In Brief: Elizabeth Lowry, The Chosen

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LowryI’m running a bit behind on writing I need to get done sooner rather than later, but I don’t want to let Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen go unmentioned, so I thought I’d say at least little bit about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Briefly, then, I liked The Chosen but didn’t love it: it was not as absorbing or revelatory an experience as Tóibín’s The Master, which is my touchstone for books that undertake to convey authorship in this kind of intensely personal, mostly biographical way. (I think The Master is the only book in this genre that I have found as exceptional as its subject was or deserves.) It is a smaller book than Tóibín’s, in both scope and in spirit, and I think it is possible, even likely, that someone who really knows Hardy would find it a more resonant experience: in her author’s note, Lowry says that she has “quarried his fiction, poetry, verse dramas, personal notebooks, interviews, letters, manuscripts, and his self-authored biography”—and that “the cornerstone of The Chosen . . . are the ‘Poems of 1912-13.'” Of this material, I know only the fiction, and I only know two of his novels well (Tess and Jude), so other echoes will have been lost on me.*

There’s a way in which that’s appropriate to the Hardy Lowry depicts, who is pretty pessimistic about the lasting value of any of his labors (“Surprise!” says absolutely nobody who has read any Hardy at all). Looking around the house he laboriously designed and built for himself and his first wife Emma (whose death is the immediate occasion for The Chosen), he thinks

Hasn’t he only imagined living here? In spite of his plans and designs and refurbishments, he never gave his heart and soul to it. His real existence has always been elsewhere. And now that he’s had to become the exhumer of his own life, forced to dig up its chattels and heaps of rubbish, he finds that they’ve disintegrated in his hands. Just fragments are left.

He’s feeling sad because of Emma’s death, but also and even more because the notebooks and diary he discovers Emma has left behind tell a story of their marriage in which she is bitter and unhappy and scornful of his work (even though, as we learn through the diary and through flashbacks) initially she was his greatest supporter. “Does it happen to all husbands and wives, must we all end up as enemies to each other?” he mournfully wonders.

The novel is primarily an excavation of their past and a meditation on the pain of being unable to close or make up for the gap that opened between them. Because I don’t know much about Hardy’s life, I found it interesting finding out more about it, and I thought Lowry effectively conveyed the atmosphere of the gloomy house and its (often equally gloomy) surrounding landscape. I was interested too in the picture she gives us of Hardy the writer, especially his despair about ever capturing in words the ideas he has for his novels, and the frustrations he has about their reception that lead him to give up fiction for poetry. Emma, on the other hand, seemed more elusive, although that fits with the novel’s theme of the otherness of people we think we know well.

*A quick look around turned up this review by Amitava Banerjee, posted at the estimable Victorian Web, that confirms my intuition about this.

“Other Possibilities”: Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual

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Spufford1And all of a sudden with the last mug in her hand, a message comes through loud and clear from her psyche: this is an accident. There is no need for her life to have worked out like this at all. So many other possibilities . . . How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen . . . Surely the real thing has yet to come along.

Light Perpetual is a “what if?” novel, an intimate version of alternative history where the only variables are personal. In this case the “what if?” is “what if these five children had not been killed by a V-2 rocket in 1944?” What might their lives have been like if they had unfolded across the rest of the 20th century instead of being cut so violently short? “What has gone,” Spufford observes, after a harrowingly specific and vivid account of the bombing,

is not just the children’s present existence—Vernon not trudging home to the house with the flitch of bacon hanging in the kitchen, Ben not on his dad’s shoulders crossing the park, astonished by the watery November clouds, Alec not getting his promised ride to the Crystal Palace tomorrow, Jo and Valerie not making faces at each other over their dinner of cock-a-leekie soup. It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?

Those lost futures are what Light Perpetual chronicles, in sections titled both to tell us where we are now and to remind us that they didn’t really get there: “T+5: 1949”; “T+35: 1979”; etc.Spufford3

As with all such fictions, a lot depends on our accepting the initial premise. Thanks to my philosopher husband, I have learned enough about determinism over the years to know that Spufford is not being particularly rigorous: for any one of the alternative scenarios he mentions (“some altered single second of arc . . . a guidance failure . . . a hiccup in fuel deliveries”) to have spared the children’s lives, a lot else (perhaps literally everything else) would have had to be different also. But, for me anyway, that’s OK, not just because that’s not really a novelist’s problem but because I too have spent a lot of time, however irrationally or unphilosophically, laying an absence against an imagined future: that is exactly one of the ways most of us measure loss.

The premise or gimmick once initiated, the next question is what the writer does with it: how good is the storytelling, how well is it written, what is the pay-off, artistically or emotionally? On these grounds I was really impressed with Light Perpetual, though the first few pages of the novel initially made me a bit worried. They are very writerly, self-consciously so, and I wasn’t sure I would like a whole novel in that style; luckily, the whole novel is not in that style, and so the passages that are in that register felt striking, impressive, often moving, rather than tedious. I’m not sure I can give a single example that would show what I mean, because it’s the contrast between the more straightforward and fast-moving narrative parts and these more elevated ones that worked for me, but here’s a taste:

As the chorus comes around, Jo throws her head back, straightens the soft tube of her windpipe, and harmonises. Solo harmonies for two. Her voices soar, Marcus laughs out loud, and her brown-and-silver song winds away into the night, over the roofs of Bexford, past the scarlet light on the unmoving crane, past the grand houses of the Rise and the hipster coffee shops on the hill, over the burger joints and the takeaways, between the towers of the Park Estate and out over the treetops; voice and bassline and drum break chasing leaves and fried-chicken wrappers, echoing from the surfaces of brick and concrete on which love makes its always temporary claim; from which we constitute a home, we who life our voices and pass through, pass through.

Spufford2Is it just me, or is there something there reminiscent of the third-person narrator in Bleak House, who also likes to rise above the landscape, giving an almost cinematic effect, and whose voice also rises in such moments into a visionary or prophetic tone? “Come, other future,” exclaims Spufford’s narrator; “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light”; “Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this!” exclaims Dickens’s.  (I also heard a strong echo of Middlemarch in a passage about everyone finding themselves “the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble.”)

