• I spent last Saturday on the couch reading and bawling over Amy Bloom’s Away. It’s a marvelous novel, as good as the reviews promised. The novel was as psychologically acute as I expect from Bloom — as a writer, she is both so comprehending and tender about the human animal — but the prose seemed more charged than anything I’ve read of hers previously. If you haven’t read it yet I don’t want to ruin the best sections for you, so some incidental flourishes: A woman overheard embarking on a disastrous love affair has a laugh like “the sound of bells on a warhorse”; a man in the act is described as “soft as oatmeal”; a wife complains that her husband’s labors over her during lovemaking were like “a man sawing wood.” What I really want to share is a section that comes late in the book, a meditation on Prosperine in the underworld, that knocked my socks off, but that seems unscrupulous. Like revealing a movie’s best bit in the trailer.
It’s been a while since I bawled over a novel; it’s such an odd thing when it happens. Sure, you expect to cry when Dickens gets an orphan on the slab but otherwise, what provokes it? With Away the leaking started somewhere in the first couple chapters and I just gave myself up to it. The last time a book made me cry was a Kleenex-strewn weekend, late in 2005, which stands out because it was a two-fer of tears, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, after which I looked like a soggy lump with pink-eye. (Or as my friend Hortense would say, “my eyes were puckered tight as a rat’s a**hole.”) With all three of those novels it wasn’t necessarily specific events in the novel that triggered the waterworks, just an underlying tug of sorrow over wasted or lost chances. Middle-aged sadness. (OGIC and TT, any weepers for you?)
Ever since her collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, I’ve envied Bloom’s gift for titles. In that vein Away has some excellent chapter titles, like “I’ve Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards,” “If I Had Chains, I Would Pull You to Me,” and “Ain’t It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?” Also a great first line: “It is always like this: The best parties are made by people in trouble.”
• On Sunday my husband and I were turned away from a sold-out matinee of Ratatouille at Asheville Pizza, so we went to Malaprop’s instead. I picked up the Best American Essays edited by David Foster Wallace and a copy of Walden, which I read and detested in college but hope to feel more beneficently toward now.
Also being read this week:
• Edith Wharton’s The Reef, Henry James’ favorite of her novels
• Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Metamorphoses
Archives for October 10, 2007
TT: Peekaboo
The newly minted Mrs. Teachout and I are spending the next couple of days here en route to here and here. I haven’t tried out my voice yet this morning, but I trust it doesn’t sound quite as bad as it did on Monday.
Tracey Jenkins, the adorable wizardess who designed milady’s engagement ring, has posted some snapshots of the Big Event.
For a prose-only perspective on the proceedings, go here.
See you next week.
P.S. This is the “amazing band” to which Tracey refers in her posting. Also present and performing were Mary Foster Conklin, Julia Dollison, and Kendra Shank.
CAAF: Morning coffee
• Crooked House gets all Shelby Foote on the Fairy Tale War of the ’20s and ’30s, a period when librarians went mano y mano in a heated debate over whether kids’ lit should go mimetic or stay magical. A dark yet heady time: Warhorses ranged on one side of the battlefield, centaurs and unicorns on the other; the fierce yet oddly hushed clash of battle …
If you’re interested, Natalie Reif Ziarnik’s From School and Public Libraries: Developing the Natural Alliance provides more background on the debate (see pages 10-14). If you’re not interested, then I recommend pegging back to Crooked House for a discussion of “The Road as parenting book.”
• “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen.
TT: Almanac
“We should be careful never to imagine, that the wedding-day is the burial of love, but that in reality love then begins its best life; and if we set out upon that principle, and are mindful to keep it up, and give due attention and aid to the progress of love thus brought into the well ordered well sheltered garden, we may enjoy I believe as much happiness as is consistent with the imperfection of our present state of being.”
James Boswell, The Hypochondriack, No. XLIII