First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow
the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to
newest.
I needed a break.
After winding my way through the last of Jean Stafford’s
stories I felt exhausted, like a household generator with only ounces of fuel
remaining yet desperately trying to warm an iced-in, powerless cabin. Melancholy
set in, overlaid with a nagging feeling that I just wasn’t up to the task I’d
set myself. Something about the Pulitzer committee must love the deeply
depressing, for only a very few of those read so far had brought me anything
approaching a smile. And with both Andersonville
and Humboldt’s Gift before me, I
think that unlikely to change. Oh, there may be some satire and absurdity ahead
(there’s a Michael Chabon awaiting, after all, and a Richard Russo), but I’m
resigned to a home stretch of frayed electrics, nerves rubbed raw.
So following Stafford I took the break I needed and read books
un-Pulitzered.
The laughter I craved came from How About Never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, a
memoir by the current cartoon editor of The
New Yorker, Bob Mankoff. Mankoff’s book—made up of equal parts words and
line drawings (both his and others)—takes us on an interesting journey into
what life is like for the crème de la crème of those plying the trade. He likens
working for The New Yorker to playing
for the Yankees—there is no higher aspiration (at least for a New Yorker).
After a brief obligatory trip through his own childhood and subsequent calling,
he dives into the real stuff, discussing what it’s like to churn out ten-plus
good ideas a week in the hopes that one of them will be great, in the hopes
that one of those will be great enough to find its way into the sacred
pages. At the same time he reminisces about what it was like to a) disappoint his parents, b) find his own voice and style, and c) remind us
that no one—no one—will ever be
another James Thurber. (Okay, that last one was mine. But really, you have to
admit it. Thurber was something else, the Olivier of magazine cartoonists,
working so hard to make it look so easy….)
I followed Mankoff’s book with A Little Lumpen Novelita, another spot of brilliance from the late
Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño seizes unceasingly; his work (including
the epic 2666 and the poetically
challenging The Savage Detectives)
never fails to grasp and hold my attention. This brief work, best read in one
sitting, is simultaneously depressing and uplifting, telling the story of the
older of two orphans who finds herself in a very unusual (and oddly romantic)
situation where she seduces someone she plans to rob, but never effectively manages
either. (Bolaño’s voice, silenced so early, will be missed, but I’ll continue
to look forward to whatever posthumous translations appear.)
At this point I began to feel guilty. I’d set a project for
myself, after all, and had allowed this unintended sidetrack. Worse, I was
enjoying it. Now and again I’d look toward where a beaten hardback copy of Advise and Consent sat on my end table (I’d
already decided Drury’s book was the next stop on the Pulitzer train), and
thought about how much I didn’t want to open its pages. Over six hundred of
them waited for me, all densely packed with what a cursory flip through suggested
would be endlessly boring descriptions of hallways and long passages of mediocre dialog.
(In fairness, the plot was supposed to be a humdinger, but then I’d always been
wary of anything where the word “humdinger” seemed an appropriate descriptor.)
Guilt and I don’t get along. In particular, self-guilt and I don’t get along. I don’t
know where it comes from or why it should be so but, given that I’m in my
mid-fifties and it’s merely annoying (rather than debilitating), I’m long past
figuring out how to fix it. I just take the ride.
So my break broke down. I cracked open Advise and Consent. Waded through fifty pages or thereabouts. I’m
so far unimpressed, but I’m not sure if that prophecy isn’t of the
self-fulfilling variety.
Then I had a moment of inspiration, an insight as to how
both having and eating might be possible. On the shelf in my office sat a slim
volume, Out of the Dark, by the recent
winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick Modiano. Since an earlier
reading obsession had led to working my way through all of Alfred's honorees, Modiano’s
book gave me the opportunity to continue my brief but much-needed Pulitzer
break while still feeling that I was reading something I was “supposed” to
read. I’d simply shift lanes, obsession-wise, and knock off a book I knew I had
to get to sooner or later, anyway. So that’s what I did.
Modiano—at least based on this one thin example—reminds me a
bit of Camus, though with the personality of an arrogant flaneur, someone who writes in the same way that someone taking a
stroll looks into every shop window—sometimes twice—then dismisses the window’s
contents with a subtle wave of the finger. Those around will notice and take heed, drawn in by the conceit. If the street is interesting enough,
attention commands attention. In Modiano’s case it is. He limns his characters
just so—giving you enough but not too much—allowing you to observe with just the
distance needed to maintain the necessary air of existentialism that runs, Styx-like,
beneath the story.