The other thing that worried me about the novel’s set-up is that a story of children’s lost futures could easily lead to idealization and sentimentality: instead of killing Hitler, the alt-historical fantasy of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, maybe Spufford would save the doctor who finds a cure for cancer or a radical leader who ends poverty or something. But Spufford’s five protagonists are flawed, ordinary, and often unsuccessful; the lives the novel imagines they might have lived are, like most lives, often hard, sometimes happy, occasionally beautiful. They do harm, or are complicit in it (one of them serves time in prison for her role in an act of horrific violence, for example, while another cheats someone out of all of their money); their ambitions are thwarted; their relationships often falter or fail altogether. In other words, the “might-be’s, could-be’s” are realistic, not idealistic; it is even possible at points to wonder if in some cases the future was not a loss worth grieving after all.atkinson1

Spufford could have told his five life stories without the framing device of the bomb: once they get underway, they are, on their own terms, effective devices for chronicling the upheavals and challenges of life in London over many eventful decades. Politics, labour activism, changing demographics and communities, technological changes, music and theater and sports and education: the novel engages us with all of these facets of modern life. As I read, I was interested enough in every character’s story that I often forget that I wasn’t following their “real” life. When I reached the last chapter (t + ∞), I found myself wondering what would really have been lost from the novel if Spufford hard written it straight—a question I also had about Atkinson’s A God in Ruins. I wasn’t annoyed with Spufford the way I was with Atkinson: at least he is clear from the outset about his game, for one thing, whereas Atkinson’s airy “Pouf” still irks me, all these years later! But in both cases I sense some distrust of “old-fashioned” novels, a desire to highlight and even excuse the artifice of fiction by layering an apology for it into the novel itself. I thought A God in Ruins was (would have been) a good enough novel, even a better novel, without the twist. I’m not so sure the same is true of Light Perpetual: its final words—”Come, dust”—have the power they do because we have committed for so long to other possibilities.

“What Can’t Be Said”: Concita De Gregorio, The Missing Word

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Missing WordHelp me say what can’t be said, you ask me.

This would be the most extraordinary outcome. Managing to say out loud, dry-eyed, the things that can’t be said because no one knows where to put them, no one wants to hold them, because they burn. And you—when people ask about you—feel guilty because you are a red-hot ember that scorches anyone that touches it.

Concita De Gregorio’s The Missing Word is just barely fiction, by which I mean both that it tells a true story and that it tells its true story with exceptional lightness, almost delicacy, not of tone but of touch or glance, as if to help her readers hold Irina’s story in their minds without scorching.

What happened to Irina is this: she married Mathias; they had twins; she and her husband eventually separated but made amicable arrangements to share time with their daughters; one day he picked them up and they were never seen again. Mathias took his own life, leaving no traces or clues of the girls’ fate. Irina lives on, because “that’s what nature has decided: pain on its own doesn’t kill you.” Eventually she meets another man, Luis, and is happy with him, though she is also, always, grieving: “It’s a never-ending occupation. A constant battle. A siege, as you call it The presence of those who are absent besieges you.”

Some of the chapters of The Missing Word are told by the narrator (Concita, as I understand both the novel’s conceit and its fictionalized truth) addressing Irina with questions or observations about Irina’s story, or Irina’s desire to tell her about it:

You want to talk about you. About what you’re like now. You want to say, eyes wide with surprise, that it can happen, something that you never imagined possible has happened to you. Love is back, it never really left: it was hidden in a corner, crouching in fear with its hands over its head, but it was there  . . . You talk and talk. You talk about changes. Memories. You wonder.

Other chapters are in Irina’s voice. She talks about about her family history, her marriage, her children, their disappearance, her memories, her mourning:

No. I don’t have a single picture with me. I don’t have one in my wallet. I don’t need to see them captured and immobilized in the past. I see them alive in the present, I don’t even need to close my eyes. I see them and hear them . . . There isn’t one image in particular that comes to mind. Every single one. All my memories are here: it’s not that they return, they never left. They haven’t been dislodged since the second they came into the world. Sometimes you’re surprised by the moment when they manifest themselves to you.

Other chapters are letters and documents: Irina writing to her friends, to her Nonna, to the girls’ teacher (begging, poignantly, for the school to release their stories and pictures to her), to judges or investigators (pressing for the investigation—which was inept, half-hearted, inconclusive—to continue). A couple of the chapters are lists: things Irina is angry about, things that make her happy, things she “mustn’t forget”—I made a list with that heading too, after Owen died.

riley-time-2“It must be said,” Irina says to Concita, “that losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain. The benchmark.” This is uncomfortable territory: it doesn’t seem right to weigh one grief against another. “Never would I compare my state with that of, say, a widow’s,” Denise Riley says in Time Lived, Without Its Flow”; “never would I lay claim to ‘the worst grief of all.'” Yet Riley, whose adult son died suddenly of a previously undetected heart defect, goes on to make other comparisons:

And, among my own kind, never would I compare my own infinitely lighter lot with that of the parent of a murdered or tortured child, or a suicidal child, or one killed in a stupid accident, or one very young, dying painfully slowly.

Irina does not know how or even whether Livia and Alessia died. She feels the impossibility of their survival, because surely there would have been some sign after so much time:

They’re very sensitive, Alessia and Livia. Highly intelligent. They understand, they hear everything. They would have found a way, in these years of absence, to let me know: we’re here. One person, a trick. Even if someone had said Mamma’s dead, or Mamma doesn’t want you anymore, she left. They would have come across something or someone, I think, able to capture a signal and transmit it. To be suspicious, feel sorry, understand.

But against the ninety-nine percent probability of their death, she sets the one percent chance that they are “somewhere in the world”: “all I can do is squeeze every fiber of my being into that infinitesimal space.” Maybe that would be worse, the not knowing for sure, the persistence of that tiny hope, although my mother’s heart says it might be better than what I know.

