Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush

Posted on June 6, 2018 by pagesofjulia

This study of rising sea levels puts both science and poetry to work in honoring human and non-human coastal communities across the United States.

Journalist Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore is science, poetry and personal witness, concerned with human and more-than-human communities. It is a reckoning with the ugly reality of climate change, with numbers and predictions becoming grimmer each year. It is a poetic meditation on the nature of change, on how people can make peace with a changing world and our agency in it. And it is an impassioned consideration of the injustices humans perpetrate on one another, and on the non-human world.

Rush saw firsthand the reality of rising sea levels in inland Bangladesh, when a boy named Faharul showed her his dying mustard greens, their veins filling with salt. It took her years to follow that story to the U.S. communities she visited in researching and writing this book. In Rhode Island, Louisiana, Maine, Florida, New York, Oregon and California, Rush interviews local residents, observes local flora and fauna and questions scientists. She studies climate change and the rise of sea levels globally, but particularly in wetland ecosystems.

Rush’s concerns begin with plants and animals: salt marsh harvest mouse, roseate spoonbill, Caspian tern, rufous hummingbird, red knot, black tupelo. But she quickly extrapolates them to tell a human story, too, about the people threatened alongside greater egret and cypress, and about her own struggle to navigate hope and action within despair. “I have a hard time separating excavation from elegy.” The loss of islands on Louisiana’s coast means the loss of Native communities there, and to understand that loss, one must recognize that those communities were formed by relocated tribes of Chitimacha, Biloxi, Choctaw and Acadian people pushed out of their original homes all over the continent. This is but one example of the vulnerable populations most at risk and least assisted by social supports.

Appealingly, Rush puts her research and writing to work alongside the perspectives of coastal residents: interwoven chapters are told in other voices. She makes allusions to the story of Noah and his ark, and to Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, seeking the right reference point. Striking black-and-white photographs from Rush’s travels add another gorgeous, elegiac layer to the narrative she helps to construct. Finally, an alliterative organizational structure stemming from wetland botanical structures makes this a book to be admired on many levels.

Rising is in some ways a difficult read. Its subjects are sobering and saddening, and survivors of flood events may be re-traumatized by some descriptions. The human-on-human crimes Rush documents include both discriminatory lending practices and sexual assault. These are important subjects to consider, regardless of the pain they may cause, but Rising has more to offer: pulsing, gleaming prose and a stubborn search for, if not hope, then peace in the face of disaster.

This review originally ran in the May 24, 2018 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 10 rampikes.

(Yes, that good, even though it made me terribly depressed too.)

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

“The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard

Posted on January 24, 2018 by pagesofjulia

At the gracious request of Uriah Pariah, here is a my response to an essay I admire greatly, and more and more every time I read it. “The Fourth State of Matter” appears in Jo Ann Beard’s collection The Boys of My Youth, and you can read it here.

NOTE: This review includes spoilers, and I feel strongly about the reader’s first experience with this essay being a blind read. If you don’t know what it’s about, please STOP now and go read it yourself first before continuing with my lesser words.

I think this post has to include the story of how I came to this essay in the first place. It was assigned reading in Suzanne Paola’s Intro to Creative Nonfiction Writing class at Western Washington University, an undergrad course I took in my early 30s a few years ago, surrounded by people not old enough to legally purchase beer (itself a weird time). Suzanne is a gift to the world and to this art form, but that’s another story. I read the essay she’d assigned without knowing anything about it. So my experience was innocent, like most of the readers (I assume) who first encountered it in The New Yorker in 1996. I have since been assigned the same essay several times, and have read it additional times for “pleasure” (though that’s not quite the right word) and study. I’ll never have that first read again, but it still gets better every time. I wish the same for you.

So, on first read, this is what presented itself to me: the narrator has an old dog, a collie, who is nearing death, in the most sympathetic, almost apologetic fashion. Jo Ann sleeps in fits and starts, between cleaning up after the collie’s incontinence. She has squirrels in her spare bedroom, and her husband has just left her. It’s a rough time. Then we go to work with Jo Ann, and meet her quite likable colleague, Chris. They are quite different–he is a space physicist, she is the managing editor of the space physics journal and vague on the science–but have a genial relationship, so comfortable that I instantly relate, even envy them a little.

