EXIT WEST and all the stories that have lately revived my hope

Mohsin Hamid's new novel, Exit West, holds the whole of our world on its blue (star-specked) palm. The story of hard-fisted regimes and near apocalypse, escapees and plundered landscapes, dark doors and possibilities, Exit West is the story, too, of People as illuminated by two particular people: the young lovers Nadia and Saeed. They meet at a time of crumbling infrastructures, raging drones, ID searches, random violence. They take up the journey (through these dark, mysterious, escape-hatch doors) together. They live among other immigrants in foreign lands in subsistence circumstances, and they try (they both do try) to retain the feelings they believe they have for one another throughout the raw rub of it all.

Global and intense and palpable, sprinkled with this necessary, never-intrusive magic, Exit West is hard-hitting and heart-hurting, but never, for an instant, cruel.

I will never look at another image of a dislocated refugee and not see Nadia or Saeed or their fellow travelers. I hope every American reads this book, every European, too, and that we all have the same response. That we act on it.

Over and over and over again, Hamid smashes the conundrum of love and life, home and homelessness with long, binary sentences and short words. He writes philosophy into action and within action he posits tenderness. He makes powerful use of the conjunction and the multiple, the crowded and the stop:

That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl's Court, or near the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police officers and volunteers, who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting that night.

Two pages later, returning his focus to the two characters that shoulder his novel, Hamid writes:

Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.

How lucky I have been to spend the last few weeks reading and re-reading books that teach me. Books that have forced me to ask myself what it is I think I am doing with my writing life...and what I should be doing. Paul Lisicky's The Narrow Door (unspool time to find the truth). Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others (the novel as document, the document as story). George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (be unafraid to do the things that will, inevitably, be questioned). Paulette Jiles's News of the World (make history now, make details crackle). Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons (there are always many sides to one story). Debbie Levy's Soldier Song (picture books, the best of them, are as smart and as well-researched as anything on the adult table). Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City (memoir is as much about what you've thought as about what you've done). Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow (nothing wrong, nothing at all, with a good, old-fashioned hero set down inside a good, old-fashioned, finely told story).

Don't despair, my friends. Great art is still among us.

Today I creep back into my own writing life. Edits are arriving on a book due out next summer. Having been emptied and defeated for so long by the news, I am bolstered, ready, hopeful, again, about the power of story.

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at Penn today: do you strive against loneliness? words from Beryl Markham

Before my students set out across the campus with camera in hand today, they reflected, among other things, on these words from Beryl Markham, quoted in Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.

I know that I have a good class when the students are willing to disagree, are eager to look at shades and nuances, work their own experience into the equation. I have a very good class.

But what do you think? Does Beryl Markham, in this passage from West with the Night, speak for you? Or is loneliness not quite as abhorrent as she makes it out to be?

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents—each man to see what the other looked like.  

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what makes a book matter right now?

Bestseller alchemy is a mystery.  Publishing houses spend millions of dollars on books that go nowhere.  They reject, repeatedly until a final sighing yes, the books that go onto become book-club institutions and household names.  J.K. Rowling, Rebecca Skloot, and Kathryn Stockett know a little something about this.  Jaimy Gordon (National Book Award winner for Lord of Misrule) and Paul Harding (Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers) would likely confess to not having seen their own fame coming.

My students are reading Vivian Gornick this week, whose The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is a must-read for memoir writers.  In her concluding pages she offers up an idea about what shapes the future for books.  She offers no formula, of course—that isn't possible.  But I like what she has to say about intersections. 

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading.  How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. When a book of merit is trashed upon publication, or one of passing value praised to the skies, it is not that the book, in either case, is being read by the wrong or the right people, it is that the wrong or the right moment is being intersected with.  This book, good or great thought it may be, sinks like a stone because what it has to say cannot be taken in at the moment; while that book, transparently ephemeral, is well received because what it is addressing is alive—now, right now—in the shared psyche.  

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Penetrating the familiar with Ladysmith Black Mambazo

"Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given.  On the contrary, it is hard, hard work."

— Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

We're talking about we get there today at Penn.  Among other things, we're listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo to learn what isicathamiya can teach us about our own weather, and about the way we perceive it.

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The doomedness of theories of creative writing

As the sun tries to rise on Philadelphia today, I pack my bags for the University of Pennsylvania, English 135, where Vivian Gornick's most essential The Situation and The Story:  The Art of Personal Narrative will be our partial guide.  It is my guide, as well.  From the final pages:

Any attempt to teach writing ... out of anything other than that which the teacher knows intimately rather than theoretically is also doomed.  Theories of creative writing I find even more damaging than questions of craft.  It seems to me that as teachers of writing, we are there only to make the widest and most thoughtful sense of our own experience.  Out of that alone comes useful exploration. 

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