A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

You Can Hear the Echo by MK O’Donnell: Revisiting the Day Kennedy Was Shot

by 2 Comments

Very few events shake a nation to its very core. In my lifetime there was September 11, 2001. I remember catching the Today show that morning after the planes had hid but before the towers collapsed. I sat riveted and watched wishing I could reach out to Clayton who was already away at school and without a cellphone. In my parents’ generation, fifty years ago today, event that changed everything was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. You Can Hear the Echo by drops in on a family in a small Texas town just as shots are fired from the book depository on that Friday and follows them throughout the subsequent weekend.

Why this Book Now?

Although today is the fiftieth anniversary of that unforgettable day, that is not why I bought or started reading this book. I found it used at a local store and I was entranced to have a look into how events like this shape our lives and our culture. I’ve been unable to read fiction about September 11 even now, and I was curious what and how O’Donnell had captured as she wrote this book just two years after Kennedy was shot.

I also wanted to know more about my family. My parents both grew up in Texas, though I’m not sure if my mom had already moved to New Mexico by then. I know she was in school when the news broke. My father though was 19 and already in the Marines. Because I once asked, they’ve both told me exactly what they were doing when they heard the news, but the memory wasn’t visceral for me so I promptly forgot. I am sure their memories of 1963 are as clearly imprinted on their minds as 2001 is on mine.

It wasn’t even until I was nearly finished reading the book that I realized this anniversary was near.

What Did I Learn?

O’Donnell presents a wide and representative array of characters in this book. From the conservative father to the new wife who worries that he could have been part of the plot and the liberal son who loved Kennedy and suffers greatly and openly for it. They have neighbors who are former communists and a former maid who rounds out the story with a look at an African American woman in the still-segregated South. I was not emotionally invested in these characters. Even when the son nearly shoots his father, I was not roused. Instead they feel like set pieces laid out to each show what that type of person would have felt. That was a failing of the book, but a part of me understands creating that kind of emotional distance from a tableau that must have felt fresh. Still it surprised me because the setting of this book was so domestic and I expected to empathize more with the characters.

What surprised me about the book was that the conspiracy theories about Ruby were surfacing so early. I’ve read Libra by Don Delillo and American Tabloid by James Ellroy, but I always just assumed (regardless of the truth or fiction behind either book) that all of that information surfaced later. I found myself wondering throughout the book what else the characters had access to because when I think of that day in history, all I can see is the Zapruder film, but how different it must have been to hear the news first. I wondered also if that footage would have even been shown on television then in all of its gory detail.

What I Still Don’t Know

As much as I love fiction and prefer it both to nonfiction and in many cases real life, I am not sure if fiction can capture the full or true essence of events this momentous. Poetry can, and I found some solace in Poetry After 9/11 even as I failed to connect with Falling Man by Don Delillo and chose not to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Even in War and Peace I skim over the war bits to read the juicy love story.

It’s not that I don’t care about these events. I care about them in a place so deep inside me I can’t even talk about it. As a student of politics and humanity, I want and need to know how we function as a society and as individuals in times of great loss. I’ve read everything I could ever find about the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because those are all things that happened to other people in other times and fiction and literature are the only way that I can connect with them that I accept the imperfect facsimile.

Maybe I’ve seen the Zapruder film and watched the towers fall too many times. But when it comes to events that feel closer to me–my grandparents knew Lady Bird Johnson and Nellie Connally, even if only peripherally–I know that there is something in my heart that is not described by these social commentaries.

So I’ll disappoint you today and avoid talking about the craft of this book. But what I’d love to know from you is where you turn when you seek to understand the evils of the world. Do you look for and find solace in literature? Have you read pieces about these events that you care to share? Or do you want to share that most intimate gift, your own story about a day in history?

I’m off to ask my parents once again what they experienced on November 22, 1963. Maybe this time I’ll write it down.

A Tale of Two Worldviews: Alice McDermott vs. Tim O’Brien

by 4 Comments

Sometimes what makes you love or hate a book isn’t the characterization. It’s not the plotting or the setting or the quality of the writing. Sometimes what you love or hate about a book just comes down to the message. That’s what I realized when I read July, July by back to back with Charming Billy by this weekend.

