Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

The Shimmer of Truth in The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

November 8, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The first night my husband read me a chapter from The Ocean at the End of the Lane by lamplight as I nursed our son, I was certain the story was more than made up. As the narrator returns to his childhood home, I could feel Neil Gaiman flashing glimpses of his childhood into the story. Something about smudging the line between truth and fiction made the book even more of a joy to read (and to listen to) as we followed the fantastic journey of a man reliving a few magical and terrible days in his childhood.

Metafictional Clues

The dedication was my first clue that this book was not as fictional as we usually consider fiction to be. Gaiman writes, “For Amanda, who wanted to know.” I could just picture his wife asking him about his childhood one night and Gaiman spinning this elaborate tale. The epigraph, from Maurice Sendak, deepens the impression that we’re reading a somewhat true story. It reads, “I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew them. It would scare them.” That epigraph also happens to capture perfectly the feeling of this entire book.

The story begins with a man (unnamed) returning to a half-remembered English hometown for a funeral. There is something so hauntingly true as Gaiman writes about answering the standard questions asked by people who knew you once. They ask about your “work (doing fine, thank you, I would say, never know how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all).” Although Gaiman never specifies what type of art the narrator makes, I felt like he was opening his soul in those lines and that coupled with the biographical similarities meant that for me the narrator could not have been anyone else but Gaiman from there on out.

In the end it’s not at all unusual for writers to put themselves in their work whether it’s gathering small observations from their daily lives, mining emotions they have felt, or drawing on actual events. But I was delighted to hear in the acknowledgements, “The family in this book is not my own family, who have been gracious in letting me plunder the landscape of my own childhood and watched as I liberally reshaped those places into a story.”

While metafiction is often defined as a work that brings attention to that work’s status as an artifact, in this case the metafictional elements were subtle enough that they made the story feel more like real life. If you’re familiar with Gaiman’s love of the fantastic, you know what a wonderful feat this is.

Shimmering Truth

The line between fiction and truth isn’t the only one Gaiman dances in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He also plays with the way memory affects truth. This starts with how memories start to unfold on the narrator as he drives to where his childhood home once stood. The story opens up and we meet a wonderful cast of characters including his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, who isn’t as young as she may seem.

I absolutely will not spoil the story for you here, but it’s interesting to note both the way certain memories and events are (almost literally) snipped out of the narrative and the way the narrator’s recollections shift (especially as the story comes to a close). Even the characters change shape between the narrator’s youthful and adult interpretations of them.

As old Mrs. Hempstock says, “Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?” Sometimes those two people are who we were then and who we are now and I’ve never seen a book capture that difference more perfectly.

Reading Aloud

Ever since my dad read my brother and me the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, I’ve loved being read to, but it’s an act that takes a lot of dedication on the part of a reader—especially when you’re dealing with novel-length works. For example, I’ve been reading Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman to my husband since April of 2013 and we started The Arabian Nights way back in 2011. So when my husband settled cross-legged on the floor of the darkened nursery and unfolded the case for his Kindle, I scarcely dared to hope that reading was on his mind. And I never thought we’d finish the whole book in under two months.

Being read to is a different (and not always positive) experience. For one thing, I couldn’t picture the names of the characters which made them seem more ephemeral to me. I also found that by not seeing the words of the text I had more trouble recalling what happened the time before.

But the upsides were so amazingly wonderful that I’m already begging my husband for the next book (and may even finish reading those other books to him someday). For one thing, that ephemeral feeling that came with not having seen the words on the page worked for this book. Because I wasn’t turning pages, I felt like I was being told the story by the person who experienced it. Secondly, because we were experiencing the book together, we’d sit after each chapter and talk through what just happened. He was reading the book for the second time and was loving seeing it new through my eyes and I was loving digging for hints and clues about what was to come.

And then there’s the experience of being read to. Each night that my husband sat on that floor I felt so surrounded by love. I can’t wait until we can share that experience with our son (in any way that we think he might remember it). For now, as I finish off the brutal mystery of The Snowman I’ll just be grateful that we can read as adult of material as we please for a few more months.

It turns out that Gaiman read The Ocean at the End of the Lane aloud to his wife each night as he was writing it. Some stories just come alive that way. We’re still looking for the perfect next book to read aloud. If you have any recommendations, I’ll gladly take them.

If you want to embark on an adventure with a Gaiman-like boy and the Hempstock family, pick up a copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Power of Family Lore in Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam

October 17, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I was delighted when my review copy of Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam arrived in the mail. Not only was I not expecting it, but I’d felt such a close connection with the film October Sky (based on Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys) that I was looking forward to learning more about his family. And the timing could not have been more perfect.

Family Epic: Novel or Memoir?

