Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Wideman Investigates West Philadelphia from the Outside

August 29, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In the novel Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman, Cudjoe, has returned to Philadelphia to find answers about a horrific event that happened on Osage Avenue in 1985. By withholding the bare facts of the case, Wideman puts the reader alongside Cudjoe as he searches for information and insight in an insular neighborhood.

Interestingly, in the first half of the novel the narrator has significantly more information than he is coherently conveying to the reader. As does Cudjoe. The novel begins in a dense style where the reader is trying to gain some bearing of what’s going on. The language is richly descriptive, but there are few facts to ground the narrative so the reader floats through a phantasmagoria. The flap copy and title clearly refer to a fire, but the first sentence is, “On a day like this the big toe of Zivanias had failed him.” The action is taking place in Mykonos and the fire isn’t even mentioned until page 7 with the cryptic nursery rhyme, “Ladybug, Ladybug. Fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your children are burning.” I wonder if the first few pages would have held my attention if I hadn’t known already about the fire.

Lost in the Smoke

The effect is dizzying. The reader is trying to gain ground and understand this horrible event. When Cudjoe reaches Philadelphia, fire-related details begin to seep into the narrative: “[h]er other names are smoke curling from smashed windowpanes of the house on Osage.” But the language is metaphoric and little concrete information is offered about the causes of the fire and why the police shot those escaping (the bare facts of this information are obtainable only from the second half of the book or the book’s jacket).

Stonewalling the Outsider

Cudjoe asks people all over West Philadelphia for their take on the fire and for information on the whereabouts of the boy who escaped. However, the people in the neighborhood know he has come back from outside and don’t want to rehash the story with him or with the reader peering in from outside (a reader is more than an abstract concept here; Cudjoe tells them he is writing a book).

When Cudjoe tries to insert himself into this world that he’d been away from, the inhabitants like Margaret Jones resist him: “[s]he knew he’d been away…and that distance bothered her.” She will give him vague anecdotes about the leader of MOVE but even less information on the boy, Simba. The reader feels the role of the outsider as well, Margaret Jones says, “[w]asn’t any trouble till people started coming at us” and Cudjoe and the reader are more people coming at them, disturbing the status quo, “[w]e’re not looking for help from you or nobody else…Somebody called himself helping is the one lit the fire.”

The Facts Seep In

Information is offered about the aftermath of the fire itself: “the boy was last seen naked skin melting…A sharpshooter on a roof…The last sighting reports the boy alone.” It is clear at this point in the narrative to Cudjoe but not the reader that there was a fire on Osage Avenue started to get rid of the group MOVE. Cudjoe and the reader know that the police shot at those escaping and that a boy was seen alive, but neither Cudjoe nor the reader know what happened to Simba. The reader is immersed in his quest, and every time Cudjoe approaches someone new the reader is as thirsty for information as Cudjoe is.

The Narrator as Outsider

It is an interesting premise to set a book inside a closed society. Usually, though, I would expect such a book to be narrated by someone who is inside the society and to gain a glimpse of the inside I would otherwise not see. Because this book is from the point of view of someone who is no longer in the fold, what I learned about West Philadelphia instead was how closed it is. It was much like seeing how tall the wall is rather than catching any clear glimpse of life beyond it.

The language was striking, but without facts to ground it, the words, e.g.: “it’s Technicolor high noon” became bricks in the wall separating me from this culture. I could see it and appreciate it but not truly understand what was going on inside. Wideman seems to be making the point that the actions of the police on that day are inexplicable but not unexpected to the inhabitants of West Philadelphia. As an outsider, I am left with an understanding of how different their world is from mine and reminded that there are never satisfactory answers in a case like the fire on Osage Avenue.

The Reader’s Expectations

What I learned from this novel is how easy it is to raise expectations for the reader. Humans (especially readers) are curious creatures and we are easily tantalized. In fact, I was so drawn in by the premise of this book that I allowed Wideman to illustrate for me the character of a neighborhood I wouldn’t have read about otherwise.

However, I felt unfulfilled at the end of the novel. I was hoping for some sort of redemption. I can accept the larger message that there is no redemption and no true comprehension of a case like this, but I still feel something missing. I don’t want to write too much with the expectations of a reader in mind, but I will keep it in the back of my mind as something to consider when I am revising.