Tim O’Brien

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know by now that I love Tim O’Brien. In fact, reviewing Going After Cacciato showed me that if I looked hard enough, literary language was all around me. So when I bought July, July, I knew it wouldn’t sit for long on my too-read shelf. I knew he was going to be playing with time and a myriad of characters and I couldn’t wait to see what he did.

I hated it.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is very well written. The characters are interesting, O’Brien plays with the edges of magical realism, and he does this thing with interspersion of space in the last few pages that blew my mind. But it was a miracle that I made it to the end of the book, because from the very beginning I just wanted out of the miserable lives of the characters as they sat at their college reunion rehashing all the horrible things that ever happened to them and all the horrible things they ever did to each other.

I realized that what the book jacket described as “a portrait of a generation launched into adulthood at the moment when their country, too, lost its innocence” was maybe too good of a portrait. And I wasn’t sure that most of them were adults. They were selfish, damaged, and childish. I recognized some of their behaviors as my own and it terrified me. The book made me want to hug my husband. Forever. And maybe not leave the house again.

I read the book in one night because I do adore O’Brien and I was looking for some redemption (for the characters, for me). But when I read that last period, I knew I was going to need to get out of bed and fetch myself a palate cleanser.

Alice McDermott

By contrast, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott has sat on my shelf for I don’t know how long. The sticker on the front says the used store bought this copy in 2000 and I could have been shifting it around since then. But it was just what I needed Saturday night after closing July, July. I know it was just what I needed because I fell asleep twelve pages in. My brain had finally found a place where it no longer felt assaulted and I could relax.

That does not mean the book was boring. Nor was it especially uplifting. The book actually starts in a bar following a funeral as neighbors pass around gossip about the deceased (Billy) and his widow sits almost entirely offstage. I did not know what to expect. What I found, though, was this tightly-knit world of several generations of Irish-Americans. Their lives are not idyllic and many of them are alcoholics. But they love each other and they act in each others’ best interest. The book shifts back and forth in time–covering more than half a century–and I fell so hard for these people.

The writing is good and sometimes quite pretty, but it was McDermott’s spirit that captured me.

The Quest for Happiness

“Billy didn’t need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn’t poetry. It isn’t prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it, Danny, because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true.” – Alice McDermott

My generation is really busy right now trying to figure out what’s going to make our lives happy. We’ve been told we can be anything, except there aren’t really all that many jobs. We’ve been told we are special, except that few people want to pay us to be special. In contrast, when Billy’s cousin and best friend, Dennis, comes of working age in 1937, his father gets him a job at Con Edison because “The greatest city in the world will always need electricity.” This is a man who knows that having enough money to feed your family is happiness. There aren’t a lot of strivers in this book and I found that refreshing, especially after reading July, July where the strivers were the unhappiest of the lot. As I think back on it, maybe both books were telling me the same thing, but the positive example was a lot easier to listen to.

Maybe it’s a generational thing–the Greatest Generation vs. the Baby Boomers. All I know is some of the brightest minds of my generation are either setting up jobs completely on their own terms or they are walking away entirely. They are working part time or using their Ivy League educations to set up farms and grow enough food to feed their families.

Ain’t Capitalism Grand?

The other thing I watch in my everyday life is how we all talk about the economy, waiting for it to get better. And we’re told the best thing we can do to make it better–the best thing we can do to create jobs for those who don’t have them–is to buy more and save less. We have to put our money to use. We have to want more things.

I don’t know about you, but my house is full. I have so many things I can’t even give them all away. And not a one of them makes me happy. I understand that capitalism is built on growth and that growth is built on consumption, but it feels like all of that rests on a bubble of rapidly-cooling air. I can’t buy a better coat that will last longer because it might put someone out of a job. I can’t buy coffee in bulk bags because those horrible, single-use plastic cups require more manufacturing and cost more money so they equal prosperity (and then even the man at the landfill has a guaranteed income). Oh, and I have to do it all on credit because my income won’t go up until I stimulate the economy.

In Charming Billy, when Dennis asks his step father (Mr. Holtzman) for a loan so that Billy can send for his bride from the old company, he says, “You boys will never have any money if you spend everything you make before it’s earned.” Imagine if the government worked that way. Imagine if we were talking about paying down the deficit instead of raising the debt ceiling. On a good day the best we can muster is balancing a budget so we don’t add to the debt.

