She used to say I moved
too slowly toward change.
Maybe that was a fear
of love I was too selfish
to follow, a fear of a new
bravery, a yielding
I wouldn't accept. An opened
door I neither ignored
nor entered--at least not
when she was ready,
which was always too
early for me. And with every
door, with every late step
I took, I thought,
I could've been this
happy years ago.
Life is first wide, then narrow.
The sky is higher when you are a child.
You put your hands to so much, knowing by feel.
Remember that, navigating your dear path.
*
Life is first wondrous, then wonderful.
One thing after another dazzles the child mind.
We mature into refinement, into numbness,
waiting for that one thing that arrests the eye.
*
Life is first given, then imagined.
The mind makes a world its own,
the body reaches for that mind world.
Inward, outward, a dance of hope.
*
Life is first wide, then narrow.
The sky is higher for a child, who knows
by putting his hands to things, who grows
to walk his narrow path on his own.
*
Life is first wonderful, then wondrous.
One thing after another stuns us
into laughter & leaping. Children are numb
to nearly nothing. We grow into that.
*
Life is first given, then imagined.
All the body has is limits & gravity,
a narrow path rather than a story,
once upon our time.
Inspired by one of the last lines of this poem.
She was always the tough one,
always awake on long drives,
always endured injury quietly.
Now she moves gingerly,
a cane in the house,
a walker in the trunk.
There are weekly updates
on medicine & therapy,
on diet & sleep.
Sunday afternoon she watched
me & my son playing football
in the street,
my boy a flash
of sweat & purpose.
Pure boy.
"You're lucky to have a dad who plays."
He nodded, uncomfortable
with emotions that he feels
needn't be spoken.
She plucked a dead magnolia leaf
from the sidewalk, pivoting
back into the house.
I’ve walked these streets before, decades ago. We’d drive the six hundred miles south for Christmas, for funerals, for two weeks every summer while Dad served his time in Army Reserves. What I remember of the streets isn’t much — the panaderia with the best cochinitos, the two story building pockmarked by time where Papa Romulo ran his tailor shop & his cantina, the shops we never entered, the shops that used to be. With every walk down those dusty hot sidewalks, I wanted to get back to the house of my mother’s childhood, back to the pomegranate tree & the screen door with the bell, back to our BB gun and the mesquite trees with their undulating thick branches shading the packed dirt. I haven’t been down those Rio Grande streets in decades.
As I’ve said elsewhere, there’s little there for me now but dusty graves & deep memories. My mother’s childhood home, the only home I knew there, has bougainvillea where the salt cedar once soared, tin foil on the front windows. My brother Raul has the aluminum lawn chairs from the back yard, chairs sunbaked over time from candy-apple red to rust. The display cabinets from Mama Tulitas’s store are in my parents’ garage, once stocked with fresh bread, now packed with gardening equipment & hundred-year-old hat blocks. Not everything is lost.
Recently, I zoomed in on these Rio Grande City streets — or to be more precise, on an alley where my great grandfather Papa Pedro worked as a blacksmith. Click by click, I walked those streets, found that alley, advancing by digital leaps, the camera of all things on a tab nestled between a recipe for Dijonnaise grilled chicken breasts & student submissions waiting to be graded, the camera lens advancing fifty feet at a time in pixelated bursts, landing on sharp focus high-def ground. Getting closer & closer to the terrain if not the hour of this time of hard labor, of honest labor, of manhood, of Mexicanness I never knew. A daydreamer at heart, I don’t need much to conjure up a living laughing version of the strong, serious, mustached man in the photo (one of two we have of him). The digital search / journey awakened nothing my mother hadn’t already shared decades before with the five of us kids walking through the Valley heat, interrupted by her childhood friends running errands. We rolled our eyes. They ignored our boredom, relishing the blessing, the surprise, the luxury platicando. A pin was always in a map somewhere. Now I had seen it.