“There’s no specific noun for the parent of a dead child,” Riley remarks. That is the “missing word” of De Gregorio’s title. Maybe, both writers imply, there is no ready vocabulary because this is the loss (worst or not) that people, or parents anyway, least want to contemplate. It frustrates Riley when people say (as they have said to me too) “I can’t imagine what you are feeling”: “I’d like them to try to imagine,” she says, “it’s not so difficult.” I have thought the same, but I also understand the refusal; Riley calls it “a disavowal of the possibility of empathy,” but surely it is only self-preservation. Concita reflects on Irina’s reluctance to tell people the truth about her daughters:

People ask: Do you have children? You say nothing. Yes, two, you’d like to say. Because it’s true, you have two. They’re there all the time. You can’t free yourself of their absence . . . Then you should add: but they’re dead. Presumed dead, if you really want to be precise. But you don’t say it. You don’t say it spontaneously and then it’s too late, and you can’t find the courage to say it. Courage, yes, that’s the word. Because you’re ashamed to embarrass people . . . They truly didn’t want to know: they didn’t want to hear it.

“Well, do you know what would be amazing?” she goes on; “If people you speak to about yourself had the capacity to hold their peace, listen, and not feel duty-bound to put their two cents of horrified clichés in. To accept, and find a place for what you are saying.” That is what The Missing Word offers its readers as well as Irina: a place to listen, a story of love and loss to make up for the word we don’t have to give our grief a place—a story, too, of movement, which for Irina makes a new story and a new love possible, not replacing the old story or the old love but continuing them:

Searching, traveling, seeing, trying to understand what the bigger picture is. This is the only thing we can do. Not stopping ourselves, not suppressing our desire, ever. Another step. One meter further. Forgetting and remembering. Letting things out and then bringing them back into your heart.

I read The Missing Word on what would have been Owen’s 26th birthday. Another step.

“Unearthly Creatures”: Olivia Manning, The Doves of Venus

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manning-dovesShe thought of all the girls she had known—some too fat, some too thin, some plain and bespectacled like Nancy, some stupid, some dishonest, some mean, some cruel: all given, at times, to giggling, sniggering, sniffling, smelling of their under-arm smell—and yet, somehow, they were all transmuted by Tom’s admiration into unearthly creatures, silver-white doves, delicate, diaphanous, lovely as female gods.

Olivia Manning’s The Doves of Venus is one of the bleakest coming-of-age novels I’ve read, I think. Perhaps it struck me with so much melancholy force because I read it right after School for Love. School for Love is hardly buoyant, but by the end, Felix’s future seemed—maybe not clear or easy, but robust with possibilities, as he heads to England feeling ready to take up an adult place in the world. It is, in other words, an idiosyncratic but also perfectly recognizable Bildungsroman. Ellie, the young protagonist of The Doves of Venus, is also settling into her grown-up life at the end of her novel, but it feels as if she is settling, not just because [spoilers ahead, in case you care] she marries a blandly safe young man but because her marriage makes her mother so happy—”I never dared hope for such happiness,” she tells Ellie through tears—and it is precisely her mother’s stultifying world Ellie wanted to much to escape. Ellie has survived her stint as an independent single woman, but she did not thrive on and could not sustain it; the ending thus felt to me like a retreat. It shows Ellie outgrowing naïve ideas about love, but without quite attaining a corresponding sense of self.

school-for-loveThe novel is populated with many other women, young and old: that Ellie’s is not by any means the worst of their fates suggests the novel as a whole is grappling with the challenges faced by women in the 1950s, a time of rigid expectations but also some loosening constraints—a combination that brings a lot of risks, social as well as psychological. All around them are signs that it is now possible for women to rely on more than their looks for success and security, but women like Petta, the depressed wife of Ellie’s first, much older, lover, have not learned how—or maybe it is more accurate to say that they have not (or she has not, at any rate) learned to trust that they can get by on other terms. There’s a particularly poignant moment when Petta, feeling momentarily enlivened and confident, suddenly sees herself in a mirror among a crowd of younger women:

As she met herself emerging from among the petal-smooth girls, her smile went. Flushed and moist from the heat of the room, she seemed to have grown old in a moment.

Her face shocked her. It has an appalling pathos. She looked round at the girls as though there might be explanation of this change in her. They showed no surprise. She was a middle-aged woman. They accepted her age, just as they accepted their own youth.

Petta’s suicide attempts literalize the ways she feels dead-ended in a world that cannot see her as she still wants to see herself. But her pattern of latching repeatedly on to a new man thwarted the compassion I sometimes felt I ought to be able to show her: Manning makes her seem pathetic, not sympathetic, irritating if also pitiful. (Manning’s gimlet eye is part of the pleasure of her fiction—that detail about women smelling their under-arms exemplifies her unsentimental perspective.)

virago dovesEllie could have been set up as a clear foil for Petta, but she isn’t sure enough of her own value (or values) to play that part. Again, Manning doesn’t set her up for success: her artistic ambitions are not matched (as far as anyone else thinks, anyway) by either talent or drive, and she spends a lot of the novel moping about. The real contrast turns out to be Petta’s daughter Flora, who appears only very briefly late in the novel. “I want to study medicine,” she calmly tells her long-absent mother, and Petta is struck with “acute envy”:

It seemed that all she had been given herself—beauty, an unexpected fortune, the attention of countless men—was as nothing compared with the intelligence that would enable this plain girl to turn her back on a world where beauty and money held all the cards. She was simply side-stepping the whole damn-fool set-up.

None of the other women in the novel—and there are a lot of them—is so clearly prepared to live on such wholly different terms. Most of them have, like Ellie, internalized the idealized vision of women as “doves,” or, recognizing its unreality, have understood that nonetheless, those are the terms, the rules of the game they must live by.