A Life Less Ordinary

I thought of Mr. Holtzman today when the repair bill for my car started to approach the car’s actual Blue Book value. As my husband and I discussed the worth of the vehicle, the life still left in it, and whether we should replace it, I was proud that we sounded more like Holtzman than John Boehner. I was glad that my husband agreed the car is worth repairing. I was grateful that it is, unlike so many of our electronics these days, still somewhat cost-effective to repair.

I know that if we all walk away from the malls and refuse to buy the latest iPhone our way of life will change. Our GDP will shrink. The stock market will lose value. People might well lose jobs. But that last one is the only one I worry about because none of these objects I’m supposed to want make me happy.

What does make me happy is to come home every night and snuggle with my husband. Our jeans might be a little ratty. We make coffee in a cheap French press that only gets replaced when I shatter the carafe. And we’re repairing our nine-year-old car like a couple of old fogeys. And maybe that means I’m not ambitious enough, but I don’t care. I don’t care because it makes me feel like an adult to take care of the things I have instead of throwing out something that isn’t perfect. I don’t care because I share my life with friends new and old and not a one of us gives a rip about what material goods the others possess.

I could go into how the impulse to toss out things that aren’t working relates to divorce rates, but you can make that inference on your own. I just know that if I treated my writing like we are taught to treat our material objects and each other, I’d have a waste basket full of shitty first drafts and very little personal development (and very few final products) to show for it all.

So the gift I received this weekend from two very talented authors is the inspiration to dig deep and think about my values. What books challenge you? Do you feel the tide changing like I do or do you think I’m full of it? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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

Ruminating on the Supernatural with The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

by 4 Comments

This time of year I always start to crave ghost stories and caramels, so when I found The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton sitting on my to-read shelf one night, I knew the time was finally right to read it. I’ve always liked , and although these stories speak to the genteel turn-of-the-century world I came to love so much in The House of Mirth, they were not at all the October scares I expected. Instead they got me thinking about my own relationship with the supernatural.

A Spook-Filled Childhood

When I was a very little girl my aunt told me stories of La Llorona–of her imprisonment by her jealous husband and how she wandered the deserts of New Mexico wailing. I know this story varies, but that is the version that will always be true for me. As she told me this story, I snuck peeks at the blackness of a nearby closet and pictured her presence there. I still have a thing about closets.

Whether it was that story or some other inspiration, ghost stories are the first books I remember choosing for myself. Something about the thrill of the scare combined with insight into another plane of existence held me rapt and kept me coming back for more. I was raised without religion and I think in some ways I invested my sense of spirituality in the supernatural. As I grew older I started reading about more real horrors like the Holocaust and other mass murders, but ghost stories and the supernatural continued to interest me.

And then there was the ghost. When I played in our basement I often thought I heard my mother calling me. I’d run to the stairs to answer but she always said she hadn’t called. I didn’t think anything of it until one day I saw a woman in the doorway of a long, spooky hallway we had. It’s difficult to describe what she looked like but she wasn’t a solid form or detailed. All I remember is her long, brown hair and her yellow, flowered dress. I feel like I saw her twice. I think I was afraid when I saw her, but I don’t remember screaming.

I was obsessed with the paranormal for years. I read all the books and wished I had ESP. I played with a Ouija board and candles. I recited Bloody Mary into bathroom mirrors so many times that I still can’t look in the mirror after watching a scary movie.

Losing My Taste for Scares

I loved scary stories and movies well into my twenties. I may or may not be watching The Others right now as I type. But somewhere in the past few years the scares have touched a different part of my heart and I am more genuinely afraid of ghosts.

Perhaps this has something to do with a trip my husband and I took to Taos, New Mexico to see the Nicolai Fechin Museum. Some people say that Taos has a hum, that so much evil was committed there over the years and it’s infected the place so deeply you can hear it. I know we felt ill at ease when we drove into town and as we went to the store for supplies, but when we checked into an amazingly large hotel suite at a very cheap price, I think we forgot all of that. But then, sometime late into the night, I woke up and I could feel something in our room. My memory is of a shape standing by the window. Clayton remembers it being on the other side of the room near the closet. I was so scared I couldn’t even move to turn on the lamp. Somehow my husband and I figured out we were both awake and experiencing this same feeling. We got out of bed, hurried down the corridor, and set up camp in the living room with all the lights on. When dawn came, we got the hell out of town. Even today I have difficulty talking about that night and how I felt.