This essay is a braid, and a very fine example of that form, but sort of subtle too, because the various braids (and there are several: dying dog, squirrels, estranged husband, work relationships with Chris and others) all come from the same timeline, the present tense of the essay. It’s not clear at first whether they will work as braided fibers or a single story, although I think they come out in a braid, and like the finest such essays, they are tied up together at the end, so that there is a moment of reveal: the reader’s aha, when she sees how tragically these narrative threads are all in fact one.

Because what this essay is “really” about is the 1991 shooting at the University of Iowa, when a graduate student killed five and maimed a sixth before shooting himself. Jo Ann knew the shooter and several of his victims, including her dear friend Chris.

This “real” material comes on slowly, then suddenly. There are foreshadowing moments of darkness, but when the first bullet flies the reader still feels a shock. It felt very realistic to me in this way: it felt like the faculty and students on campus might have felt that day.

Jo Ann goes home in shock. She takes care of the collie dog. She has already had an old friend take care of the squirrels in the spare bedroom. She is surrounded by friends who want to help her, although they don’t know how; her estranged ex-husband (not a sympathetic character) comes around and bumbles some more. Again, the telling feels like what she might have experienced in the living of it. The essay ends on a heartbreakingly beautiful elegiac note, and we are bereft: that this fine piece of art is over, and that lives have been lost, along with the squirrels and the not-quite-yet-dead-but-still-dying beloved dog.

One of the things that struck me most on my first reading was how much the dog affected me. Because, be clear, five people were murdered and followed by one suicide, then another; an additional victim was left paralyzed; a major university was deeply wounded. But the dog. My own old dog has been getting older and less cogent for years now–he’s still going, amazingly, but even when I first read this essay, I could feel his mortality. When we discussed “The Fourth State of Matter” in that undergraduate class, I was a little surprised to learn that nearly everyone had this story, though, about a beloved old dog, dead or dying. Of course, I quickly saw what nonsense it was to think that I had a monopoly on this. It’s a pretty universal feeling. We love our dogs.

Also, though, the essay starts with the dog. Beard’s first line reads, “The collie wakes me about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream.” My personal impression of this essay is that the collie dog–who goes unnamed, lending her even more of the universal, the ur-dog, the archetypical beloved–stands in for everything else that is lost. The youth and innocent partying of the squirrels, the broken love of the husband, the lives (Chris, who Jo Ann was close to, but also Bob, who she disliked and fought with constantly)–all of this, for me, is contained in the dog. For me, it’s a near-perfect essay, if not perfect. I haven’t even mentioned all the single lines that are crystalline, funny and perfect, as well. Go read it, again.

There have been criticisms. For one thing, Beard plays loose with the facts in characterizing the shooter, Gang Lu, attributing thoughts and feelings to him, supplying some of the content of letters he left behind explaining his actions. On first reading, I gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe enough of those letters (for example) had been released to the public to allow her to know what she claims to know in this essay, but that is not the case. I’m so much on board with this essay that I no longer care. Funny, I’m a stickler for truth in nonfiction, until my heart has been won, and then I don’t care anymore. (See also Albert Goldbarth’s “Fuller.”)

Then there is the question of how we write about violence, about trauma, and about other people’s losses. This was the subject of Katie Fallon’s seminar at my recent residency, for which I was most recently assigned this essay, among other lovely pieces of writing. The class was divided, although “The Fourth State of Matter” was not at the center of our discussion–we mostly focused on Brian Doyle’s “Leap,” another piece I dearly love, although my peers are not all in agreement about it. We wonder, with pieces like these, about exploiting trauma, about glorifying violence, about whether to number the gunman in the death count, about when a story is “ours” to write about. We all have different reactions to these questions, and that’s not really what this blog post is meant to be about, but I will say about “The Fourth State of Matter” that I think Beard stays well on the side of writing about her own personal experience of this tragedy. She may not be all in the clear on the question of fact-in-nonfiction, but I think she’s fairly safe on exploiting violence. Again, because she makes it about a dog, some squirrels, and a dear friend. Or, as the original commenter put it when he requested this post: “it’s the fact that it was her story to tell, and a true one at that, that lends it its ultimate power.” That’s why nonfiction, my friend.

Uriah Pariah, thank you for asking me to write this. Hope it’s been helpful.

I already said it when putting together my best-of-2017 post:

Rating: 10 faces of love.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco

Posted on October 4, 2017 by pagesofjulia

A devoted, tormented daughter eulogizes a beloved father in this thought-provoking and experimental memoir.

Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is an intense and unforgettable memoir, as fascinating for its artistry as for its subject matter.