Writers and critics have had a lot to say about the difficulties of writing a female Bildungsroman: what can it mean to tell a story about maturation when the conventional markers of adulthood are constraining rather than liberating? what if the place you are supposed to grow into is one that stifles or erases your identity, rather than establishing it? (This is a common and, I think, convincing way to think about what The Mill on the Floss is about, to give just one classic example.) Manning seems to be contemplating the same difficulties, as matters of both life and literary form: what life can a woman like Ellie really have that doesn’t carry some seeds of disappointment in it? The Doves of Venus carries Ellie from youthful folly through sad experience to a perfectly good marriage: the novel could plausibly be read as a happy ending, at least for her. I found the tone of the conclusion too melancholy for that, though, as Ellie heads home from a funeral in the “spectral quiet” of a winter night. But Flora, though: Flora gave me hope.

“Venturing Into Reality”: Olivia Manning, School for Love

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school-for-loveHis mother had been his world, and he, out of touch with other boys, perhaps unconsciously to please her, had remained rather too ‘fresh’ and ‘innocent.’ Anyway, it didn’t please everyone. He became conscious suddenly of his own developing attitude to life. Now he was alone in the world, it was just as well he couldn’t remain a little boy all his life.

Olivia Manning’s School for Love is as gimlet-eyed as her Balkan and Levant trilogies—more so in some ways, as its focus is much narrower. It is essentially a coming-of-age story about young Felix Latimer, who, following the death of his beloved mother, ends up in Jerusalem rooming with a sort-of relative, Miss Bohun. Jane Smiley’s introduction to the NYRB edition notes that in early reviews Miss Bohun was “compared to such great English literary monsters as Mrs. Havisham in Great Expectations.” First of all, Mrs. Havisham? That’s a shocking slip, as her unmarried status is pretty much the whole point of the character! But beyond that, Miss Havisham is not nearly as close a match for Miss Bohun as Miss Clack, in The Moonstone, who is similarly passive-aggressive, repressed, and evangelical.

Miss Clack is played more for laughs, though, while Miss Bohun, while sometimes inadvertently laughable, is too mean and destructive to be genuinely funny, wielding her power as a landlord at a time of widespread hardship and displacement with grimly gleeful pettiness and greed. Near the end of the novel one of the refugees she tutors in English, provoked beyond endurance by Miss Bohun’s hypocrisy, remarks that it is often remarked about her “that so mean a pay goes ill with so much religiosity.” Indeed it does, but Miss Bohun is angered, not shamed, by this reckoning, which if anything accelerates her mission to secure as much as she can for herself.

moonstone-oupThere are moments in School for Love when it is possible to sympathize with Miss Bohun, mostly because we see her primarily through Felix’s eyes. Grieving, lonely, and naïve, he accepts Miss Bohun’s account of herself and others for a long time and enjoying his occasional role as her confidant. She does take people in, after all; she has taken him in when he was otherwise unwanted and at a loss, although the terms of her “kindness” (as we see much more clearly than Felix) are anything but generous. It is a sad part of Felix’s maturation that he has to give up believing the best about people, an attitude nurtured in him by his mother. He is helped along in this shift towards realism (or, perhaps, cynicism) by the arrival of the refreshingly frank widow Mrs. Ellis, who becomes the subject of his first intense crush and, through her resistance to Miss Bohun’s pretenses, an agent of his “developing attitude to life”: “Venturing into reality,” Felix thinks, “Mrs. Ellis was the guide for him. Almost every time he was with her some incident widened his understanding of life, or of himself.”

Like the Balkan trilogy, though on a much smaller scale, School for Love is populated with people set adrift by the fortunes of war—out of place, uncertain of themselves and their futures. Felix himself is waiting for a transport to England: only late in the novel does he (whose recent memories are all of his family’s life in Iraq) come to see this as a potential homecoming, one that he approaches as an occasion to act for himself, as a man rather than a boy. It seems significant that he finds the courage to assert himself in his devotion to Faro, the Siamese cat who has been his only friend and comfort since his arrival in Miss Bohun’s cold, alienating house. Animals are, perhaps, better than people, or maybe they are just easier to love because they are less likely to disappoint or betray. “You don’t understand,” kindly Mr. Jewel says to Felix, who cannot understand why Mr. Jewel, who has been very badly treated by Miss Bohun, is ready, not just to forgive but to join forces with her. “You’re young,” Mr. Jewel goes on,

You’re strong and independent. You’ve got all your life before you. You young ones are a bit hard on us old ones—you don’t know what it’s like to be old . . . We’re all human; it’s not for us to be too hard on one another. You’ll find that out some day.

manningThis is a gentler conclusion, both about Miss Bohun and for the novel, than I expected from Manning, who was not known for her benignity. It seems consistent, though, with the novel’s title, which comes from a discussion between Felix and Miss Ellis about some lines she recites from a poem by William Blake:

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

“What does it mean?” Felix asks. “I suppose,” Miss Ellis replies, “that life is a sort of school for love.” Felix still has some lessons to learn.

Refusal: Kate Zambreno, Drifts

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driftsHow to capture that? The problem with dailiness—how to write the day when it escapes us. It was the problem at the center of the work I was trying to write, although I was unsure whether I was really trying to write it. Never have I felt more emptied of the possibility of writing but more full of it at the same time. When did I realize I was suffering not from writer’s block but from refusal?

Drifts shows its “refusal” from beginning to end: it is the record and the result of Kate Zambreno refusing the subtitle of the book, which is a novel. “Is it a novel, though?” I kept asking myself, as I read. I get it, that’s the point: Drifts asks (Zambreno asks) us to ask, what is a novel, anyway? what does it look like to refuse the artifice of form (and narration and coherence and plot and all the other usual constituent elements of fiction)? what if instead of seeking unity you settled for fragments, what if instead of momentum you embraced meandering, what if you turned always inward, never outward? For people who like this kind of book, Drifts is definitely the kind of book they will like. I didn’t much like it, which won’t surprise anyone who has followed this blog for long. Novels in fragments usually strike me as cop-outs. Yes, it’s hard to finish the thing: to complete the thoughts, find the form, shape the narrative, make something solid out of fleeting impressions, make art out of experience, rather than recreate it. That’s the novelist’s job! So do your job: don’t put the unfinished pieces out into the world and excuse them on the grounds that experience, too, is fragmented and incoherent and random. I live that way: must I read that way too? Other readers love such fictions, though, including many readers whose insights I value highly. That’s what keeps things interesting!

journalsolitudeThere were definitely things about Drifts I did like. I liked learning about Rilke (I would have liked, better, a unified essay about Rilke); I enjoyed May Sarton’s scattered presence (I would have liked, better, an essay focused on Zambreno’s interest in Sarton). I liked the sense of what it might be like to be in Zambreno’s head—until I got tired of it, since it’s not a particularly restful or happy or illuminating place and being in my own head is hard enough these days, thank you very much. I got tired of the insistence on how hard it is to write, to be a writer, to write a novel. It started to seem unbearably self-absorbed, self-indulgent, solipsistic, all this moping around and lamenting and oversharing. “Think of Trollope!” I wanted to say. “Get out of your head and just tell us a story!” But of course that is not the kind of novel Zambreno is interested in.