Billed as “The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator,” Carrying Albert Home is what Hickam calls a “family epic.” Coming from a family of storytellers, I’m very familiar with this genre—although I hadn’t before considered it could be a genre—and this book helped me understand what I loved so much about the novel and film Big Fish.

We’ve all been told stories of how our forefathers walked dozens of mile to school in snow up to their necks and uphill both ways. The exaggeration of these tales somehow helps us remember undercurrents of who our ancestors were. Hickam captures the spirit of family lore with the epic tale of his parents’ journey to deliver their pet alligator back to Florida.

Although the details are too good to be true, I wanted them to be, and as Homer (the elder) and Elsie encounter John Steinbeck, Communists, bootleggers, and bank robbers during their quest I felt like I was getting to know the core of those two characters—Homer who endures all and Elsie who wants to experience every possible excitement life has to offer. Although the book is packed with greater truths, I was so glad I didn’t have to care if the details of the story were accurate.

The Art of Plotting a Journey

Hickam’s folksy storytelling style and the ever-escalating events reminded me of that other Homer’s The Odyssey and like that classic work, this book is a textbook example of Aristotle’s plot arc.

The ground situation—Homer living with a restless Elsie in Coalwood with a rapidly growing alligator—turns into a story when they set on the road to deliver Albert home. Each new plot complication (the aforementioned bootleggers, bank robbers, and more) is a struggle Homer and Elsie have to overcome to get Albert back where he belongs.

What makes this book an exceedingly good example of how to structure a story, though, is how clearly you can trace not just Albert’s physical journey, but also the emotional journeys of Homer and Elsie. Hickam uses each of the plot points is a new opportunity to examine and shift their desires and the possible outcome of their love story.

If you want to get even headier about how this book exemplifies story structure, read up about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and use that information to trace Elsie’s “hero’s journey.” It’s an excellent exercise to learn how to refine a plot.

My Own Family’s Epic

When I said I felt a close connection with October Sky, it’s because my grandfather was a coal miner who broke free from his small town by becoming a chemical engineer like (a generation later) Hickam broke free from his coal mining destiny by becoming a rocket scientist. But that’s the boring version of my Djiedo’s story. In his self-published memoir My First 80 Years, Djiedo (Dr. John J. McKetta) details a wild lifetime of anecdotes starring everything from beating Perry Como in a singing contest to being bitten by a blue-footed booby.

Although some of the stories seem far too large to be true, I want them to be, and they’ve become such a part of the family lore that I want my son to know the stories as they are—somewhat outsized versions of a fabulous life. And I get a special chance to make him part of that epic as we all converge on Austin this October to celebrate Djiedo’s 100th birthday. The coal mining boxer-engineer-trumpeter-presidential advisor will be feted by a family including my father the pilot-sign carver-forester-economist-bookseller and me the novelist-marketer-reviewer-mother (as a younger member of the family I still have some time to catch up on my dashes). Storytellers all, whatever unlikely events happen during the weekend celebration, the version we later remember will be one hell of a story and I can’t wait to enlarge and improve upon it as I retell it to my son over the years.

Happy birthday, Djiedo! Thanks for setting a fantastic example. May all our stories be as long and rich as yours.

If you want to set on the adventure of a lifetime with Hickam’s family, pick up a copy of Carrying Albert Home from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Calculus of Grief in Enon by Paul Harding

October 5, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I picked up Enon by Paul Harding on a rare trip to the bookstore in the first few weeks of my son’s life. I did not know then what the book was about, but I had so enjoyed Tinkers that I was glad to take a chance on what I knew would be a solidly written piece of fiction. I did not know that it was going to make me question how emotion is and should be conveyed in literature.

The Structure of Loss

Three sentences into reading Enon, we already know that Charlie Crosby has lost his only child, thirteen-year-old Kate. Killed while riding her bicycle, we’re quickly immersed in the downward spiral of Charlie’s grief as he pushes away his wife and begins to lose himself.

The book is very well structured. Harding weaves together the progression of time with flashbacks from Charlie’s life, insights into the history of the town of Enon, and ever more intimate looks at Charlie’s guilt—both the destruction he’s currently wreaking on himself and flashes of how he might have prevented Kate’s accident—so that with each page the reader is drawn deeper into Charlie’s world and the experience of losing a child.

Intellectualizing Grief

There is only one thing missing from Enon—emotional connection. You’d think with a first person narrative and a subject as wrought as the death of a child that it would be easy to connect with Charlie. As a new mother who basically worries every second that something will happen to my child, I was actually terrified to read beyond the first page of this book because I thought I’d be devastated by it.