I went looking for it again in the Library of Congress and found a Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Rio Grande City from May 1894 (one of two the LOC hosts). Even back then, the town had a meticulous geometric order. Sanborn marks the equidistant east-west water lines running beneath a land where water means citizenship, where water means life, where water is a commodity almost as valuable to find as natural gas. Each lot in nearly equal proportions with its neighbors, each street in rectilinear dignity with / apart from the others. From this gods-eye view, Sanborn commemorates each owner shaping the stuff of creation, innovating & compromising within the perimeter of their respective lots, making this little postage stamp of a world their own.
Some homes built as far from the “traffic” as possible. Some buildings (businesses, clearly) constructed as close to the street as safety & city codes will allow. Sanborn color-coded the maps, a different color for each material. Tile. Stone. Wood frame. Brick. Sanborn Fire Insurance imagined a plan for one particular kind of disaster, the kind of disaster that struck one mile west of where the blacksmith shop once stood, that struck my mother’s childhood home on Fairgrounds Road at the Rio Grande City home I knew, that struck July 2, 1981, my twelfth birthday. I had spent that night fifteen miles away at my paternal grandparents’ house in Roma. My great grandfather was long dead. I don’t know where the water lines were in 1981, but I see now where they were in 1894. The time of Sanborn’s map was a time of caution, of preparedness, a time of knives & saws, of clothes lines & woodstoves, of hand carved existences.
My great grandfather had strong rough hands moving quickly in the heat, moving briskly from fire to anvil. He bent iron. It was right there, just outside the frame of the map.
A single feather sprouts
from the otherwise uninterrupted carpet
of manicured uniform crayon green.
As I get closer, an eruption of feathers,
long grey quills from wings,
tiny tufts from once-full breasts.
Was it on the way home?
Did it hear the hawk
in its assured glide?
It is the killing season again.
It always is.
Second to the last line from Hanif Abdurraqib's "Welcome to Heartbreak."
For most of human history, if you wanted to make a point, you had to push. A stylus into clay. A chisel into stone. In certain cases, you could be more delicate. A brush onto a canvas. A quill onto parchment. Horsehair & feathers—something must be shorn, something must be lost, for something to be remembered. The meaning is made by hand. A sometimes slow, near-permanent process of setting & resetting, replenishing & depleting the ink, stroke by stroke. Until 1795.
A scientist serving under Napoleon invented the pencil during perhaps the bloodiest of years in the bloody French Revolution. It was complicated—well, maybe for a scientist it wasn’t. Graphite is one of the softest solids. Mix graphite with water & clay, heat the compound in a kiln to 1900 degrees, and you can shape it however you like. Or, in the case of the scientist Nicholas-Jacques Conte, you shape it so that it slides just so into a kind of wood sheath. Your hand stays clean, your pocket stays clean, and ideally, you can write to your heart’s desire, can write as long as the graphite holds.
Oh, and it’s graphite, not lead. They mistook it for lead when they found huge deposits of the stuff in Bavaria in the 1400s. Huge deposits of a kind of pure carbon. Beneath fields, beneath farms, tucked into hills & caves, humble walls & surprising depths, mounds & chunks of rough dark fragile stuff.
This stuff (soon to be called graphite) was wholly unlike the earth itself, the earth which took on the qualities of the seasons & the elements—earth could become mud, could become soil, could become dust. You depended on the earth’s variety. You could even come to appreciate its smell, knowing that the scent of the earth hinted at what emerged from the womb of its wet darkness year after year. Not this. This medieval discovery of dull gray deposits wasn’t quite dross, wasn’t quite precious, wasn’t lead.
You couldn’t build on it, you couldn’t plant in it, you couldn’t eat it, you couldn’t yet sell it. You couldn’t help but notice how persistent it was, how it filled in the lifelines & love lines in the palms of your hands, how it worked its way into the finest of swirls at the tips of your fingers, how it wrote so much on you without ever seeming to diminish in itself. (If you could keep it from breaking in your hands.)