I’m sounding more negative than I felt about the book as I read it. There were many moments in Drifts that interested me and others that moved me and others that upset me (I wasn’t prepared for the discussion of and image from Sarah Charlesworth’s series Stills). I found myself wondering why Zambreno didn’t just write it Drifts as memoir, rather than autofiction. I find it distracting reading works that refuse (that word again) to decide or clarify what they are, and perhaps my expectations would have been different if the pitch itself had been different. Still, the title gave fair warning, even if, arguably, the subtitle misled. I’m glad I finally gave Zambreno a try: now I know that she’s not for me. I’m not absolutely refusing to read anything more by her, but unless her other books are of a wholly different sort, I’ll let them drift away.

Marvellous Ways

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YVR BooksI’m just back from a long-awaited, oft-postponed visit to Vancouver. I came back with more books than I left with: no surprise there! A couple of them are ones I claimed from my mother’s ‘donate’ pile (one of my undertakings was to help her sort her many – many! – books so that the ones she wants most to read and reread are actually on shelves and the others eventually make their way into the hands of other readers); a couple of others were just too good to pass up when I spotted them on the bargain books shelves at the UBC bookstore; and one, Bach’s Sonic Tapestry, is by and inscribed by an old family friend.

I actually finished reading one of my new books while I was still in Vancouver, Sarah Winman’s A Year of Marvellous Ways. Between jet lag and the actual work I now have to catch up on (I even set up on out-of-office reply for the first time I can remember, to be sure I actually would take meaningful time off!), I don’t expect to be able to write a proper post about it, so I thought I would at least give you a sense of it before its details fade away.

A Year of Marvellous Ways is about a lonely and eccentric old woman, Marvellous Ways, and a young man, Francis Drake (he’s heard all the jokes about his name already!) whose paths cross in the remote village in Cornwall where she lives. Drake is in trouble, mostly because of his traumatic experience in the Second World War; Marvellous lives mostly on her memories, which are mostly of lost loves. Predictably, these two misfits heal each other, though the details of it are not so predictable. It’s a touching enough story, just shadowed enough with tragedy to avoid being twee.

The novel’s most distinctive aspect is its style, which might seem to you either poetic or overly mannered: I had both reactions, sometimes at the same time. Here’s a sample:

That night an old woman at the end of her life, and three young people at the start of their lives lie in bed listening to the earth turn. It has a melody that only the gentle hear. They each lie thinking about love. Lost love and love to come. The old woman falls asleep first. She falls asleep with moonlit lips upon her lips and the sweet scent of china tea and gorse flower whispering tales from sun-drenched time. The young woman who smells of bread thinks love is like yeast. It needs time to prove. It is complex. She thinks she might get a dog instead. Along the coast in a cottage called Long Gone a young fisherman thinks only of her. He thinks love is like the sea, beautiful and dangerous but something he would like to know. And in the boathouse a young man lights a cigarette. He takes two puffs, one for sorrow two for joy. He thinks about a woman called Missy Hall. For once it is a good memory. The moon falls behind the trees and the lights go out.winman-ways

Do you like that? Could you read a whole novel like that? I mean, of course it isn’t literally all like that, but quite a lot of it is. In the end, for me, it was a bit much, but I didn’t dislike the novel.

I picked up A Year of Marvellous Ways because I really liked Winman’s more recent novel Still Life. (Still Life definitely deserved a proper write-up too, but when I read it last year, I just wasn’t up to the job.) I think if I had read A Year of Marvellous Ways first I wouldn’t have picked up Still Life, so I’m glad it happened the other way around.

Once things settle down (including my currently very muddled internal clock), I will be reading the others, probably starting with Drifts, which I dipped into on the plane yesterday. It was enticing but clearly deserved more attention than I was able to give it in between bouts of turbulence.

Poetry Serendipity

Rohan Maitzen18 Comments

stevensonI have read a fair amount of poetry in my life, for pleasure and for work. One of my very oldest books is an illustrated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s  A Child’s Garden of Verses, and I went through a phase as a tween where I thought reading Poe’s “The Raven” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” aloud was the height of literary engagement; around the same time, I was given an anthology of Romantic poetry, which (read obsessively but selectively) confirmed my youthful predilection for angst and pathos. Mostly I read fiction, though, so it remains surprising to me that it was a poem—Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web,” specifically—that turned me into an English major (thank you again, Don Stephens!).

My poetic horizons broadened considerably during my student years, mostly in predictable ways: the English Honours program at UBC required entire courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton in those days, for one thing, and I actually chose a course on ‘Poetry in the Age of Dryden and Pope’ as an elective—and really enjoyed it, thank you very much! (In fact, I often reflect on how much I gained by the now old-fashioned idea that my curriculum should not be primarily determined by what I already knew I was interested in.)  At Cornell too, where I did my graduate studies, historical breadth requirements meant a fair amount of attention to poetry across time.

tennysonSince I became an English professor myself, my research and teaching has primarily focused on fiction, but I actually consider poetry the highest form of literary art, and I always look forward to the chance to work through some examples with my students, something I rarely get to do except in first-year courses or when I teach our ‘theory and methods’ course on close reading. Once upon a time we had a full-year Victorian Literature course, which meant plenty of poetry and even (rarer still) some of the period’s great “sage” writing, and today sometimes I get to teach our survey course on British Literature from 1800 to the present: hooray, more opportunities for poetry! I also regularly assign as much of Aurora Leigh as I dare in my seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question.’ (If you’re curious about how I approach these courses, the index to my series of posts on “This Week In My Classes” will lead you to all kinds of reflections on them.)

