middleagedmiddlechild

Over these past few years, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches with respect to cross-generational cross-cultural novels. Not all are immigration novels, but many are. Not all are trauma narratives, but many are. Not all are novels in translation, but many are. I’m sure you can think of many. Each time I read one of these important works, I’m humbled by the care with which the novelist crafts a difficult & deep personal truth. Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin is just such a novel.

Country of Origin begins and ends with women in transition, with women looking to the skies.

In the beginning of the novel (Cairo, 1951), a young woman looks to the skies from the roof of her comparatively luxurious, comparatively safe family home. She sees a city in ruins, a country in turmoil but one that her powerful, politically-savvy father can just navigate. Despite this father’s deliberate plotting & maneuvering, the young woman imagines, seeks, and secures an escape, an independence, a vista of safety & love. Sadly, it is not a permanent one.

By the end of the novel (Colorado, 1984), a young woman looks to the skies from the safety of a mountain preserve, part art project, part insect lab. She sees nature in its beauty & savagery, a landscape that has its hopes and its cruelties. This second young woman—the only child of the first young woman—has endured much: first-gen struggles, neurodivergence, family illnesses, and family losses. Despite all of this, the young woman sees in this mountain vista—one she will soon leave—a series of possibilities. Some of them quite firm, but many of them fleeting.

It’s that kind of novel. Every generation with its hopes, every generation with just enough to survive & testify to the next one.

I read somewhere that G-d is merciful,
watching, judging, understanding, but still

merciful. The quality of mercy, I read
somewhere else, is not strained. It droppeth like ...

well, it's freely flowing. It isn't meted out
like some precious resource (though it is). 

It is worth much more than it costs to give. 
There is always a person to forgive

and a reason to forgive, if for no other reason
than that it gives you practice

in feeling how little it takes to bless
a person in error, in distress, deep in shame.

Even when we know that they'll just mess up 
again, in our mercy, we bring a part of heaven

to earth.

"kyrie eleison" means "Lord, have mercy." This was my last sprint write with my students on May 18, 2022, modeled after Clint Smith's "Meteor Shower". 

An orange shirt hangs in my closet. My second ever. 
It's got a sheen & a stretch altogether unnatural,
some space-age material that doesn't breathe & doesn't fade.

It's a golf shirt from another era, a stiff broad collar,
more buttons than are necessary, and a deep breast pocket.
There's a duck on the pocket also from another era. 

Summer 1988, north Austin, I'm watching my girlfriend shop
in a fabric store. We were young enough & in love enough
to do everything together then, even things I didn't want. 

I rotated one of those product kiosks, bored & annoyed. 
And there the duck was on a tiny card, a bright impulse
that I knew would make her smile. She sewed it right on

an orange t-shirt I wore probably once a week. Decades after 
we broke up, the shirt lost its snap, and I lost my taste for it. 
I threw away the shirt but kept the duck. I showed it to my wife,

who sewed it right on a new orange shirt. My second ever. 
Here in the closet, in the home we share, a bright sign of
how to adorn a simple thing, of how to keep love near your heart. 

_{Inspired by the love of two women and by this poem.}

Look, like most people who read Trust by Hernan Diaz, I had the immediate impression that this was going to win a lot of things. It’s a shame when that is one of my first instincts, but it wasn’t the only one. I didn’t only think “this one has a high literary fiction written all over it.” I thought about how elegantly Diaz navigates paths that are difficult to make accessible and relatable.

He writes about money in an exciting way, and in a way that doesn’t shirk moral questions. So many stories about money track the way that it can pull a person away from what they value. This novel by contrast demonstrates how money, particularly loads of money, reveals what we value.

He writes about gender in an unsettling way, a way that reveals itself the further you get into the novel, a way that reveals your own gendered perspective the further you get into the novel.

I guess I should say that this is a novel that plays with what a novel can be. It is in four parts, the latter two parts (and much of the second of the four parts) written in the voice of female characters. The further you get into the novel, the further Diaz moves you away from the fiction of part one, the kind of story that we have come to know of the novel at its best, at its peak.

There are spoilers that I’m avoiding here, as you’ve probably noticed. All I can say is that each part in each voice of Trust will have you thinking and feeling, and then thinking and feeling anew.

You wear a white shirt,
grey slacks, and a plaid tie.
A uniform of academic
seriousness & middle class.

You roll your sleeves up
& unbutton your shirt
at the neck. You feel there's little 
on the surface you choose.

You are freest on your paper route,
especially Sunday mornings 
weaving slowly from curb to curb,
crossing the double yellow line.

All four lanes yours.
The city asleep.

Inspired by Erika L. Sánchez's "The Poet at Fifteen", which was inspired by Larry Levis's "The Poet at Seventeen".  

I recently read a book that was part investigative journalism, part literary criticism, part feminist meditation, and part motherhood memoir. Now I’ve read another one.

I’m glad that I was not familiar with the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, otherwise I might have been frustrated by how often the author centers herself, or how often she calls previous evidence in the question. This herky jerky style and approach turns out to be the one that mirrors the action of writing, and wondering, and drafting better than any “straight” history or memoir could have. Surprises land hard, both personal and academic; blessings abound (just the right library recommended to find just the right centuries-old map). 

Ramqvist has several challenges in the telling. She must navigate the paths taken by three previous authors who have told their versions of the story, sometimes centuries earlier, and thus, sometimes restricted by personal connection to Marguerite, by connection to the uncle that banished her, by connection to centuries-old ideas of propriety & euphemism. She also cannot help but read her current self through the lenses of her selves — as a mother, as a Swede, as a once-young woman making risky choices with dangerous men.