My experience with this book was somewhat of a generational one. I’m told that the news events this book is based on made national news. I wonder if Wideman considered his audience’s familiarity with those events as he wrote the story.

Have you read this book? How did your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about the fire affect your experience of it?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Philadelphia Fire from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Conscientious Listening: The Pleasure of Being Read to

August 20, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Being read to is a pleasure that most people will not experience after childhood. My father was an excellent reader. He did all the voices and never shied from long books (I’ve only ever “read” The Lord of the Rings trilogy with my dad pronouncing every word). Everyone should be read to as a child. But when was the last time you shared this joy with an adult?

Why My Husband is Reading to Me

My husband and I both love books even though we read at very different speeds. And with my terrible memory, by the time he gets around to reading something I loved, I’ve forgotten the best parts.

After buying the first book of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain for his Kindle, my husband fell in love with the book. The thing about the Kindle is that until I get one, I can’t read the book unless I steal his. And I’m still really devoted to paper books. When he offered to read the book aloud to me, I was gobsmacked and grateful.

We’ve spent subsequent evenings in the living room (that’s what we call the room without the TV, even though we hardly live in it) as he reads eagerly on. He’s pre-reading the book because he can’t contain his excitement, but also because it’s difficult to do a cold reading aloud. Some nights he reads to me when we get home and again after dinner. One night he read straight through for almost two hours until he was hoarse and I made him stop.

I am loving the attention and the time together. I’m loving our discussions before, during, and after.

How Being Read to is Affecting My Writing

Being read to is changing my relationship with language. I look at words day and night. I read. I edit. I write. I move commas and think about substituting words. I dread an especially long paragraph in a dull book and count pages until the end. I sneak peeks of endings.

I can’t do any of these things when my husband is reading to me. Instead, I watch his mouth forming the words and I encounter the words in a space where I can’t see them. I see the pictures the words are drawing (I’m sure Derrida or Foucault would have a more intelligent way of describing this). Having him read to me is helping me engage with the story (and especially the imagery) in a different way.

When it comes down to writing, I feel freer. I can focus more on what the words are supposed to do than on what they are. I know that I remember the trail of biological matter swept across the inside of that plane rather than any of the words that were specifically used. As a writer, words are my tools and they are important, but I feel like sometimes I oil and polish my screwdrivers without ever actually putting them to proper use.

The Problem with Books on Tape

The one way that many adults still experience being read to is through books on tape. My husband and I have shared the joy of being read to during road trips. We’ve listened to mysteries and classics from readers good and poor. Listening to The Lord of the Rings while crossing Utah even changed the geography I associate with the books.

Books on tape are a great way to experience a book when you are doing something else. Except that we are always doing something else. They work for me on road trips because there is the meditative quality of driving. But I can’t imagine listening to one in traffic. And when I’ve tried listening to books while gardening, my mind is equally split between the two tasks.

The problem with books on tape is a problem with the listener (me). In this busy, busy life, it’s hard to imagine allowing myself to sit still and focus on the story when I know my hands could be doing something else. When my husband reads to me, I can appreciate the gift of energy he’s putting into storytelling. I try to repay him with the gift of attention.

Reading to My Husband

I may have started this whole reading aloud thing last summer. We were waiting in a backyard hammock for a meteor shower and I was as restless as usual. I went inside and grabbed The Arabian Nights and started reading him stories. We haven’t gotten very far in the months since, but I hope soon to return the reading favor.

What I Want for You

When my husband started reading aloud to me, I justified the guilty pleasure with thoughts of all the readers Jorge Luis Borges must have listened to after he went blind. I wondered if that was part of the genius of his writing. But there should be no guilt in sharing a story and I’m eagerly awaiting my next chapter.

Here’s your homework. Ask someone to read to you. Or read to someone else. You don’t have to start with a full novel—a short story or poem will do. If you have kids, read to them but also try this with an adult. Recapture the magic of oral story telling. Reencounter language in its many forms. Relate to another person by share the special gifts of attention, time, and story. I hope reading aloud will bring you as much pleasure as it’s brought us.

If this review made you want to read the book aloud, pick up a copy of The Strain from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Cormac McCarthy, Optimist? Considering The Road

August 13, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The first time I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I read it almost straight through, and I was devastated by the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world. The second time I read it, I leafed through its pages to see if I could find hope among the ashes.

