sentences are long and particulate in River.  They are also embellished and soft, tumbled together.  Some give directions (past the quay, down the street, around the corner, up the stairs).  Some ask.  Some want ("... and you suddenly realize that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.").  All of them crash and hum together, leaving the reader (this reader, at least) somehow intensified.

Thank you, Erin, for sending me a copy.

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The Report/Jessica Francis Kane: Reflections

I took just one book home with me from this year's BEA, Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report.  It's a Graywolf Press title—Graywolf, a first-rate house responsible for such first-class books as Alyson Hagy's latest, Ghosts of Wyoming.  I don't think you can go wrong with a Graywolf book, and I can say, with absolute confidence, that you will not go wrong with The Report.  Smart, compelling, riveting, whole, The Report is a book about history and those who write it, about blame and the consequences of diffusing it.  It is a novel based on the real-life horror of a night in March, in London, in 1943, when 173 people seeking protection from a possible air raid, died on the steps of the shelter that was supposed to protect them.  No bomb had gone off.  No bones were broken.  All of those who died died from asphyxiation—from an inexplicable pile-up on the stairs.

How in the world had it happened?

Laurence Dunne, a magistrate, is asked to find out.  Systematically, he interviews 80 survivors.  He listens to those who blame themselves and those who cannot be honest and writes a report so novelistic, so empathetic, that it haunts him and others for a long time hence.  In Kane's perfectly well-imagined novel, that event, those survivors, and Dunne himself materialize, devastate, haunt.  I was a most captivated reader, a reader Kane kept wholly spellbound from the first sentence to the very last.

Kane notes that she got the idea for this book some ten years ago, and that her two children were born during its creation.  I believe that.  There's so much wisdom here, so many important thoughts quietly but compellingly collected.  Kane is a transparent writer, working with absolute clarity, allowing her reader to see straight through to the complicated heart of things.

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Ghosts of Wyoming by Alyson Hagy/Beth Kephart Review

I don't have a photograph of Wyoming, for I've never been there. I don't have a picture of my friend Alyson Hagy, either, though she was here one evening for a Christmas-time meal, and I have in my head the rigor and intelligence of her stories; I have in my mind's eye an image of her studying the books on my shelves; I remember that I had a terrible migraine before she arrived and her presence cured me of it like a pill.

I write of Alyson Hagy on this blog—of her talents as a teacher and leader within the University of Wyoming, of her talent for friendship, too. But today I am writing to herald Alyson's sixth book, a collection of eight wildly specific and original short stories called Ghosts of Wyoming. I'm heralding her relentless drive to present the Wyoming she knows—its tricksters, equivocaters, promoters, miscreants, and scamps; its legends and tall tales; its bird-afflicted weather; its eye-grazing, heart-bruising beauty.

The stories here take many forms and live inside several eras. Bad is not always bad and good is not what it seems. A boy steals a pup. A man goes missing. A girl does wicked thievery with bones. A reverend out in the wilderness can't decide what should be trusted. A woman on the edge of hysteria decries the loss of a moth. Men talk—trainmen and oilmen, a near-scholar. Women love hard and return as ghosts. The sky is made of howl and chirp and "the lusty flute song of larks," and "ravens...gliding with the confidence of the undiminished and unfed."

"You know why people come here, Livvy," one character observes. "They like how the mountains look. They like the wild creatures they see, the fantasy that we can change our lives." I don't know for sure how long Alyson, raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has been making Laramie, Wyoming, her home. But anyone reading Ghosts, due out from Graywolf Press in February, will recognize, on every page, a woman and a writer who knows where stories lie and how to tell them. They'll find a woman gifted with a preponderance of odd and unfamiliar phrases, with metaphors that wild your mind and make a foreign place familiar.

I am blessed by many things in this life. One of those things is Alyson Hagy.

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