The plot, detailed by an untrustworthy narrator, wanders through
the lives of a young, somewhat bohemian couple who are both likeable and
unlikeable in equal doses. Our narrator seduces (or finds himself seduced) by
the pair’s female half, setting off nothing at all dramatic in any conventional
sense, yet proving a watershed moment nonetheless. The characters, like their reader, experience
sans guilt.
A good read, but not a great read. That was yet to come.
*****
I have yet to find a writer who will fully admit to what it
is they’re trying to do when they sit down to write. Some will say that they
write for themselves, to tell the stories they want told or that they would
want to read. Others to share an experience that just might uplift, enlighten,
or assist some person “out there.” The slightly more honest among us will talk
about compulsion and a hidden desire for widespread readership (and the fame
that sometimes comes with it). But none of that is true.
What a writer wants, more than anything, is to devastate, to write just one sentence
now and again that stops a reader like a bullet to the heart. A sentence so
full of the writer’s soul that the reader can’t help but feel what the writer
wants them to feel, a flayed sense of raw immersion that overwhelms, that
forces a moment’s pause for breath.
I’ve found a book that does that, and more than once. Listen
with your nerves and soul to this sentence:
The membrane between
space and time is a sieve; I can be dusted through it and reassembled on the
other side.
Or this one:
The second-to-last
time he spoke, he was six years old.
Both come from Know
the Night, a brilliant memoir from Maria Mutch. The book—and “book” isn’t
quite the right word, though I haven’t one better—describes two years of nights
she spends—obsessively, passionately, and reluctantly—with her son Gabriel, who
has Downs Syndrome combined with autism. With a mother’s sensitivity, Mutch
awakens frequently to comfort, console, and coax her son through these darkened
hours. She stumbles, like the sleep deprived will, through whatever the
darkness casts their way. Simultaneously she becomes engrossed in the stories
of Admiral Richard Byrd, whose explorations provide a telling undercurrent of
what it feels like to be alone—what she imagines it might be like for Gabriel.
At the same time Gabriel loves jazz, and the book emphasizes
this connection through its free-form (yet still organized) structure,
counterpointing stories of Gabriel with those of Byrd, and again with those of
Mutch herself, and her husband and second son. The book reads like the jazz
clubs it describes, and I felt Gabriel’s connection to the music as surely as
if I were there myself.
But, finally, it is the sentences.
Here she artfully juxtaposes Byrd’s contemplation of his reflection
...
But at the moment, he
[Byrd] is suspended in his little mirror, watching himself watching himself; he
is turning in the vortices that layer Antarctica, a witness to being consumed.
...with the way Gabriel avoids his own:
Gabriel rarely watches
himself. He only catches glimpses. Like our cat, he’ll often smoothly avert his
gaze when he’s standing in front of a mirror, not as if he’s afraid to see
himself but as if he has no curiosity about how he appears in the glass nor
interest that there is a glass at all. Then again, maybe he understands the
power of the other self, and like Byrd would prefer not to see the one that is
darker and harder to grasp.
And here, near the end, when Mutch describes listening to “Flamenco
Sketches,” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue
sessions:
I don’t know how many
times I’ve heard the tune before, it would be many, but I don’t know that I
have ever really listened, or listened in the way that Gabriel is listening. He
opens a door for me, and I step inside. Is this what it’s like to be him? Or
what it’s like to be him at least some of the time? I am never ready, I am
never ready. I am ready.
The beauty and power of a story well told come not from singularity,
but from the telling. Mutch is not the first mother with a special-needs child,
nor the first to write about it; bookstores have entire sections devoted to
such works. But Mutch is the first I’ve read who writes with such pure devastation,
a devastation that is not about destruction, but about awe. When the best sentences and stories devastate, it is as if
Sisyphus, in reaching the top, finds that the rock remains, that he is finished
and yet feels entirely alone, unable to conceive of what comes next. It is both
fullness and emptiness.
Few authors have made me feel this way. Annie Dillard. Joan
Didion. Orhan Pamuk. Dario Fo. Alice Walker. Paul Auster.
Reading Mutch’s memoir has washed away the guilt I’ve been
feeling, the nagging ache that it’s somehow wrong
to read anything other than those books I’ve set as tasks. The experience reminds
me that this project shouldn’t be thought of as a project at all. It should simply
be reading. Reading for joy. For
insight. For feeling. And for devastation.
Read since last post:
- Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)
- Know the Night, Maria Mutch
- A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto Bolaño
- Out of the Dark, Patrick Modiano
- How About never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff
Currently reading:
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
- Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)
Count: 62 read; 25 to go.
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