I still enjoy the odd ghost story or movie, but these days I seek out Spanish directors who tend to focus more on the coexistence of ghosts and the living than on movies with big scares.

What About Edith Wharton

What I found so astounding about Wharton’s book is that it isn’t scary. Or at least not mostly. There are people in the stories who are scared of the ghosts, but for the most part the ghosts are a kind of curiosity. They portend death or provide echoes of it, but they don’t jump out of closets or levitate beds. They remind me in some way of the ghosts in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. They are a natural part of the life cycle. I like this idea of acceptance and of the layers of time and existence that co-exist.

There are stories that feel unfinished and stories that lack tension, but I still enjoyed this book very much. And as much as I say I’m not up to a good scare anymore, “All Souls'” was both the scariest of the stories and the one I enjoyed the most.

I don’t know if ghosts are real, but I do believe in the continuity of energy. And while I will still be closing my closet tight tonight, I’m also going to see if I can get through The Sixth Sense while my husband’s away and not have to dodge the bathroom mirror afterwards. Session 9 will have to wait until he’s back, though.

If you want to explore the spiritual side of ghost stories, pick up a copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom on A Brief History of Yes

by 4 Comments

a brief history of yes micheline aharonian marcomAs a writer, how do you critique the work of friends? In private you read drafts of their work and point out the parts you love and areas for improvement. You both know you can’t be objective but that red-penning a draft is in fact a loving act that will make the work stronger. With any luck you are different enough writers that you can learn from each other but also at similar stages so that it’s an equal exchange.

But how then do you review the work of your teacher, your advisor, the person who helped shape your voice? When reviewing a book, I always try to look at the best of what the book has to teach, so I wasn’t worried that I’d review A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom in a negative light. I did know, however, that Micheline will always be my mentor and that when I read her words on the page I hear her voice.

When I told her that I wanted to write about her book here but that I wasn’t sure that I could be objective, she graciously offered to answer a few questions. So what you see here, rather than a straight-up interview, is me asking both questions about the book and the questions that would help me continue to find my way as a writer.

A Brief History of Yes

“He still lies in the mind of the Portuguese girl, for as the lover of yes knows, the absence created by the end of a love affair is another form of presence.” – Micheline Aharonian Marcom, A Brief History of Yes

A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the portrait of a love affair from beginning to end between the Portuguese Maria and an unnamed American. The way the book is structured, we know always that the affair will end, but the writing is so gorgeously inhabited that I was deep inside the emotional thrall of the ups and downs from the thrall of new love to the deep loneliness of knowing something is about to end.

With echoes of Clarice Lispector, Fernando Pessoa, and William Faulkner, Marcom’s carefully crafted blend of lyricism and concision is inimitable. I know, I’ve tried. She plays gently with grammar, combining words and changing punctuation, so that I always feel the possibilities of language are opening before me. And the way she reveals the unsaid is something I’m still ruminating on, even months after reading the book.

Interviewer: You’ve led such an international life, how has that shaped you as a writer? Is that part of the reason you read trans-nationally?

Marcom: I think that literature, like painting or music, cannot be appreciated from the vantage point of only one culture or country or epoch—it would be as if I only looked at American painters, for example, and skipped Cézanne, Picasso, Klee, Velasquez, Goya, the ancient Mayan sculptures…. I seek the books that are “aesthetic achievements,” that make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Wherever and whenever they were written.

I: I loved the way you revealed the things that were “not said” between Maria and her lover. Is this something you started with or did it evolve as you wrote and rewrote?

M: I can’t any longer remember. But I don’t think that it happened in revision, and more or less emerged that way. Although, of course, I did revive the book extensively. But I am a writer who follows my intuition, who “listens to the voices,” as Faulkner said. So although I revise continuously, I also allow for the strange and unpredictable. And I am always interested in what people don’t say to one another, as much as what they say.