And yet in spite of this long experience—or because of it, in a way, as it has been so miscellaneous and in some respects haphazard, driven by immediate requirements, constrained by the contents of anthologies or the imperatives of course design—I consider myself both amateurish and ignorant about poetry, at least compared to those who really work with and on it, as teachers and scholars, or as poets themselves. I’m particularly stupid about most very contemporary poetry: when I do dip into it, I am often baffled or alienated or bored, reactions which I genuinely believe are as much my fault (maybe more) as the poets’. I am professionally committed, after all, to the idea that reading well is something we have to learn to do!

in-memoriamWhen I teach poetry, something I often remark is that even the most skeptical among us tacitly acknowledges its power and value on special occasions—weddings, for example, and funerals. There is something about poetry that we need, not just at those times but especially at those times. I knew this already in theory but only really understood its truth when Owen died. Lines of poetry that I had read many times before became new to me, in terrible but also beautiful ways; I reread them over and over, and also sought out (and was offered) more. Sometimes the words brought comfort, but more often they offered confirmation: yes, this, this is how I feel, this is what I would say myself, if I could. I have found some passages of prose that bring the same relief, but it is still poetry I turn to when the grief is hardest to bear. I copy passages into my journal and save screen shots, an ongoing commonplace book of sorrow. I don’t necessarily think that this is the best way, the best reason, to read poetry. It can feel solipsistic; I wouldn’t want it to be the only way I (or anyone) read poetry. I wouldn’t want these to be the only poems I read.

SamplerI would like to read more poetry, and to read more different kinds of poetry better. You’d think this would be easy, and of course the steps themselves are simple enough, but the feeling of not “getting” it (which I have, cumulatively, spent many hours trying to train my students out of) does get in the way of my good intentions. Lately, therefore, I’ve come up with a little game I call “Poetry Serendipity”: every time I go up into the stacks of the university library, I take different routes on my way to and from whatever section I am specifically visiting and, as I wander, I scan the shelves for names I recognize or (more random and risky, but also more fun) for those tell-tale slim volumes that you just know must be poetry collections. Sometimes I have a few names in mind, so that if I notice I’m in the (say) contemporary American section around names starting with M or P, I can look around for (say) W. S. Merwin, or Marge Piercy. I sign out a few books, bring them home, and browse them without purpose or pressure. If I like something, I pause and reread;  if I don’t connect, I close the book and move on without shame or regret—sometimes from very famous poets! I haven’t had many big successes, but pretty often I find at least one poem I like enough to copy out. Along the way I think I am learning something about myself as a poetry reader. I like form, or the feeling of it; I like clarity, sometimes (though not always) simplicity; I like concrete details; I like ideas but not elusive abstractions; I like moments in time, poignant or reflective; I like calm, and melancholy, not exultation; I do not like religion (with rare exceptions). Yet somehow I also like many poems that meet none of these specifications.

Here are a couple of poems I have copied out, from among the ones that aren’t (for a change) about grief, or not overtly. Maybe you already know them, or maybe for you too they will feel like lucky finds, a bit of poetic serendipity.

The Bookstall

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open—that one
and that—and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read—these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.

— Linda Pastan

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

— Jane Kenyon

At a Bach Concert

Coming by evening through the wintry city
We said that art is out of love with life.
Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,
Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,
Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

— Adrienne Rich

One of my luckiest finds so far has been Elizabeth Jennings. She turns out not to be particularly obscure, but I had never come across her before. After I went through the first of her collections that I’d brought home, I went back for more. Here’s one of hers that I like.

Answers

I kept my answers small and kept them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bulwark to my fear.

The huge abstractions I kept from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.

But the big answers clamoured to be moved
Into my life. Their great audacity
Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.

Even when all small answers build up to
Protection of my spirit, still I hear
Big answers striving for their overthrow

And all the great conclusions coming near.

— Elizabeth Jennings

I own only a handful of poetry books (not counting the many anthologies and readers and textbooks I have accumulated for work): the collected poems of Philip Larkin, of Elizabeth Bishop, of Mary Oliver; Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of Cavafy; Sylvia Plath’s Ariel; some Daphne Marlatt. Of these, Larkin is my favorite (and “Aubade” my favorite of his poems)—my tastes and interests lean pretty conventional, I guess, which is fine with me. I wonder if it counts as “winning” my game to find someone else whose poetry I want to buy, not borrow. In the meantime, I’ll keep browsing.

Do you have any favorite poets, preferably lesser-known, that you think I should keep an eye out for as I wander the stacks?

“My Struggles”: Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Rohan Maitzen37 Comments

kingsolverPractically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal. I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only. I could share it, but only if I chose to do so. The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas. On that particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start. She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth . . . I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lies, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.

For a novel that has (more or less) exactly the same plot and (more or less) the same characters as David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is remarkably unlike David Copperfield. This confused me a lot when I read the first half of Kingsolver’s novel back in January—confused and also alienated me, to the point that I not only put it aside unfinished but wrote plaintively to my book club asking if maybe we could choose something else for our next read. I’m glad now that other members said they were enjoying it and so we stayed the course: with our meeting to talk about it finally looming, I picked it up again yesterday and ended up reading right through to the end in a few hours. I was not delighted by it, but I became engrossed in it, and though overall I am still disappointed in it as a revision of Dickens’s novel, as its own novel Demon Copperhead is, I think, actually pretty good.