Jeannie was 18 when her father died. Though her mother is beloved and sympathetically portrayed, it was her father who had been her hero, her perfect person. On his deathbed, Jeannie promised him she would write about him. Although there is no sign that he heard, let alone held her to it, this promise would haunt the increasingly troubled young woman for years to come.

Her father had lost his left eye and wore a prosthetic one, which was in fact plastic, “but sometimes I call it glass. Glass implies the ability to be broken.” He lost his left vocal cord, too, and her mother loses hearing in her left ear. “What will be left of me if I lose her?” Jeannie’s father had a daughter before her, from an earlier marriage, who died in a car accident. That daughter was Jeanne; the daughter who promised to write this book is Jeannie, pronounced the same but with an added i. She fills her book with meditations on glass and left.

The Glass Eye is not what the 18-year-old intended to write. In the years after her father dies, Jeannie appears to function at high levels: she receives several degrees and works for prestigious publications. However, she is hospitalized repeatedly, battling mental illness and devastating grief. Everything is about her father–“Of course I hallucinated my eyes had fallen out.” A symptom of bipolar disorder (one of several diagnoses Jeannie receives) is a preoccupation with ” ‘clang associations,’ connections between words dictated by sound rather than meaning,” although for Jeannie, eye and i and I are also connected by meaning.

Vanasco pays compulsive attention to metaphors, and to the project of writing this memoir, which becomes a meta-exercise observing itself. She wonders, “What’s my hindsight perspective? Is this my narrative present?” and plays with plot. She asks the professor in her memoir course, “What if it’s about the promise to write the book?” The Glass Eye is indeed about Vanasco’s promise, as it’s about her father, grief, loss, her dead half-sister and reckoning with her own mental illness. And it’s about itself: both memoir and writing-about-writing.

Lyric, haunted, smart and tortured, this is an obsessive love letter to a dead father as well as a singular work of literature. The Glass Eye will attract memoir fans and readers concerned with mental illness and bereavement, as well as writers concerned with craft.

This review originally ran in the September 15, 2017 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 dollhouses.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivák

Posted on April 5, 2017 by pagesofjulia

This novel of love, grief and the cycles of life veils its profundity in deceptively simple everyday events.
the-signal-flame

Andrew Krivák (The Sojourn) paints indelibly rich scenes and relationships with The Signal Flame, an astonishing novel set in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains. A strong tie to that setting is one of the elements that binds together a community and a family struggling with loss and continued life.

The people in Dardan mourn patriarch Jozef Vinich. He is survived by his daughter, Hannah, and her son Bo; these three generations have been touched by war. Jozef lost fingers in World War I; Hannah’s husband survived World War II but returned in ignominy, a deserter later killed in a hunting accident; and Bo’s younger brother, Sam, has been missing in action in Vietnam for some months. As they grieve for Jozef and Sam, Hannah and Bo must also navigate a lingering feud with another local family, the management of a business and a farm, a natural disaster and a legacy Sam has left behind.

The town of Dardan and its inhabitants are eloquently portrayed, both in the everyday and exceptional. Krivák’s writing is beautiful, luscious but never overwrought; he recalls Norman Maclean in the understated loveliness and clarity of both language and meaning. He imbues his story with methodical pacing, a strong sense of place and a perfectly expressed sense of the quotidian: The Signal Flame takes place between Easter and Christmas of 1972, but encompasses a world of human experience. This is an extraordinary novel to be savored.

This review originally ran in the February 10, 2017 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 9 letters.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Posted on June 9, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A minimalist meditation on loss takes an unusual slim and poetic form.

grief is the thing

Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers handles bereavement and the novel format in inventive ways. Scraps of poetry, dialogue and ramblings, with lots of white space, fill just over 100 pages, but this sparse little volume takes on no less than love, loss and art.

Three parts, “A Lick of Night,” “Defence of the Nest” and “Permission to Leave,” roundly sum up the grieving process. Brief segments are narrated from three characters’ perspectives: Dad, Boys and Crow. Mom has recently died, and Dad and two young sons struggle to cope until a special Crow comes along to care for them–in a manner of speaking.

The Crow’s voice tends toward the stream-of-consciousness, as a bird’s might, but there’s no questioning its agency and intelligence. Dad is an eccentric Ted Hughes scholar, struggling to write a book on deadline. Under these influences, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers resembles free verse. The Boys generally speak as “we”; despite the occasional singular, the two brothers are interchangeable. In Porter’s poetic bent and unusual usages, “They were in brother with each other.” They are nonetheless realistic and childlike; they wonder, when their mother dies, “Where are the fire engines…? Where are the strangers… screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?”

