when you find your name in The New Yorker

Katrina Kenison is the one who told me. My name, she said, on the back of The New Yorker.

Are you sure? I said.

Because everybody who reads this blog knows how much I love The New Yorker. How much respect I have for its pages. How I have dreamed (but it is only a dream) of being New Yorker worthy.

Just as everybody who reads this blog knows how much I love Alice McDermott, with whom I sat, long ago, at the 1998 National Book Awards. She won that evening, for Charming Billy, and I joined the roaring crowds. I have been a huge admirer ever since—of her storytelling, her language, and her humanity.

My words in this ad on the back of The New Yorker? Needless to say, it is an honor.

For those who might have missed them, my thoughts about Someone are here. Yes. I loved it.

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Someone/Alice McDermott: Reflections on a Perfect Novel

I have had this galley of this most important book for several days. I hadn't read it for this simple reason: reading it once was the surest way I knew of never again being able to read it for the first time. This is an Alice McDermott book. This is an occasion.

Yesterday a friend called, asked what I was doing; I said "reading." She asked if there was really anything new that I could learn from books, having read and written about "thousands" in my life (I've no idea how many books I've actually read; I'm quoting now from a conversation). Oh, I said (a rushing oh). I learn every time. Good or bad, I read, I learn.

Reading Alice McDermott, I learn about time. I learn about how an entire life can be surged forward and reclined against. I learn about the power of those two or three knowing nods to the future, about the devastation of a quiet recoil, about the intimacy between a reader and the page when a character privately reassess the past. I learn about economy and also about largesse, but mostly, mostly, every time I read Alice McDermott, I am reminded of the great complexity of "simple lives," of the small heroics that make us human, of the heartaches we cannot defend against. I am reminded that there are writers among us who know. Not a single gimmick in an Alice McDermott book. Not a single nod to the commercial antics of our time. Walk down her Brooklyn street. Meet Marie. Watch her tumble toward love, grasp toward knowing, learn about comfort, give it, grow old. When you do this thing you will have opened your heart to the strangers among us.

You are expecting proof. It's on every single page. No sentence anything but perfect. No scene anything but seamless. No detail superfluous.

Here, for example, on an early page, we meet the blind umpire on Marie's Brooklyn street. An older Marie is remembering a younger Marie here, and somehow McDermott gives us the sense of both perspectives at once. But also here is not just a singularly interesting character and a quietly compelling scene. Here, in this paragraph, are the seeds for the devastation yet to come. Nothing superfluous, as I said.

Bill Corrigan wore a business suit and polished shoes, and although there was a glitch in the skin around his eyes, a scarred shine in the satiny folds of his eyelids, although he was brought to the kitchen chair every afternoon when the weather was fine by his mother, whose arm he held the way a bride holds the arm of a groom, it was to him that the boys in the street appealed whenever a dropped ball of an untimely tag sent both teams, howling and cawing, to his side of the street. They were there now: shouting into each other's face, throwing their caps on the ground, and begging Bill Corrigan to make the call. He raised one of his big, pale hands, and suddenly half the boys spun around, and the other half cheered. Walter Hartnett rocked backward in despair, raising his good foot in the air.

Very few people know what writing is in the way that Alice McDermott knows what writing is. But every reader should know her work.

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It's Not Love, It's Just Paris/Patricia Engel: Reflections

Anyone who had the privilege of reading Patricia Engel's collection of stories, Vida, knew for sure: a new true writer had emerged, and attention was to be paid. Oh, the sentences, I kept murmuring, as I read. Oh, the heartbreaking sentences. (My thoughts on Vida are here.)

At the BEA two weeks ago, I came home with just three books—Someone by Alice McDermott (the immaculate surprise of that book shared here), Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, and It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel. Who could need more?

Engel's first novel is the story of an American girl (though indeed, for this is an Engel tale, and Engel is deeply entrenched in many languages and multiple cultures, the heroine is a Colombian American girl) in Paris. Lita del Cielo lives in the "House of Stars" under the care of an aging countess and in the company of other young women with international blood and sure ideas about love. She is a faithful daughter, a skipped-two-grades academic, a girl who wears her one good dress to a safe length below her knees. She is the sort of person who can judge the quality of a friendship by the silence it can withstand, and while the girls in the house go about their notching affairs, Lita waits, ghostwrites term papers for a sustaining fee, helps a young waiter perfect his English. Mostly she watches, and she listens, tries to make sense of the lessons brought to the worn down, still-haughty home of the stars.

Here, for example, Lita is having a conversation with a housemate with whom "you weren't required to respond in order for her to have a full conversation."

"But you see, men are born guilty Women are built to forgive and love and forgive all over again. Men are built for war and because we live in mostly peaceful times, they just turn on themselves. My point is you have to learn to get through life without being sentimental about boys because they are never worth the trouble."

But of course Lita does find a boy—imperfect and mysterious, capable of silence, slow to assume and long to love. He is the son of a notorious politician. His mother is dead and he is ill. He lives by himself near the sea, finds city noise and dust endangering. Lita has only come to Paris for a year. She has come certain that she will return to the family who needs her, but Paris changes everyone and Paris changes Lita.

This is a book filled with incomparable sentences, a book so international in its aura, so mysterious in its trajectory, so veiled and so specific at once. Yearning is a universal language. Paris just after Princess Diana's death, in a house of many languages, through the eyes of an unchastened soul, is resolutely particular. I read in awe of Engel's ability to bridge so seamlessly between the two—to burrow so deeply into the story itself and to transcend with great swaths of sudden truth.

My galley is wildly dog-earred. Here, below, one of many additional passages that I loved:

And then I understood that between us there was a common spore of isolation that grew in my overpopulated home and within his quiet cottage. We were young but we'd both grown well into our loneliness. We were the kind of lonely that wasn't ashamed to be so. A lonely without self-penitence.

It's Not Love, It's Just Paris is set to launch on the same day—August 6th—as Handling the Truth, a book birthday we also share with Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya, whose San Francisco I've observed from the balcony of his home in the hills.

I'm thinking cake. In the meantime, huge congratulations to Patricia Engel, for doing it, again.

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