Maybe they discovered by accident that this pure carbon could mark things easily, like chalk. Wrapping this graphite with string, humble shepherds began marking their flock. Imagine a single shepherd arising from under a tree, the grazing hours of his slow woolly charge over. Imagine him counting nine ten eleven and again with wide eyed urgency NINE TEN ELEVEN, counting & shouting, counting & shoving the sheep still to recount until he confirms one sheep missing. Imagine him leaving the rest behind, at the mercy of the elements, at the mercy of the wolves, leaving the rest behind to go quickly into the open country, seeking the lost sheep. And when he finds his sheep, sees his mark on its wool, he sighs, thanks the heavens, gathers him onto his shoulders, gently chiding the lost sheep with each joyful step back to the flock. We all know where we belong. We all know that such a line can bring order, can shape the stuff of creation. (All lines can.)
Lines on wood, lines on rock, lines on the ground. Not to decorate but to demarcate. To separate this from that. (A kind of godly labor—the god of Genesis creates largely by means of separations & distinctions: night from day, light from dark, the sea from the land, one fruit-bearing tree from the rest of the garden. A divine story written only once.)
Kids must have played with it. Centuries ago, children barefoot, dressed in rough tunics their mothers made, a thin rope for a belt, soft hide for shoes. Centuries ago, when the wild was closer to home, when it was maybe just a stone’s throw from threshold. Kids would go into the hills, knelt at the edges of mysterious blackness, an older kid dragging his hands along it & holding them up to his little sister, hands stained through & through. They rubbed it on each other’s faces for fun, or maybe they grabbed a pinecone-sized chunk of it to throw against a tree, to smash against some of the flat stones that served as staircases up the hill. They got scolded when they got home for sullying their clothes (or they didn’t because to live in the 1400s was to be filthy most of the time). Children for centuries, and centuries.
Until eventually other kids altogether less free rubbed sleep from their eyes while they packed pencils in zippered school supply bags. Pencils & sharpies, scissors & protractors, highlighters & post-it notes. A tool kit for a developing mind, all tools tucked into the same backpack with their crustless sandwiches & sliced fruit. And one tool that Nicholas-Jacques Conte hadn’t considered in his original pencil. These school children’s pencils are balanced—a blade-sharpened black point and a soft tongue-pink eraser.
For sixty years, pencils were practical & variable. Different densities, different sizes, different shapes, most with some sort of flat side so that they would not roll off a surface when set down. Decades of rough drafting. But the stakes were still high—the tracks of the pencil’s journey, the record of the marriage between mind & hand was near-permanent. Sometimes, some pencillers used bread to massage their lines into oblivion, like a magician stroking a bright coin against their flat palm before the yearned-for disappearance. Perhaps with a damp cloth, you could perform a similar magic, smudging away the hasty word choice, wiping clean the erroneous sum, removing altogether the evidence of a human mind erring & backtracking, resounding the mental depths & pivoting toward the true, the right. A pencil’s work held fast. Until 1858.
A stroke of not-original not-genius: A writing point on one end, and on the other end, the polar opposite. A piece of rubber that would also be sharpened, depending on the error to remove. Hymen Lipman wrote / wrought a tool of & for human ingenuity at its messiest, a tool of re-vision most deliberate, the very tool we know today. In an ironic turn of historical events, Lipman had his patent erased by the Supreme Court, the great righter of wrongs, the great writer of rights & wrongs. Lipman had no legal claim to a patent, having merely merged two inventions; Lipman created nothing so that we could create anything.
So we do.
Following the dotted lines that guide us letter by letter into shapes of meaning, words we’ve only heard. And a few years later, connecting dot 3 to dot 4, bringing shape to the empty quadrant of the kids’ meals menu. And a few years later, showing your work—substitution & misstep, reduction & inversion—narrowing line by line till the barest most declarative of meanings, X equals, the end to the erratic path from chaos to value. Later still, entering testing rooms, sitting for hours with everyone across the country your age, a bored adult at the front, while we bubble in our futures, recognizing that there is often no correct answer but merely the best possible answer. Until things really matter.
