A grief observed

Yesterday I started The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of the emotional aftermath following the death of her husband and the life-threatening illness of her daughter. I’ve not read much Didion apart from a few essays anthologized in various freshman composition textbooks I’ve assigned over the years, but what I’ve read, I’ve liked. In the essays I’ve read, Didion demonstrates a ruthless, unflinching refusal to turn from grim and difficult scenes. A “pretty cool customer” is how a hospital social worker describes Didion when hospital workers approach her in the Emergency Room waiting room to inform her of her husband’s death, and this “cool customer” tone resonates throughout the book as Didion recounts the experience of losing her husband while worrying about her comatose daughter.

As a writer, I relate to this “cool customer” aspect of Didion’s prose. I believe that when you’re writing about something emotionally charged, you have to separate the emotion from the words, allowing language itself to act like a twitch–a clamp attached to a horse’s lip to distract it during veterinary procedures–so you aren’t fixating directly on your own pain. If you’re worrying in your author’s mind about a particular turn of phrase or the peculiar echo of a repeated image, you’re less likely to be sucked under by the pull of pure emotion. Instead of writing about your own pain, which is an entirely subjective subject, your writer’s mind considers pain as an abstracted, almost Platonic thing: what universal elements of Pain does my experience point to, and how can I share that accurately with any feeling heart?

When you write about pain–particularly your own–the words serve as a sort of lifeline, something to cling to in the maelstrom of contradictory feelings and remembrances. As Didion’s memoir vividly illustrates, in the face of tragedy you can’t control your feelings, the tidal ebb and flow of grief, but you can control the words with which you describe your own emotional tsunami. When you write about your own pain, the act of crafting language becomes one way of making sense out of the senseless, a written version of Freud’s talking cure. Because Didion has such a long, illustrious history of being a “pretty cool customer” in her essays and fiction, her sights were honed to razor-sharp acuity when tragedy struck, every wife and mother’s worst nightmare happening while she stood with eyes wide open.

I’ve borrowed the title of today’s post from another classic memoir of grief, the journal C.S. Lewis kept after the death of his young wife. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction: husbands die at the dinner table, daughters lie in comas caused by hospital-contracted infections, and wives die before their older husbands. There’s no sense to be made of any of these inexplicable realities: sickness and death defy the narrative arc of “happily ever after.” But as long as a writer’s eye remains open to her or his experience, even tragedy can be transformed into art, a pretty cool customer finding the kernel of truth behind events most mortals prefer to ignore.

 

The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS

In the United States, we’re accustomed to viewing AIDS through the lens of political activism and ethics: what should we do to assure AIDS victims receive better medical treatment without social stigma? Jonathan Engel’s fascinating new book, The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS, views the disease through the lens of medical and social history: how did our understanding of a mysterious disease, its vectors, and its possible cures evolve over time and in different places?

As an American reader, I was most fascinated by Engels’ discussion of geographical differences in AIDS epidemiology. In the United States, AIDS has flourished among homosexuals, hypodermic drug users, and their partners: despite political attempts to spin the disease as affecting “everyone,” American AIDS is statistically concentrated within a particular portion of the population.

In Africa, however, AIDS is more pervasive, widely infecting even heterosexuals with no connection to hypodermic drug usage. In The Epidemic, Engels traces various theories explaining why AIDS seems to behave differently in Africa than it does in the U.S. Although the vectors that spread HIV are the same worldwide, various societal influences make the sexual spread of AIDS in Africa more pervasive than the sexual spread of AIDS in the United States. In discussing this and other politically sensitive topics, Engels consistently writes with the objectivity of a scientist, explaining epidemiological differences without making moral or political judgments.

Because Engels book deals objectively with the ethical dilemmas posed by AIDS and attempts to curb its spread, The Epidemic seems a perfect book-club selection, a book that would be richer and more thought-provoking if read and discussed with others. Among the ethical dilemmas Engels touches upon–but does not preach about–are issues of civil liberties (for example, should the gay bath-houses that harbored the initial spread of the disease have been closed?) and personal privacy (should newly diagnosed individuals be required by law to notify their partners of their HIV status?) Because Engels consistently refrains from taking sides in the various ethical debates he chronicles, readers have the freedom to make up their own mind when it comes to the social implications of this modern pandemic.

This is the second book I’ve reviewed through HarperCollins’ First Look program, which offers free Advance Reading Editions of new books to individuals interested in reviewing him. If you’d like to read new books for free, check out First Look for a chance to “read and review tomorrow’s books today.”

 

Lucky: A Memoir by Alice Sebold

I didn’t mean to start reading Lucky, Alice Sebold’s memoir of her rape as a college freshman. I’m in the middle of several other books, so I don’t have time to start a new title…and it’s not like a book about rape is a fun summer read. However, after reading (and loving) Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, I knew I wanted to read Lucky eventually. So when a friend lent me her copy, I read the first page out of curiosity and was immediately drawn into Sebold’s story.