Instead, because our experience of the events relies entirely on Charlie and Charlie wants nothing more than to escape the pain of grief, I felt distant and cold while reading this book. I could intellectually engage with the horrors of losing a child, I could conceive of how the path Charlie was on could ruin his life even further, but I could not feel much of anything about any of it. Which turned out to be a disappointment and my mind wandered a lot as I read the book.

Imparting Emotion in Narrative

So how was it that Harding failed to create an emotional connection between the reader and Charlie? The last thing Charlie wants to do is feel the loss of his daughter. Pulling back from that kind of horror is a natural human coping mechanism, but by running us through every thought in Charlie’s head, we don’t get to make jumps, leaps, and emotions on our own. It becomes difficult to engage with Charlie and the situation. And when Charlie is describing the feeling of loss, it’s still difficult to connect because we see what Kate’s death is doing to him, but he wants to self destruct and provides no entree into reaching out to him. It feels as though Harding is pushing us away as much as Charlie pushes away his wife.

Could it be any other way?

If Harding wanted us as readers to empathize with Charlie on an emotional level, he could have interspersed third person perspective. If we witnessed Kate’s death without the filter of Charlie’s distance, it would be impossible not to feel his pain. We would travel down that emotional spiral with him and his actions seem inevitable. It would be harder to judge him and wish he would make different choices. If we saw how neighbors saw him—again without the filter of Charlie’s rationalizing—we might pity the poor wretch he becomes.

Should it be any other way?

I don’t know. I was horrified by how dead inside I felt while reading this book, but I’m not sure complete emotional devastation would have been the best tack either. I would have preferred a blend of emotional and intellectual appeal. In fact that pulling between our two ways of dealing with life could make for an unequaled depth of engagement.

As a writer, I’d find trying to create that perfect balance between the two a wonderful challenge. Although I know it would not be easy. In fact it’s something I struggled with in writing Polska, 1994 which in early drafts came off as a lament which also kept the reader at a distance—if only because it veered too far in the direction of emotion. And this balance between reason and feeling is something I’d urge you to think carefully about in your own writing—at least in the editing stage.

Harding is a gifted writer and I can only imagine he created the exact level of emotional engagement he wanted. Which only leaves me to wonder—why show me so much of Charlie’s devastation while holding my heart so far away from him?

If you want to unpack Harding’s use of emotion or just see if I’m a cold fish of a reader, pick up a copy of Enon from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Seeking Redemption in The Art of Crash Landing

September 13, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Reading the first page of the review copy of Melissa DeCarlo’s The Art of Crash Landing where self-proclaimed “fuckup savant” Mattie Wallace details how long it takes to cram your entire life into plastic garbage bags and outline some of the circumstances that got her there, I cringed. I thought, “Oh, great, a self-indulgent, first-person narrative about how the world done her wrong.” But I could not have been more wrong, and instead The Art of Crash Landing turned into a wild ride through a life wasted where redemption and forgiveness burn on the horizon.

Inside a Disaster

Despite my initial misgivings, it’s not long before we gain real insight into where Mattie’s thirty years of living went wrong as she packs up her car and heads on over to the last friend she has in the world—her former stepfather, Queeg. By the time she shows up on his doorstep pregnant, starving, and out of cash and options (page five), Mattie’s voice stopped grating on my nerves and I’ve started to worry for her. Now that’s an art.

There’s something about the way DeCarlo unpacks Mattie’s experiences—including the death of her alcoholic mother—that made me (and Queeg) want to cradle this wounded bird and nurse her into a better life. Part of it is how much Mattie owns everything that’s happened to her—even the things that were way beyond her control. She knows she’s bad news. She also thinks she was bad news when she and her mother first met Queeg seventeen years earlier. She doesn’t feel entitled to this man’s help—she simply has no other choice.

As plots usually go, another choice emerges and Mattie is somewhat shoved by fate to visit the town where her mother was born, raised, and seemingly run out of a long time ago. She runs into characters from her mother’s mysterious past and a few ghosts of what could have been, too. The resulting story, always tinged with Mattie’s over-ownership of the disasters around her, is a poignant unwrapping of how one person’s disaster can take down all their loved ones. It’s also a look at how to escape the life you were given and thrive on your own. Most importantly, it’s a look at how we all have reasons for becoming who we are—our parents, our grandparents, and us—and how to live in the part of that cycle we have control over.

Pacing a Narrative Race

I should have known from DeCarlo’s opening words, “Twenty-seven minutes is, if anyone ever asks, exactly how long it takes to cram everything I own into six giant trash bags” that this book would be fast-paced. What I couldn’t anticipate is that at just over 400 pages what a fast read it would be and that it would cover such a short time period—about a week.

