The Cradle/Patrick Somerville

Yesterday I read past the beginning of Patrick Somerville's novel, The Cradle, and straight through to the end. "You enjoying that book?" my husband would stop by and ask. "I am," I'd say. "Okay," he'd say. "That's good."

(that would be book talk, in our house)

But why? Why was I enjoying this book, which can be summarized in a snap: Man gets sent out to search for an heirloom cradle by a very pregnant wife who most often gets her way. Or can it? The man is Matthew Bishop, after all, the product of a destructive, still simmering foster care childhood. The wife is Marissa, whose mother walked out on her at 15. And to find the cradle Matthew must endure one of the oddest road trips ever, a direct stumble across a coterie of strangers who are cut from a cloth full of tatters, holes, raw seams. Moreover, this isn't just Matthew's story, for there's an in-cutting tale about a woman named Renee, who has a past that may or may not intersect with Matthew's present. Or Matthew's future?

Lots of layers, then. Lots of characters. Lots of time going by, backward and forward. All in a novel that comes in at a dead even 200 pages.

"You enjoying that book?"

Yes. I'm trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out how Somerville, an accomplished short story writer, achieved so much economy despite the spill of tangents here. How he found room in his spare story to pack out so much history and want. I'm coming around to the idea that it is, in the end, about how Somerville chose to play the odd—without apology, on the one hand, without a hint of cute, on the other. The Cradle is just as funny as it is sad. And it balances rightly by its end.

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Very First Words

It often feels as if I live multiple days within the framework of one. I was writing about global health care for hours in the early part of yesterday, before I scrambled to my former middle school for the exhilarating Operation TBD, then went out with video camera and my Sony in hand to collect footage for book trailers now in progress. An hour of email, then to the high school down the road, where I was teaching a mini-course called "Very First Words." At nine-thirty I was sitting in our favorite neighborhood restaurant, chatting with one my favorite waitresses about a law school choice that she is making, her preparing to leave one life to create another.

Beginnings, then, were very much on my mind—each scene from the day let loose and catalyzed. In the class itself we asked ourselves what beginnings do and decided that, among other things, they extend an invitation, issue a caution, or lay down a bridge; they set the tone, establish a voice, and signal rhythms; they provide clues as to what is at stake; they either announce or suggest a world view. Beginnings can be bombastic or brave, ideological or explicit, dashed into place by an opening salvo of dialogue, or hushed unto themselves.

We read the prologue of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time—that streak through the dark world. We read the jiving Mum says of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. We stole within the sensory till of Marie Arana's American Chica and the hushed deep night of Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, which is not the same, at all, as reading the clinical reportage of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking or the truly (and I do mean truly) non-cinematic opening lines of Steve Lopez's The Soloist.

Then we talked about how a writer gives a piece momentum, and while fiction wasn't on the agenda last night, I had Patrick Somerville's The Cradle with me, and so I read. For look at what Somerville does here—twining disclosure and unexpired exasperation, pairing a short sentence and a long one to rush the reader in, so that there is no choice but next:

Marissa could not be comforted, and wouldn't have it any other way. The cradle for the coming baby had to be the cradle she'd been rocked in as a child; not only the cradle she'd been rocked in but the cradle that was upstairs in her bedroom when she was fifteen and her mother came home one night from the grocery store, slammed her keys down on the countertop, slammed the brown crinkled bag onto the table, looked down at the floor, looked at Marissa, took the keys, and walked out the door, this time permanently.

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