Like any good screenwriter, Sebold cuts right to the chase. The brutal attack Sebold suffered the night before heading home after her first year of college is the centerpiece of her memoir, so she recounts it on page one. Only after you’ve gotten a graphic look at Sebold’s survivor spirit does she fill in the background to her story: the “weird” dysfunctional family she returns home to, her emotionally distant father, her panic-addled mother.

Sebold’s rape causes her to redefine “normal” as she struggles to return to said state…but it soon becomes clear that her home life was never “normal,” whatever that is. One of the most emotional moments so far in Sebold’s memoir is the moment, for instance, when she confronts her father’s insinuation that she “let” her rapist attack her, given that his weapon was found dropped on the ground not far from the scene of the crime. As Sebold explains to her father–the one man who should sympathize with her–how a beaten and traumatized girl would necessarily be terrified at the thought that her attacker was still armed, readers get a vivid glimpse into what it means to be repeatedly victimized: first by a rapist, and next by friends and family who just don’t “get” it. Sebold make no excuses for the fact that she cooporated with her attacker after it was clear she couldn’t escape. The choice between being raped and being murdered, she suggests, is surprisingly easy to make.

The title Lucky comes from Sebold’s later realization that a girl had been murdered on the spot where she was raped: as police investigators informed her, she was “lucky” only to have been brutalized. Although “lucky” isn’t the first word most women would associate with the word “rape,” Sebold is lucky to have survived with her wits and even a dark sense of humor intact. Sebold didn’t ask to be attacked, nor did she “let” her rape happen to her…but she did, in brutality’s aftermath, choose how to respond. So far, her memoir suggests that she chose an admirable path with both courage and grace.

 

Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska, et al

James O. Prochaska’s Changing for Good is one of the books I’m reading as part of my MentorCoach training program. (The other book is Co-Active Coaching, by Laura Whitworth, et al.) Since coaches typically work with people who are trying to change ingrained habits, understanding how people change is essential. Although advertisements and talk show psychologists tout instant, “just put your mind to it” style change, research shows that there are distinct steps that self-changers go through before changing for good. By recognizing, for instance, that thinking about and planning for an eventual change is part of the growth process, coaches and clients alike can be more realistic about goals and the “baby steps” it takes to reach them.

 

The Rarest of the Rare by Diane Ackerman

Beginning a Diane Ackerman book is like sinking into a hot bubble bath: warm, soothing, and sensuous. After having adored Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, I’ve made a point to collect a copy of every Ackerman title I can find used: a rewarding task given how prolific a writer she is.

The Rarest of the Rare is a slim (by Ackerman’s standards) volume in which Ackerman lives up to her reputation of being “a hard-core adventuress” by traveling around the world to observe endangered monk seals, short-tailed albatrosses, and golden lion tamarinds as well as the threatened habitats of the Amazonian rainforest and the Florida scrublands. As with all of her books, The Rarest of the Rare is a descriptive delight, bombarding readers with sensory details of Ackerman’s adventures as she swims with monk seals and slogs up the Amazon. Although extinction has always been a natural part of the evolutionary process, the current rate of human-influenced environmental change threatens both biodiversity and the very sanctity of natural life. A rare bird herself, Ackerman captures the beauty of endangered creatures and ignites in her readers a desire to save them.

 

The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich

I recently finished a review copy of Louise Erdrich’s soon-to-be-released new novel, The Painted Drum. After having heard that part of Erdrich’s book is set here in New Hampshire, I was curious to see her writerly depiction of my adopted state.

The Painted Drum does indeed open in New Hampshire, in the fictional village of Stiles and Stokes. Faye Travers and her half-Ojibwe mother are antique dealers who make their living appraising local estates, so it is with eager curiosity that Faye inspects the belongings of John Jewett Tatro, a local man rumored to have an impressive collection of antiquities from his days as an agent on North Dakota’s Ojibwe reservation.

As readers of novels such as Love Medicine, Tracks, or The Beet Queen well know, Erdrich is an anthologist’s dream, writing novels whose chapters serve as self-contained short stories. “Revival Road,” the opening chapter of The Painted Drum, is as intricate as a well-crafted brooch, containing within it like jewels the themes of the narrative which is to follow. While giving requisite nods to New Hampshire local flavor–frost heaved roads, springtime blackflies, and seemingly ubiquitous Subarus–Erdrich brings into sharp focus a community that sees more than its share of sorrow but has yet to learn how to deal with tragedy.

Like many New Hampshire towns, Stiles and Stokes is divided between locals and transplants: families who have lived in the area for generations and the typically well-heeled outsiders who are drawn to the state by its colleges and tax-free status. Although she herself is a local, Faye Travers has much in common with cosmopolitan newcomers, including Kurt Krahe, a German stone artisan who is Travers’ neighbor and would-be suitor.

It is from Krahe that Travers learns a German term that proves significant throughout the entire novel: the notion of Zwischenraum, the space between things. Travers herself is a creature of this in-between realm, arbitrating between locals and newcomers in both her professional and personal life. Like a white car wedged between birch trees–an early image that presages later tragedy–Faye is caught between worlds: the New Hampshire world where Native antiquities are to be bought and sold no differently than any other forgotten mementos and the Ojibwe traditions of her mother’s ancestry, which insist that a painted drum she finds among Tatro’s belongings is both magical and deserving of special treatment.