I: The events in A Brief History of Yes are not at all chronological and yet the book has an inherent logic. How do you think about time as you are writing?

M: When I’m writing first drafts, I don’t think, I follow my obsessions, my interests, my inklings—as I said: I tune in and listen. Later when I have material I shape and trim and work to cull a book’s final form. But I usually find the pattern had already been made and it then becomes my job to “lift” it to its final shape.

I: What are you reading?

M: Right now re-reading Faulkner’s The Bear for a literature class I’m teaching, and all the Lispector I can fit into my day for an essay I’m writing on her work. So, as you can see, I’m returning to the tried and true.

If you want to read A Brief History of Yes, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nance Van Winckel Gives Voice to the Dead in Pacific Walkers

by Leave a Comment

The world is full of strangers—people we’ll never know and those we once knew but will never see again. I come from a small town in northern Idaho and there I left behind so many former friends who are strangers to me now. Reading the poignant poems in Pacific Walkers by Nance Van Winckel, I began to wonder if I knew any of those Jane and John Does—if any of the friends who are lost to me have also been lost to the world.

You see, Van Winckel pulls her inspiration for many of the poems in this book from the records of the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office—a place not very far from where I grew up. She also gives life and stories to the people in old photographs. Van Winckel is humanizing what we have all left behind and some of the writing in this book is simply stunning.

Anonymity

“the question won’t pertain to tattoos

or unmatchable DNA, but to what
world, under what sun, in what situ

we go on finding each you, each you,
the not-missed, the never missing.”

– Nance Van Winckel, “Last Address”

I felt weird writing “left behind” above, but the word I really wanted to use was “detritus” and that felt worse. We’re talking about, and Van Winckel is writing about, human lives—a man found dead in a landfill, another in a railroad tunnel a premature baby girl found at a water treatment plant—and these are the lives of people we’ve left behind, who might never be claimed. People who are missed in some absent part of our brains that wonders only occasionally “What ever happened to…?”

And that’s part of the point, of course, of writing this book. That part of the experience of reading this book struck me so hard that I couldn’t even write about it for a week. Van Winckel touched on things I did not want to think about. I can barely leaf through old photo albums at the Salvation Army because I find the discarded memories so sad. Here she gives full stories to those people. The language is restrained, as it should be, and Van Winckel leaves me to sit in this uncomfortable place of wondering what’s happened to those I left behind.

The Detritus of my Life

“you were all the world I had to leave” – Nance Van Winckel, “Afraid of My Rays, No One Comes Near”

I remember a boy in junior high. I thought he was the cutest. I never dated him—I was dating other people and he never seemed to notice me—but I always knew when he was near. He didn’t have a lot of money and so he wore the same jacket for all the years from junior high through high school—not that I think he graduated—so it was easy to catch a glimpse of him on a street corner. I don’t know his first or last name—I only have his nickname and a hazy memory of where he lived. I know he got hard into drugs like a lot of his crowd did. And Spokane would have been a natural place for him to end up.

As I was reading this book, it was this boy I kept thinking of. When Van Winckel placed descriptions from the coroner’s office near the poems, I read them extra hard to see if any were him. I hoped they weren’t, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. There were others who were acting as lost as he was at the time, but they had bigger personalities and people to catch them. This boy, I don’t know… I hope he’s out there somewhere living a happy life surrounded by people who love him.

Poetry for Strangers

“Taped into the space
Where a window had been,
that newspaper: it must
be scanned… each day
another fact aglow
with sunlight,
each night the same war.” – Nance Van Winckel, “Compromised State”

So I want to tell you more about the language and form in Pacific Walkers, but I can’t. Maybe the level it affected me on says it all.

This weekend Rebecca Bridge and I are putting the finishing touches on our book of writing prompts and one of the things we suggest is taking a photograph and making it into a story. If our readers do have as well with that exercise as Van Winckel, they’ll be in great shape. My cousin Elisabeth finds inspiration in strangers every week and pulls it together into Poetry for Strangers.

Perhaps writing is a way we can catch people who might otherwise fall away.

“By May / I’m a dashed-off note with promises / of more where this one came from.” – Nance Van Winckel, “I Am My Own Assistant”

If you want to connect with the people in this book or to actually see what the writing is like, pick up a copy of Pacific Walkers from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.