And you reach for a pen.
*
*
*
[shavings, that is, pieces that never got sharpened or that didn’t fit in the sharpened draft]
Pencil shavings. Pencil apron—the part that’s the wood part that your index finger rests on. It’s called the “apron” of the pencil. I didn’t know it needed a name
The point of no return—we really use only half a pencil’s full resources before we throw it away. A pencil, though, If you’re careful, a pencil lead can last 731 miles.
St Luke’s Catholic School—they had NFL themed pencils at the store. They wouldn’t let you choose your team. You’d give the lady the money, and she made a big f7cking deal about reaching into the box without looking so that nobody could accuse her of letting you actually choose the pencil you wanted. One time I gave her my money, and she locked her eyes on mine, reached into the box & handed me a Tampa Bay Buccaneers pencil. In the mid-70s, Tampa Bay had the worst team colors in the entire NFL, and I was so pissed off, and Jimmy D came up behind me and laughed about it. Jimmy was a rich only child asshole whose mom had bought him a whole dang box of Dallas Cowboys pencils, whose mom one time asked my mom to have me come spend the night at his house, and I didn’t want to, but my mom told his mom I would, so I did, and at the end of this annoying afternoon & evening trying to have fun with this kid in his huge house with loads of toys & things, we move over to his bedroom to go to sleep, and I see that he had this huge room all to himself with a bed all to himself, and I’m coming from a house where I share a room & a bed with my brother, and Jimmy’s bed has satin sheets like a girl, and I was so confused because he was such a loudmouth bully, such a little prick, but he had these satin sheets all paisley patterned in royal purple and forest green, and I thought This jerk oh my G-d, and I just couldn’t wait to go to school the next Monday to tell everybody that he slept on satin sheets, but as I got into the bed I couldn’t figure out why this whole thing was weird, and I worried that maybe I alone would think it was weird, and I figured on second thought maybe I didn’t want people to know that I spent the night there because we weren’t really friends, and I realized that my mom pitied him, that my mom knew he was a little prick, and I’m there in this big satin bed with Jimmy, realizing that his mom must have known he was a prick with no friends, which was why she reached out to my mom because I was known as a nice smart boy (I was a nice, smart boy), so I fell asleep, having prayed to myself & having decided that I wouldn’t tell anybody about his sheets, and now here he was laughing at me, and I wanted to shove the pencil into his ear, so I imagined doing it & him crying & bleeding. That all happened. It happened just like that.
Pencils tucked behind ears, one of the most natural resting places for a thing unnatural
Version 1 of the paragraph beginning “Kids must have”: [version 1] Maybe kids played with it. Centuries ago, children barefoot, dressed in rough tunics their mothers made, a thin rope for a belt, soft leather shoes. Centuries ago, when the wild was closer to home, when it was maybe just a stone’s throw from threshold. Maybe kids went into the hills, knelt at the edges of mysterious blackness, an older kid dragging his hands along it & holding them up to his little sister, hands stained through & through. Maybe they rubbed it on each other’s faces for fun, maybe they grabbed a pinecone-sized chunk of it to throw against a tree, to smash against some of the flat stones that served as staircases up the hill. Maybe they got scolded when they got home for sullying their clothes, or maybe they didn’t because to live in the 1400s was to be filthy most of the time. Maybe.
Standard yellow pencils. The hexagonal design — what other things come in groups or sides of six?
The Slaves of Solitude has a fantastic pedigree. First, it’s a British novel published by New York Review of Books, which does not miss, especially with out-of-print or reissued British novels. Also, it’s written by Patrick Hamilton, a novelist I didn’t know but whose plays I do know–one of which became the movie Gaslight, another of which became the movie Rope. So based on those plays, with The Slaves, I expected a drama of full-contact relationships. The novel delivered.