This painted drum of the novel’s title exists in a Zwischenraum all its own. Discovered near the novel’s beginning, the drum’s true history is revealed in the novel’s middle portion, when Ojibwe storyteller Bernard Shaawano recounts how the drum came to be built and how it came to leave North Dakota. Although central to an understanding of the drum’s mystical powers, Shaawano’s story lacks the sharp focus of the novel’s opening. Whereas Faye Travers’ story is rooted in and perpetually returns to the actual world, Shaawano’s mundane life as an orderly at North Dakota hospital fades in the face of the family history he retells. Shaawano himself seems only a minor character, merely a mouthpiece for the traditional tale embodied in the drum. Framed by the mundane lives of Faye in New Hampshire and a North Dakota mother named Ira, Shaawano’s tale is a Zwischenraum fable shrouded in myth and mystery.

In the end, it is Ira and her three children who bring Shaawano’s mythic tale back to the realities of modern-day reservation life. Pinned by poverty, Ira makes some bad decisions as she struggles to raise three children on whatever resources she can scrounge or scam. For the drum to be truly magical, it needs to speak to the present-day realities of Ojibwe such as Ira: instead of remaining in a timeless Zwischenraum, the drum has to shape the future as well as the past. In the end, readers aren’t sure exactly where Travers, Shaawano, Ira and her children are headed, but the promise of the painted drum suggests that there is hope in the future and that long-dead ghosts can eventually be laid to rest.

If you are interested in reading and reviewing soon-to-be-released books, check out HarperCollins’ First Look program. Sign-up is free, and you get to keep the books you review!

 

Waxwings by Jonathan Raban

I recently began reading Jonathan Raban’s Waxwings, a novel set in Seattle at the height of the dotcom craze. The pulse of Seattle’s boom-or-bust culture is embodied in the three characters around which the novel revolves: Tom Janeway, a creative writing professor in charge of managing a literary endowment from a weathy online entrepeneur; Janeway’s wife Beth, a copywriter for a thriving dotcom startup whose options have recently vested; and Chink, an illegal Chinese immigrant struggling to survive in a city where the Haves are richer than ever. Seattle is a place I’ve always wanted to visit, so I look forward to seeing how Raban interweaves these three characters’ stories against the backdrop of a city that surged on the crest of online success.

 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

After waiting until the flurry of spring semester (and the drudge of grading) wore off, I’ve finally begun Marilynne Robinson’s long-awaited, Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel. Months ago when I first bought Gilead, I was disappointed by its opening: the book didn’t “grab” me in the way that Housekeeping had. In retrospect (and in all fairness to Robinson), I don’t believe Housekeeping grabbed me immediately, either. Robinson’s prose is careful and poignant, its charms developing softly and slowly.

Gilead is well-crafted, but it doesn’t shimmer like a jewel. Instead, its beauties are simple and ordinary, like those of a well-worn quilt. The story of a dying preacher as told to his young son, Gilead captures the vision of a person who’s been on this earth long enough to recognize wonder in the simple things: a couple of rowdy men laughing, a mother blowing bubbles with her child.

It’s no wonder that passages of Robinson’s novel remind me of the plain, simple goodness of Tom Montag’s memoir, Curlew: Home. Tom’s proud of the fact that he’s a farm boy from Iowa, and although Robinson was born and raised in Idaho, Gilead, which takes its title from an Iowa town of the same name, shows that her stint teaching at the University of Iowa has not been in vain, the prose and perspective of that state rubbing off on her in the best of ways.

 

Home Town by Tracy Kidder

Now that I’ve finished Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is the 2005 Summer Reading Program selection at Keene State College, I’m re-reading Home Town, Kidder’s narrative about the town of Northampton, Massachusetts. Having loved Home Town when I read it for a book group over a year ago, I’m looking forward to teaching it alongside Mountains, which profiles a very different landscape.

Whereas Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains travels the globe to chronicle Dr. Paul Farmer’s quest to eradicate infectious disease in places such as Haiti, Cuba, and Russia, in Home Town Kidder tells the story of one New England city and its denizens: a “townie” police officer with FBI dreams, a single mother pursuing a degree at Smith College, a brilliant lawyer plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A biography of a community in both its geographic and interpersonal senses, Home Town explores the ways that place influences people and how people return the compliment.

I look forward to reading and discussing this book with Keene State College freshmen as they navigate the transition between the places they come from and the places they dream of going.

 

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

Although I bought The Art of Possibility: Tranforming Professional and Personal Life after I saw its authors, married partners Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, on a TV show several years ago, I’m only now taking the time to read it. Beginning with the premise that our lives are shaped by inner narratives that are both arbitrary and “invented,” the Zanders share practical techniques and illustrative anecdotes to show how even ordinary people can practice “the art of possibility” by approaching life from a positive perspective. Since this notion of “the art of possibility” is one that has resonated in my head (and provided at least one blog-post title) since I first heard it all those years ago, it’s only fitting that I finally read (and enjoy) the book in its entirety.