• 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
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