When I saw the day markers dividing sections of this book, I did do the math and worry for a minute that The Art of Crash Landing would be filled with a Proustian level of detail, but thankfully I was wrong. Instead, DeCarlo delves into the myriad threads and subplots of small town life that came to make Mattie’s mother’s life (and consequently Mattie’s) what it is. So while on the surface the narrative covers only that short week, it actually uncovers three generations of secrets and daily life—the things that make us all what we are. I won’t spoil any of that for you here, but the tight narrative does not disappoint and the cast of characters is round and wonderfully nuanced.

The Personal Side

I’ll admit that 86% of my judgment of Mattie comes from the fact that I was watching her wreck her life and the life of her unborn child just weeks after giving birth to my own baby. Plus, coming from a background where I feel responsible for, well, everything, I saw some of myself in Mattie. And I did not like what I saw. Mattie’s story fits perfectly in with the narrative of my generation—a generation that far too often had to shout, “I’m supposed to be the kid not the parent.”

Reading this book helped me let go of some of the responsibility I feel for the entire world and helped me channel that feeling into the appropriate place—taking responsibility for what I do today for myself and for my child. Which, now that I am the parent, is pretty good timing.

Is The Art of Crash Landing a quick read? Yes. Could it be called “chick lit”? Yes again, but in the best of ways. Despite my initial reservations, I really enjoyed reading this book. Most importantly, I learned something from it.

For a fast read with a lot of heart, pick up a copy of The Art of Crash Landing from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Wet Silence – The Poetry of Widowhood

September 6, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

How many ways can you write about widowhood? In Wet Silence: Poems about Hindu Widows, Sweta Srivastava Vikram explores every nuance of what life is like for a Hindu widow in India. It’s as much a human exploration as a cultural one as Vikram delves into the aftermath of the complex relationships that underlie arranged marriages. Some of the widows in this collection are devastated that their beloved husbands have passed. Others rejoice in their new freedom from abuse and adultery. Still others face new complications in their relationships with the families to which they have now become burdensome.

Marriage in India

Indian marriages are still predominantly arranged by the families of the bride and groom. Although there’s an increasing trend toward the couple having a say in the choice, that is not always the case. The result is sometimes a lasting bond where two people come to know and love each other inside a marriage they have been committed to by their families and culture, and sometimes the result is a very unhappy couple who cannot face the shame of divorce (which carries a much deeper burden of stigma than in the US).

Wet Silence explores the aftermath of both types of marriages from the “rum handprints” of “Wet Silence” to the “touch gentle as velvet” of “My Husband is Leaving”. We also meet servant girls others who lost lovers not strictly their husbands.

I water my memory of you—
it is all I have of youalong with your empty words
in the home we never built
where the mosquitoes feast on my skin.
– Sweta Vikram, “I Water My Memory of You”

Indian Widows

Visiting India last fall, it was easy to spot the widows (at least those who adhered to tradition). In a country full of bright colors, they wear white. They no longer wear jewelry or red vermilion (one of the signs of a married woman) in the parts of their hair. And their heads are sometimes shaven. They eat a restricted diet and are considered burdens to their families and bad luck to the world at large.

This removal of all that is feminine says a lot about the status of women in India and Wet Silence takes the reader inside that restricted world on an intimate level. Each poem contains a first person narrative by a widow and the book as a whole is the result of a series of interviews Vikram conducted with Indian widows.

Clarity vs. Abstraction of Language

In Great With Child, Beth Ann Fennelly recounts some writing advice she received where a poet told her about a city that experimented with blue taxis that had a more expensive fare but took you straight to your destination and red taxis with a cheaper fare that meandered. “Take the red taxi” he advised her about her poetry. The degree of directness is a choice every poet, really every writer, must make for themselves. One of my favorite moments of abstraction in Vikram’s poetry is in the poem “Pretense”:

When I hear belts unbuckle,
I say your name to taste you.
The sound cuts
through my brown flesh,
I become wounded again.

The abuse this woman must have suffered is present in the poem, but lingers perfectly in the background where we as readers can fill in our own details. Overall in Wet Silence, Vikram takes a more blue taxi approach—giving us straightforward poems that allow insight into what is for most of us a foreign culture. But I sometimes wish she’d meandered more—found more of a way to reach into the feeling of these widows’ experiences to find the inexpressible. Easy for me to say, I strive to take the red taxi but most of the time feel like a veteran driver of the blue.

If you’re interested to know more about the lives of women in India and like more direct poetry, Wet Silence might be just the book for you. But if you’re looking for a transformative linguistic experience that still explores the Indian experience, I’d recommend Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene instead.

To get your own insight into the experience of widowhood in India, pick up a copy of Wet Silence, from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.