Whether the Weather

We drove several hours and then we drove back, and the journey in between wasn't asphalt; it was weather. It was torrential, blinding rain yielding to cranberry-colored landscape (the rocks, the dust, the odd nuclearity of ice-wrapped limbs) and then everything was ice and the wheels beneath us slid and slid, toward darkness, toward blankets of snow. Returning home this morning, there was snow enough to build little snow creatures (had we the time) and slush enough to make us wonder whether we should actually attempt the half-plowed hills (were we crazy?), but after an hour of feeling like pioneers, we found ourselves on roads that again were calm, the gray lifting. Then there was a chunk of sun sitting on a throne of clouds. Then we were within a half hour of home. Then everything was familiar, our own lives again.

The point is: You can travel no more than 300 miles in one direction and experience an entire novel in weather—all the Shakespearean sturm and drang. I went a thousand places in my mind—back and forth, exhilarated, still, frightened, exasperated, awed. I remembered childhood weather. I remembered the weather from books. I thought of Faulkner again, that river rising.

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Scuttering Halt Again

Yesterday, an argument deep into the night: What is the value of work that does not reach toward and appeal to the broader spectrum—that does not, through whichever (often mysterious) mechanisms this happens, become, in its own time, popularly known? An old question, certainly not original.

There were three of us, and on the table between us sat Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a book that I am re-reading for the fourth time which, when it comes to Faulkner and me, often feels like the first time, so wrangled and new are the sentences, the phrasing, the means of disclosure.

And I kept saying, or trying to say, or wanting to say, that those who stand in the margins taking risks, who fight against all odds to get their stories heard by some one, or two right now, today, matter (that is, they, too, have meaning) because they redirect the eye and ear, force a new kind of attending, herald emergent byways.

My words useless and inarticulate, and besides, I should have simply quoted from Faulkner himself, who didn't write sentences the way others did and didn't tell stories that had (over and over) been told and who wasn't writing (I would guess) for the "average" reader, whomever that is. Who mixed up language so newly that horse and his rider got rendered in rigid terrific hiatus and scuttering halt:

They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like, on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches into a scuttering halt again.

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Collisions

I have been at work on a book off and on for two years, as I have previously posted. It's an historical novel, deeply researched, and three voices carry the plot.

Here is the lesson of a multiply voiced novel: Collisions are essential, and they should not look like coincidence. The collisions (between characters, within moments, across voices) must carry meaning. They must signify.

I work on the signifiers now. It is slow but fascinating going. I look to the masters to see how it is done—Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, and now Jayne Anne Phillips in her new novel, Lark & Termite, which got her a starred PW review, for starters, but more than that, it has Tim O'Brien saying:

What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is—so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so.

I'd love to know of other masters of collision, of when you think multiply voiced novels work.

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