What was most pleasurable about the book turned out to be this personal reading of the self. Her travels & frustrations with her teenage daughter reveal a lot about the blessings Marguerite lost as a mother, a lot about Ramqvist’s own understandings of independence and adventure, a lot about how we read the rare stories extant of famous women from centuries ago.

_{This novel was translated by Saskia Vogel, a writer whose translation of Jessica Schiefauer‘s Girls Lost is also really good.}

There is a tree at the heart 
of our house. A live oak 
reaching up in three directions, 
waist-thick master branches 
rough & mossy. 
I imagined it as mine 
the moment I saw it. 
The house would belong to all. 
The tree to me. 

From beneath it, I can see 
into each room. I don't look up 
often enough. I look around,
from window to window, 
at my family, my house 
alive & secure. A life-size diorama 
I'm growing old in. 

Every few years the tree gets trimmed, 
sometimes as much as a third of it 
gets sawn off, mulched, & driven away. 
The dust settles bright & aromatic, 
a sandy pattern within 
the ridges of the roots. 
The canopy lifted, 
the shade dappled anew.  

And my tree bounces back, 
quickly dense again with leaves, 
stretching up imperceptibly, 
inch by delicate inch over 
the chimney, over me. 
I sit, book & wine at hand. 
Breathing deep & waiting 
to be called back inside, 
back home. 

I’ve seen Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française popping up on my Twitter feed for a long time. The colorized cover photo, which originally I thought was a little sentimental, turns out to be precise & appropriate. Though it’s got a cast of dozens, the heart of the novel is the drama of a man & a woman in a time we think we know well (WWII). The photo shows a man & woman of a certain age … no longer young, but still full of vigor & life & possibility, and in this case, full of uncertainty. They’re united but looking in different directions; I’d say that they’re in an embrace, except for the fact that each of them has a hand free.

It’s that kind of novel. One of uncertainties during a time of turmoil in Europe, here, in occupied France in 1940 & 1941. Nemirovsky, a Jewish novelist living in Paris, begins Suite Française with a kaleidoscopic energy. The Germans have moved from air bombing France and are marching on it, swiftly and successfully.

The opening part of the two-part novel focuses on several different families & citizens fleeing Paris with what little they have, with what little they can not bear to leave behind. Their fates are as varied and as shocking as … well, the fates of refugees in a time of war. Nemirovsky makes these continental events domestic & interpersonal — the wounds & kindnesses, the good luck & the bad fortune. The struggle for shelter & bread, for petrol & a shave.

The second part of the two-part novel focuses on a single occupied village, tracking the uneasy routines that emerge over months. Soldiers billeted in private homes; French officials compelled to (& enjoying the safety) of collaborating with the occupying German forces; children & survivors of the Great War dazzled openly & quietly (respectively) by the precision & strength of the Germans. And finally the women, performing obedience and politeness, while meditating in interior monologues about the beauty and natural novelty of young men in the village — their village’s men having left for war months and months earlier. Nemirovsky centers the drama of part two on the newlywed Bruno (a German officer skilled at music and eager to make the occupation civilized) and the newlywed Lucile (a girl from the forests waiting for a husband that doesn’t love her to return, enamored with the walks & talks, the talent & promise of Bruno).

Nemirovsky meant for this to be a five-part series. She was arrested in 1942  “and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.” As a result, the novel ends with an unintended verisimilitude — none of the characters know and the author cannot hint at what is in store for these characters, for their way of life on part two’s last pages, set in July 1942 as the Germans leave the village for the Russian front.

I have heard great things about Betty Smith’s autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn all my life—the book and the movie. I finally got around to this readable, accessible, emotionally & historically nimble story.

To say that it’s a coming of age story is accurate, to a point, as accurate as it is to say that it’s a family story or a bootstraps story or a … well, we’d call it historical fiction now, but it was written originally with the psychological & emotional precision that the best stories have.

Betty Smith shapes the protagonist Francie & her family through the lens of what Toni Morrison once called Homeric fairness. That is, it is a story told bravely & honestly, a growing up ennobled & complicated by surprising empathy & honesty. Francie endures the fact that she is less loved by her mother than her brother is — but Smith depicts the mother chides her disarmingly to the effect of, “Oh, honey, don’t make a fuss — you know that he needs my love & support more than you do.” And you believe the mother. Francie bristles at the indignities & consequences of her father’s drunkenness — but Smith also centers the father’s love & struggles, his talent & tragedy.

I could go on. There’s no single antagonist, no enemy (unless it is poverty). There is instead the ambiguities of life & the everyday heroism of love & hard work, the gentle daily blessings that get people through the persistent daily burdens & losses.

It is a beautiful & hopeful book, made all the more beautiful by the direct style (which has moving flourishes & shifts in POV) and made all the more hopeful by the realization that we are not alone, or at least not alone for long.

Every few summers
right before the kids return,
the cones & ropes come out
directing traffic somewhere else.

There's a potbellied trailer
spattered & smoking, surrounded
by men in fluorescent vests
& tarred steel toed boots.

The asphalt goes down
thick & clean, the oily heat 
rainbowing & distorting 
the new view.

Then a slower process,
stencils & block letters, 
striping & labeling: 
students & faculty,
 
visitors & diagonally reserved spots 
we hope never to need,
a reminder of the everyday horrors
that happen somewhere else. 

Years later the colors return
to the earth, as we all must.
Cracked & bubbled, a broad mottled stripe
thrown into relief by sun & time.

The lines, faded & crumbling,
can still keep us safe. 
We remember
where we belong. 

_{On April 27, I sent my students outside with their phones to return with photos of different colors. This is inspired by a color I found.}