Centered on the unfortunately comically named Enid Roach, Hamilton’s The Slaves probes a facet of WWII-era London that is neither very threatened nor very heroic. The war is a persistent inconvenience for the middle-aged Miss Roach, unable to get certain creature comforts like stockings or makeup, yet the war brings the excitement of American servicemen, the urgency of blackouts each night, and the relief of tea-room drama. Hamilton places Miss Roach in a not-luxurious boarding house where she is endures the most passive aggressive insults imaginable by a sixties-or-older bachelor and a German emigre flirt. Furtive makeout sessions & long loud evenings in pubs with a sort of schlubby American cad give Miss Roach something to dream about. I’m not making it sound as funny or as just or as hopeful as it is, but that’s because Hamilton makes us laugh at, criticize, and yearn for Miss Roach, sometimes all on the same page, in the same scene. The resolution is what you’d hope for.
*
Decades ago in the book fair of a small academic conference, I came across a table devoted to an independent publisher, Paul Dry Books. Behind the table was … Paul Dry. I asked him what the gateway drug to his publishing house was, and he directed me to Walter De La Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget, a novel so good that I often return to Dry’s website, searching for something new & unknown. Something like Stefan Żeromski’s The Homeless.
The novel begins in high spirits, in high culture, in high times–Dr. Tomasz Judym, visiting Paris from Poland, hears an old woman speaking Polish to what he guesses (correctly) is her two granddaughters and their governess. The conversation is so effortless, the erudition so sincere that you expect something romantic to happen soon. Instead, Żeromski directs Judym back to Poland, where he makes triumphs & missteps both personal & professional. He is a wise & principled young man around knowing & skeptical old me; he is a man of deep feeling around men, women, & children too impoverished to feel much of anything; he attracts the love of a beautiful & sacrificing woman but … Well, you’ll have to see. It is a heart-enriching & heart-breaking book about how rootless many of us are. (I don’t doubt that the title is true to the original, but I feel like these characters are home-poor, or rootless rather than what we think of when we think of homeless.)
*
This blog continues to be a NYRB-stan site. Loved and Missed is the first novel I’ve read by Susie Boyt. Most of the novel is told in the voice of Ruthie, the mother of Eleanor, who is the mother of Lily. Like most British novels I’ve read about families, I loved the psychological candor of this one, loved the way it gleaned pathos from the banal & from the everyday. And Ruthie’s story is so many stories in one.
It’s a story about women in the world & with each other. It’s about parenthood in all its joy & anxiety. It’s about the consequences & costs of addiction without ever descending into melodrama or narrative slumming. It’s a story about how quickly & how permanently the veneer of sin & vice gets removed from personal shortcomings & betrayals, to the point that these choices become like the furniture of our lives, things we navigate around & grown comfortable in & with. It’s a coming of age & a … well, I don’t want to spoil anything. An utterly human & surprisingly hopeful novel. If you like Mike Leigh movies, you’ll love this novel.
*
In There’s Always This Year On Basketball and Ascension, Hanif Abdurraqib does all the things you’d expect a certified genius to do. He offers you a unique personal lens on a subject you thought you knew–maybe that subject is basketball, or LeBron James, or Abdurraqib himself. He exorcises demons without descending into self-pity or badboy braggadocio. He weaves culture with self, faith with race, place with eternity. If it sounds like I’m speaking vaguely & broadly, it’s because it’s difficult to do justice to what Abdurraqib does with all of his poetry, all of his journalism, all his writing. Id’ highly recommend the audiobook for this one–even though I wish I had the book itself nearby so that I could underline things to luxuriate over later.
*
I really really tried with this one that had long been in my queue. I patiently (but never really joyfully) hung in for all its stops & starts & nudge nudge wink wink “playfulness”. About halfway through, I decided that I might save this one for the nursing home.
*
Our school librarian is a master at finding high-interest, issue-infused, stylistically engaging books by living authors. True Biz by Sarah Nović is just such a book.