Is The Road the Most Depressing Book Ever?

On re-reading this book, I realized McCarthy actually treads a careful line with The Road between despair and hope.

From the very beginning, he plays dark against light. The first sentence speaks of “the dark and the cold of the night” and then how the man reaches “out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” Together they are experiencing “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” And then McCarthy writes again of the child and his “precious breath.”

As a reader I was teetering between the sadness of the world and the possibility that maybe they could survive and remake the world.

McCarthy continues this precarious balance throughout the book and the juxtaposition kept me in tension. One scene shows “old crops dead and flattened” and the next “dreams so rich in color.” Beneath burnt orchards lie bunkers filled with food.

I started to realize that though I remembered the darkness of the book, there was a great deal of light in it. As the man says, “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.”

Spoilers Ahead

Death is a continued presence in the book. Whether it is implied like when the boy asks, “Are we going to die?” and the man’s response “Sometime. Not now” or the less subtle bodies hanging from rafters or the baby roasting over a fire.

The man’s slow decline into death does not come as a surprise. But really, death (usually in less colorful ways) is a constant presence in any life. In fact McCarthy is dealing with a normal element in any normal parental relationship—parents always hope their children outlive them. The only difference is what the parents expect to die of and how soon.

The man and the boy make some really stupid mistakes throughout the book. First of all, they stick to the road. Then wander blindly into choke points like bridges that could easily be traps. They get their food stolen. And somehow they survive. It’s as though their lives are charmed (at least in comparison to some of those around them).

The Children Are Our Future

The greatest hope in The Road is the child. The father protects his son and dedicates all his resources to the child’s survival and happiness. He gives the Coke and often his food to his son. “The boy was all that stood between him and death.” Even as he is dying, the father insists that the boy “carry the fire.” He tells his son that he’s “going to be lucky.”

It is possible to imagine any surviving family units playing out the same struggle to save the life of the child. This is signaled when the man remembers a scene with his own father when they had stood at the same overlook when he was a child. History repeats itself in a way, even through great world changes. The child is the future of our species.

But the child is more than just a genetic continuation. The narrative speaks more than once of the fire that the child carries. I believe that fire to be the fire of civilization. What leads me to believe this is how the father focuses on daily survival, while the child is the one who sees beyond himself to ask, “What are our long term goals?” The child the one who insists that they feed Ely. He thinks of the other boy.

The child is generous and conscientious. He can afford to be because he is protected. We, in our daily lives where a traffic jam seems like a struggle for survival, would do well to remember what the stakes really are and to spend more time thinking about humanity.

The End

I cried my way through the last twenty pages of this book, again. So in that way the book was still devastating. And then there was the interlude with the trout and “the vermiculate patterns [on its back] that were maps of the world in its becoming.” It was a beautiful paragraph, but it did not fill me with more hope than I already had. In truth, all that paragraph did for me is make me want to re-read the ending of A River Runs Through It.

So is McCarthy an optimist? I don’t know if I would go that far. But his view of the world is much more complex than I originally gave him credit for and I was glad to find that we had some common ground.

This post was inspired by a couple of late night conversations with my tribe of writers. As always, I am grateful to them for their community and to my husband. Each of them helps me search for what is important in writing and in life.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Road from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Creating a Dreamworld in Calvino’s Marcovaldo

August 5, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I sought out Italo Calvino this morning because I wanted to learn how he creates fairytales that seem to exist very close to reality. In the fourth story of Marcovaldo, “Winter, The City Lost in the Snow,” I found what I was looking for.

In the Beginning

Creating a dreamlike world starts with the first sentence: “That morning the silence woke him.” Yes, it is possible to be woken by silence, but it is also a clue to the reader that something out of the ordinary is happening. Then Marcovaldo senses “something strange in the air.” Calvino describes the character’s disorientation and the reader’s awareness of the strangeness deepens.

At this point, the reader is three sentences into the story and aware that the reality of this story is not the same day to day reality of the first three stories in the collection. In the fourth sentence (still in the first paragraph) the city disappears. Then the narrator describes what Marcovaldo sees “almost-erased lines, which corresponded to those of the familiar view.” Of course he could just be describing what a snowscape looks like, but because Marcovaldo found it magical, I found it magical.