It is tempting but probably pointless to track through Demon Copperhead comparing its main ingredients to their counterparts in David Copperfield. On the other hand, some comparison is irresistible, if only to illustrate how Kingsolver both does and doesn’t do what Dickens does. “First, I got myself born,” her novel begins. Here, in contrast, is the famous opening of David Copperfield:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

copperfieldKingsolver jumps right into the action, and really, it never stops, for the next 500+ pages. Demon Copperhead is a rush of narrative—a copious, colorful, fast-moving torrent of words. Although it is clear by the end of the novel that it is, like the original, retrospective, it has none of the layers of David Copperfield, which is complicated and enriched by foreshadowing and dramatic irony. It is perhaps surprising, given his reputation for exaggeration and hyperbole, that, on my reading anyway, Dickens is by far the more subtle and nuanced author of the two. Kingsolver (or, properly, her first-person protagonist Damon Fields) just keeps going and going and going, a kind of tireless Energizer Bunny of grim revelations about the hardships of life for a child born in poverty in Appalachia and growing up through the worst of the opioid crisis. At a time when the idea that fiction should have a purpose is (in elite circles, anyway) often dismissed as incompatible with real art, Demon Copperhead is, unapologetically, a fully committed ‘social problem’ novel: it has more in common, in that respect, with Mary Barton, or even with Bleak House, then with David Copperfield, which is, as its opening line tells us, a story about moral development—an individual story, a Bildungsroman. Its action is always, more than anything else, about David’s character, and especially about his tender, loving heart.

As novel about Appalachia and the opioid crisis, Demon Copperhead is quite compelling, although it is also pretty heavy-handed. (I might not have thought this about the novel if I hadn’t recently watched the excellent series Dopesick, which covers a lot of similar sociological territory and hits some of the same beats, in terms of storytelling.) What I figured out, when I returned to the novel after my long hiatus, is that the David Copperfield framing is a red herring, perhaps based on a misunderstanding or a misapplication of the kind of novel Dickens wrote. This point really clicked for me when I reached Kingsolver’s Acknowledgments, at the end of Demon Copperhead:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting this novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

kingsolver2It’s notable to me that the rest of her acknowledgments are to people who helped with expertise related to social problems (“foster care and child protective services . . . logistics and desperations of addiction and recovery, Appalachian history” etc.) – not to Dickens or David Copperfield. It isn’t that David Copperfield is not about child poverty and harsh social conditions; it’s that (I would say, anyway) these circumstances are incidental in David Copperfield to David’s perceptions of his experiences, and to Dickens’s own preference for addressing material conditions as external manifestations of moral and imaginative conditions. At best, Kingsolver is taking Dickens more literally than is usually appropriate; at worst, she is entirely overlooking his preoccupation with David’s inner life.

One of the costs of Kingsolver’s approach is prose that is also excessively literal, chock full of vivid, concrete details but leaving very little to—or providing very little stimulation for—our imaginations. Something I often discuss with my classes is the way Dickens’s writing itself creates in us, as we read it, the kind of mental activity he fears modern life is devaluing and suppressing: the flights of fancy in his language do for us, cultivate in us, what he fears we are losing. He writes in defiance of political economy, of utilitarianism, of facts—at least, of facts reduced to discrete and definitive units of measurement, the way they are in the famous opening of Hard Times:

hardtimes‘Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

Hard Times is Dickens’s most insistent and programmatic condemnation of sticking to “facts,” and also his most dogged but also (I think) rhetorically powerful defense of what he calls “fancy.” But he fights this fight in all of his novels in ways I have talked about here before, including in reference to David Copperfield, at least as much, if not more, through his style as through his explicit content.

I’m not saying Kingsolver’s prose is devoid of fancy. Most of its creative energy seems to me to rest in Damon’s voice, which is blunt and colloquial and observant, but not at all poetic. There is a lot of vivid imagery, although so much of it is in aid of things we’d rather not see that it can be hard to appreciate it as artistic. It’s the other qualities that, to my mind, define “Dickensian” writing that I really miss, though. For one thing, Kingsolver’s novel is entirely unleavened with humor. OK, our introduction to her version of Aunt Betsy and Mr. Dick (here, Damon’s grandmother Betsy Woodall and Brother Dick) is amusing, but oh, how I missed Janet and the donkeys! And though the basics of the plot about Uriah Heep’s malevolent machinations are the same, the exposure of U-Haul has  none of the exuberant joy of Mr. Micawber’s increasingly vehement denunciations:

And last. I am now in a condition to show, by—HEEP’S—false books, and—HEEP’S—real memoranda, beginning with the partially destroyed pocket-book (which I was unable to comprehend, at the time of its accidental discovery by Mrs. Micawber, on our taking possession of our present abode, in the locker or bin devoted to the reception of the ashes calcined on our domestic hearth), that the weaknesses, the faults, the very virtues, the parental affections, and the sense of honour, of the unhappy Mr. W. have been for years acted on by, and warped to the base purposes of—HEEP. That Mr. W. has been for years deluded and plundered, in every conceivable manner, to the pecuniary aggrandisement of the avaricious, false, and grasping—HEEP.

Yes, he goes on like this for pages—and (as Joe Gargery would say), what larks!

Dickens PortraitWhat I missed most of all in Demon Copperhead was the melancholy tenderness that suffuses David Copperfield, and the way Dickens shades David’s highs and lows with his profound understanding of both the necessity and the heartbreak of losing our childhood innocence. The David that worships Steerforth and adores Dora is so loving and lovable: he is wrong, of course, in both cases, but Dickens is so good at making us feel to our core the cost of outgrowing mistakes like these, of becoming someone too savvy and knowing and suspicious to follow our hearts without question.

There’s also just nothing in Demon Copperhead that rises to the level of Dickens’s sheer virtuosity as a writer in David Copperfield. The scene in which Kingsolver’s Steerforth (Fast Forward) comes to his end is dramatic and suspenseful but it has neither the rich pathos nor the glorious prose of Dickens’s chapter “The Tempest”:

The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature.

The ending of the chapter is in a different register altogether from the extravagance of that description: quieter, sadder, and resonant with everything that David has known and been and loved and lost:

As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever since, whispered my name at the door.

‘Sir,’ said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which, with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, ‘will you come over yonder?’

The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support me:

‘Has a body come ashore?’

He said, ‘Yes.’

‘Do I know it?’ I asked then.

He answered nothing.