Centering on three characters at a school for the deaf (an adult administrator, a teenage boy, a teenage girl), this book guides the reader through challenges unique to deaf people and challenges common to most people: Cochlear implants & divorce, feeling isolated & feeling embraced, not being understood & being understood / “heard”, navigating an adult world that sees you as broken & navigating a friendship that sees you for you, etc.
Nović recreates the variety of experiences on this campus-under-threat. CODA interacting with the deaf, the deaf interacting with hearing medical professionals, nearly (?) deaf people interacting with fully deaf people. In order to bring these varieties to life, Nović deploys dialogue as one might expect as well as italicized passages indicating when characters are communicating ASL (and even via BASL). Moreover, in regular nonfiction interludes, Nović provides succinct historical context that informs & deepens but never derails the narrative. Most helpful are the passages explaining syntax, verb tense, dialogue, and much more in ASL , passages illustrated by visual artist Brittany Castle.
This is one I can’t wait to recommend & teach again.
Her hair is lathered & twisted into the unicorn peak she likes.
I lean over, and she slaps the bathwater, giggling at my dripping face.
I mock-scowl and reach for the bright red bowl buoyed in the undulating foam.
We test the water from the tap before she leans her head back, her throat all a-glimmer,
her tiny shoulders perfectly round—I shield her eyes with one hand, pour with the other.
Later, a spiral of water at her feet, the clean girl floats, arms outstretched, embracing it all.
Another cherita, using the same image I used for this one.
And in the end, things happened quickly.
After years of protracted silences
& painstakingly unmended fences,
we both woke to an email finalizing
the divorce.
Neither of us knew that this would be
the wished-for day. She woke in our house,
I in my shabby place, grousing
internally about the other, replaying
old arguments.
And now there was nothing left
to divide, nothing to fight over.
Fees prepaid. A finally-shut door
kept us safe & far far from one
another.
On opposite sides of town,
the baristas told us,
"Have a nice day."
"You too."
"You too."
This was written for a National Poetry Month challenge, an April Fool's Day poem, something untrue. Sometimes when I write about me & my wife, I use that image, William H. Johnson, Café (ca. 1939-1940) but not always.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead won the Pulitzer in 2006. It is a patient novel that will make you wish you were the intended audience. The conceit of the novel is that the aged narrator, the reverend John Ames, is writing to his seven-year-old son. The “you” of the novel is decades from reading or understanding the story we navigate. For a novel about a man who never leaves his small hometown, Gilead is a wandering novel. It luxuriates over the smallest of domestic memories, some of Ames & his young son, some of Ames & his much younger wife before the birth of the son, some of Ames & his own father, some of the struggle for the soul of a nation during abolition. Robinson’s Ames does not move chronologically, but instead according to the whims of the heart, captured between meals & naps, sermons & visits with an old friend (also a reverend).
The novel is a thoughtful meditation on faith & family without ever sounding preachy, even when it is literally about preaching. It is a subtle almost elegy to a kind of living that few Americans might want in a part of America where few people stay, but it never descends into simple nostalgia or broad critiques of modernity. It is literally a love letter.
*
John Darnielle is the lead singer & songwriter for a band that I don’t listen to often. Eight or ten years ago, his debut novel Wolf in White Van got on my radar, and I picked up a digital copy, which I forgot about until recently. The cover gives you a sense of part of the plot, a washed-out maze. The protagonist / narrator Sean is the designer & curator of a mail-order game with nearly-infinite possibilities, some of which are subterranean. The narrative keeps several things at bay–the ultimate end of his game, for example, or the relevance of the novel’s title. The most unsettling of these mysteries is Sean’s facial disfigurement, a fact of his life so central & apparently so far back in his history that Darnielle withholds the reasons for the disfigurement.