As I read this first paragraph, the fantastic elements washed over me. I felt the story building, but the first three stories in the book had been so realistic that I didn’t realize what was happening to my attention until the middle of the second paragraph when I encountered the strange phraseology of “the snow had fallen on noises.” The phenomenon Calvino is describing is common—snow has a hushing quality—but the way he described it was so unusual that I was instantly intrigued.

Treading a Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality

Even though Calvino pulls back toward the real, concrete world as he writes the almost scientific, “sounds, in a padded space, did not vibrate” he keeps Marcovaldo and me hovering between reality and fantasy. Calvino keeps Marcovaldo’s dream world present with language like, “who could say if under those white mounds there were still gasoline pumps, news-stands, tram stops, or if there were only stack upon stack of snow.” Even when Marcovaldo is put to work shoveling snow, his mind wanders and he imagines that with the snow “he could remake the city.”

Calvino did not disappoint me. I learned from this story that to create a story that exists in the borderlands between fantasy and reality, I have to set the scene very carefully. There is as much fantasy in the first paragraph of this story as there is in the rest of the paragraphs combined. Once that scene is set firmly, I am free to play back and forth between the two lands as long as the story laps back and forth between the two worlds.

Now to put it to use. Just as soon as I finish reading this book…

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Marcovaldo from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Peter Høeg Invents the Keyser Söze of Danish Dreams

July 28, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

As the title implies, The History of Danish Dreams is dreamlike. Even more so for readers like me who have a poor knowledge of Danish history. Peter Høeg does a masterful job of hovering in the space between fable and fact where story and truth lie and though I am curious about whether there is an underlying structure of verifiable events, I will not look them up because I don’t want the spell to be broken.

Part of the spell Høeg casts is that he is able to dance between what happened and what might have happened. This is especially evident as he deals with the young girl Maria and whether she is a model child or the leader of a gang of truants.

The Model Child

The reader already knows much about the strangeness of Maria’s parents by the time she is born. Høeg weaves information about her upbringing into her parents’ narrative and I got to know her before I realized that she too would become an important character.

Over a series of twenty pages I watched Maria grow into an unusually observant child with a stammer. I saw the conditions of her mother’s declining health and the contemporaneous decline of her neighborhood. I learned that she was close with her father. And then there is a brutality that Høeg mentions more than once without delving into. She is different, but still he calls her “the model child.”

Stepping Out of the Narrative

“From this point onward certain problems arise in writing Maria’s story: I would like to depict her as a coherent individual…but this proves to be impossible…History is always an invention; it is a fairytale built upon certain clues…These clues are pretty well established; most of them can literally be laid on the desktop…But these, unfortunately, do not constitute history. History consists of the links between them, and it is this that presents the problem…In the case of Maria Jensen…it is not possible…to cover all the gaps, not even roughly.” – Peter Høeg, The History of Danish Dreams

Høeg interrupts the fictional dream and begins telling two stories—the story of Maria as her parents know her and the story of a second child called “The Stutterer” who could well be Maria. The only link between the two stories is a series of what must be truancy letters from her school. Truly compelling are the strong yet unprovable parallels between Maria and the Stutterer.

As Høeg tells more and more stories of the gang Maria is ostensibly the head of, he continues to use phrases like “It has not been possible for me to have a word with any of the individuals who then belonged in this group” and “we have no witnesses.” Had Høeg laid out evidence that Maria was the Stutterer, the story would have been about a girl who went bad and her parents never even knew. Because Høeg focuses on the gaps, though, and allows for the ambiguity, the story becomes a legend.

By the time Høeg finishes young Maria’s tale, the seven- or nine-year-old (we don’t even know her actual age) Maria has become the Keyser Söze of Denmark. Høeg seems in awe of her. The extent of her exploits could only be understood in the kind of exaggerated rumor that conveys the fullest truth possible but could never be understood in something as rigid as a court of law.

I am interested in exploring the ambiguous experience of a character in the novel I am working on now. I have been looking for a way to convey contradictory yet complementary information. I’m not sure yet if I want to pull the metafictional card by interjecting as a narrator, but I have a lot to learn from Høeg in terms of opening up the story to create a richer experience.

As with any book I read in translation and love, I know some of the credit is due to the translator. My thanks to Barbara Haveland for allowing me access to this book.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The History of Danish Dreams from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.