But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children—on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind—among the ruins of the home he had wronged—I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

Honestly, it seems kind of unfair to point out that Kingsolver doesn’t—perhaps can’t—write like that. There’s a reason Dickens was called “the Inimitable!” No doubt, too, there are some of you who prefer what she does to what Dickens does. (To each their own, of course, but also, you’re just wrong!) To invite comparison with the greats is to set yourself up for failure, and I definitely wouldn’t say Demon Copperhead is a failure. I doubt I’ll read it again, though, whereas I am wholeheartedly looking forward to rereading David Copperfield again this fall with my students.

Dickens-Desk

“Simple Truths”: Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

darkThey belonged here. Of course. It was obvious. They belonged here and they should be here. Why not? Why on earth not? Why should she and Polly leave the Point to a land trust rather than to the people who had loved it the longest? Her heart pounded. It had taken her her whole life to see it, but now that she did, nothing could be as clear. The simple truths are always hidden in plain sight, only veiled by the complications of the human mind.

I read almost all of Fellowship Point‘s 575 pages in a single day, which is a testament to how engrossing I found it. That said, by the time I finished it I was disappointed in it: although it is admirably smart and ambitious and encompasses a lot of people, events, and themes, there’s a central plot “resolution” that I found very artificial, not satisfying in any way except as a planned revelation to pull things too neatly together. Furthermore, the final resolution about the future of the land known as Fellowship Point, while the right answer in probably every way, nonetheless felt awkwardly didactic as it actually played out. (Note that I avoid saying exactly what that plot point is or what happens to the land: this is partly because I consider it a courtesy to avoid spoilers here, but also because if you do go on to read the novel itself, I don’t want my stamp of disapproval to mark these elements too prominently. My guess is that you’ll recognize them in any case, but you may well respond to them differently!)

Fellowship Point is like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel if it were written by Elizabeth Strout: it’s a family saga that sprawls across generations, and it’s a close-up study of two idiosyncratic older women, Agnes and Polly, long-time best friends, whose lives are intimately connected to their neighboring family properties on the coast of Maine. These two women are the best part of the book, and since they are a big part of it, that’s a good thing! Agnes is the most Strout-like of the two, acerbic, independent, uncompromising, unmarried—a grouch with a heart of gold. Polly is kinder, gentler, easier, more accommodating. She is married to a Casaubon-like scholar, a retired philosophy professor struggling to sustain his self-esteem and sense of purpose now that he’s cut off from formal academic life. I had to laugh at his response to Polly’s helpful suggestion that “until his next book came out he write a weblog to express his opinions”:

“Are you serious?” He frowned. “A weblog, on the computer? I’d be laughed out of the profession. . . . ” He’d adopted blog as a catchphrase rather than an activity. “Time to work on my blog,” he’d say for all kinds of transitions—when he repaired to the bathroom, for example.

OK, fair enough! But Polly’s ideas aren’t in fact foolish ones, in this case or in other circumstances, and much of the novel is about her learning to trust herself and her judgment, to stand up against his and then her sons’ tendency to belittle or dismiss her, often in the condescending guise of loving concern.

dark2Agnes, in contrast, has to get out of her own way, to stop guarding her secrets and make space in her life for love and forgiveness. This means reckoning with a traumatic incident from her past, which we learn about through the device of a long series of letters she wrote to her dead sister, which she eventually decides to share with the novel’s third protagonist, Maud Silver, an ambitious young editor eager to convince Agnes to write a full and frank memoir.

For me, it was the letters that began to sap the energy of the novel. They felt like a device, for one thing, an answer to “how do we get this backstory in?” Agnes as shown through the third-person narration is a more vivid and engaging character than Agnes in their first-person voice, too. And the backstory itself took way too long to unspool. I was curious about it, but after a while I was tempted to skim through the letters so I could just find out what the big deal was. Once I knew and I began to suspect how the other pieces fit together, I got somewhat irritable about it all, even though I liked Agnes and Polly enough to want to know how it all turned out.

Thematically, the most substantial issue in the novel is people’s relationship to the land they live on: how ideas about ownership or stewardship, about belonging or sharing or developing or loving the land, affect how it is treated and reflect other, broader, values about how we live in the world. In her acknowledgements, Dark says

As a child I learned that I lived on land where indigenous peoples had lived for hundreds of years. I never stopped thinking about this and wondering what to do about it. The question found its way into this novel. I hope we all find a just answer.

I think the novel does offer “a just answer” to its own specific scenario, but it comes across as pat, rather than as artistically satisfying. It’s true that clues about what that answer might or should be are present from early in Fellowship Point, and maybe if I reread it I would find that this thread (political, ethical, and thematic) is interwoven more richly than I noticed. Maybe, too, it’s thematically appropriate to keep the better alternative to the two options that are more overtly the novel’s central conflict out of sight until nearly the end: it makes sense, I suppose, that the third option wouldn’t even occur to Agnes, loving Fellowship Point and its family history as she does, until quite late—indeed, almost too late. Maybe this answer was meant to feel disruptive of our expectations, especially given the novel’s otherwise familiar genre. All I can say is that I wasn’t convinced by it, however just and right it is in principle, as the right ending for Fellowship Point or, to look at it the other way around, Fellowship Point didn’t read to me like the right novel for that ending. There’s just too much else going on in it that doesn’t really tie in to it.

I also wasn’t in love with Maud’s plot, and I really didn’t like the Big Reveal about it . . . but enough criticism. Really, it’s strange that I have so many complaints about the novel, considering how immersed I was in it in the moment. It is very readable, clearly. I don’t mean that as damning it with faint praise: it’s a lot! Many novels don’t achieve even that much. I appreciated, too, the obvious ambition of the novel, even if, in my judgment, its ambition is not matched by its achievement. Before I read it, I was surprised that my local independent bookstore has it filed under “fiction,” rather than “literature.” I’m always amused by their confident distinction between these two categories and I’m often tempted to challenge them both on the concepts and on their choices about what goes where. Now I think that in this case, they got it right—which isn’t to say it isn’t a good novel, but I am not at all convinced that it’s a great one.