It’s a novel that answers the whys of the lives of its isolated characters. And the answers are rooted in a certain kind of youthful rootlessness, a certain kind of youthful isolation that is the stuff of many American novels, but few novels so unforgiving in their resolutions. But Darnielle is true to his protagonist in shaping this kind of labyrinth of shared loneliness, of the power of the imagination to make despair nearly livable.
*
Years ago, a friend recommended the novel Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. I wrote back then that it was tragic how with covid it had become such a timely novel, one in which an Anishinaabe community gets cut off from the rest of the non-res world, inexplicably: no power, no communication, no food deliveries to their local store, no radio, no cell phone coverage, no internet. Rice centered that survival narrative on Evan, an able and virtuous and brave member of the community.
With Moon of the Turning Leaves, Rice returns to Evan & his community twelve years after the catastrophe. They have moved from their reservation home to a community in the north. After twelve years, food supplies & wildlife are dwindling; a search party sent out years earlier has never returned. Evan, his daughter Nangohns, his old friends Tyler & JC, and two younger community members Amber & Cal form a reconnaissance team to walk toward their ancestral home & hopefully return with news of that they can relocate. As with Crusted Snow, this novel’s language is direct, and the action is at turns both suspenseful & tender. So very clear about the fear & urgency of living in a world with dwindling resources, it’s very clear about racism & man’s inhumanity to man, and also clear–and optimistic–about the power of ceremony, of language, of family, of ancient skills & endurance of this brave and eternal people. Most reviewers name-check McCarthy’s The Road, which is a little sparse & unforgiving in comparison. Like The Road, however, Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves resolves with a hope & a rejuvenation in nature that is well-earned by its characters & welcomed by its readers.
*
Vinson Cunningham worked on the Obama campaign right out of college. His novel Great Expectations is about David, a young Black man working on a presidential campaign right out of college. The Candidate in Great Expectations is clearly Obama, although never named Obama. The unnamed celebrities, movers, & shakers populating the novel are … you wonder why Cunningham does not say “Quincy Jones” or “Jay-Z” or whoever as readily as he says, for example, “Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary said [some cringey borderline prejudiced thing]”.
David’s coming of age happens in a believable if not always smooth braiding of influences & challenges. His campaign-trail hookups give the reader a sense of the freedoms & releases endemic (perhaps) high intensity hope & change minded young people. His apprenticeship & eventual high-profile status within political fund-raising have a gossipy reality, including the indictments we should have seen coming a mile away. His personal life as a son & new father are … less skillfully narrated & woven in, often delivered as post-coital currency, his part in a quid pro quo of Cunningham’s [ahem] David‘s social climbing. Perhaps the Obama campaign has an iron-fisted NDA, but I can’t help but feel like this book would have worked better as a memoir than as a novel.
*
Greek Lessons by Han Kang is one of those novels that teaches you how to read it. I bought it because of the cover, which does not hint at the fact that it is a novel about two people struggling with being able to understand & be understood. If I had read the inside flap or any of the reviews, that two-person path would have been quite clear. Instead, I was thirty or forty pages (maybe more) into the novel before I realized that it was impossible for this to be a narrative about one person. That thirty or forty pages (maybe more) was a real trip, though, as I was imagining this as a single story.
Which, of course, in some ways, it is.
*
I am rarely disappointed by a publication from NYRB. So I was excited to pick up J.L. Carr’s novella A Month in the Country. It’s a gentle story about gentle people. Even the not-so-nice people are shaped with empathy, with care. The month in the country is devoted to a single job performed by Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War, an unveiling of sorts.
Still shell shocked, Birkin works alone over a summer to uncover, inch by inch, a medieval mural in a country church. A fellow veteran works alone in the churchyard, searching for the rumored remains of a country family’s ancestor. Reverends & station masters, daughters & wives populate this country novella with intensity & yearning. War & judgment, marriage & history, art & faith loom large, but only large enough to fit in the open hearts of Carr’s characters. A gentle, beautiful, artful, thoughtful story that [warning: cliche approaching] you will not want to end.
middleagedmiddlechild. 