This is not a novel for children, with its moments of gore and sex, but it is a whimsical and ultimately pleasing perspective on grief, and utterly original.

This review originally ran in the June 3, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 flecks of toothpaste.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalia Yang

Posted on May 25, 2016 by pagesofjulia

In celebrating a father’s traditional Hmong song poetry, this memoir records the painful history of a loving family and a people.

song poet

In The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, Kao Kalia Yang related her family’s immigrant experience. With The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, she focuses on the life and art of Bee Yang: “my father raps, jazzes, and sings the blues when he dwells in the landscape of tradition Hmong song poetry.” The storytelling and emotional communication of that art form was a defining element of Bee’s contribution to his family and his culture, from their home in Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand and, finally, in the United States. When his mother died, Bee stopped singing, and Yang considers the significance of that silence as well.

As its title suggests, The Song Poet is lyrical and beautifully composed, with themes of loss and love, realistic and raw, but enriched by gentle metaphor. It is divided into “Side A” and “Side B,” the first told in Bee’s first-person perspective and the second in Yang’s. These points of view offer immersion in a Hmong culture that values family, and shares a complex system of spiritual celebrations and a way of life centered on the day-to-day necessity of growing and harvesting food. War and violence drive the family to Minnesota, where Bee and his wife do hard, dangerous labor, and are poorly equipped culturally to battle racism and exploitation. But they retain their reverence of family and tradition. The Song Poet is a message of love and thanks to a father who sacrificed for his children’s future, and a memorial to his art.

This review originally ran in the May 17, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 flip-flops.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Maximum Shelf: Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

Posted on May 17, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on May 9, 2016.

Steven Rowley’s first novel, Lily and the Octopus, is a startling, scintillating experience, both funny and emotionally wrenching: a story that shatters all expectations.

lily and the octopus

In the opening lines, narrator Ted Flask introduces his contented home life with his domestic partner, an aging dachshund named Lily. They live in Los Angeles, where Ted works from home, and they are comfortable in their routines: pizza on Sundays, Monopoly on Fridays, talking about cute boys on Thursdays. They have inside jokes, holiday traditions, and an idyllic story of love at first sight. Lily holds up her end of conversations, although as a dog she is of course distractible, and her memory can be short. Her voice is just as we expect a dog to sound. As a puppy (in flashbacks, as in the scene of their first meeting), her breathless enthusiasm comes out in all caps and exclamation points: “IT’S! A! GREAT! TIME! TO! BE! ALIVE!”

As the novel unfolds and Ted fills out as a character, though, it becomes clear that his life is not necessarily well-rounded. He has a therapist he dislikes; he finds her dim-witted, and in his head runs all her advice past his ideal, imaginary therapist. He has panic attacks. His career has stalled. A long-term relationship, ended 18 months ago, continues to haunt him; recent attempts at dating have gone poorly. Until Lily, he worried that he was unable to open up, unable to love. In Ted’s favor, he has a superlative human best friend named Trent, who always comes when called and brings Valium. And, crucially, Ted has Lily. She is the best thing in his disordered and inwardly-turned life.

Those first sentences introducing Lily also introduce the octopus. A new addition to their household, he has a death grip on Lily’s head, and he’s not going anywhere. Like Lily, the octopus talks. Ted wants him to leave, but the octopus will not let Lily go. She begins to have seizures. She weakens.

Ted dreams of an octopusectomy. The vet offers chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, but is not optimistic about Lily’s chances. Ted tries to involve her in the decision-making, but Lily is a dog: her attention span is limited (oh look, red ball!) and, anyway, at 12-and-a-half human years, she has been feeling a little run-down. She rarely speaks in caps anymore. Ted was warned by a vet that, as Lily aged, she would begin to exhibit what he called Enclosed World Syndrome; that is, her perceived world and realm of interest would shrink. It is true, her walks have gotten shorter. Of course, Ted himself has the same malady. As the octopus’s tentacles tighten around Lily’s precious small head, Ted realizes he has a battle on his hands.

It is easy to fear that the market for books about beloved dogs may be flooded, but this one does something new. Lily and the Octopus is its own beast, and the reader is not the same person at the end as at the beginning. In many ways this is the story of Steven Rowley’s life in all its emotional truth, if not in specific, literal details. Ted and Lily’s Los Angeles is a thoroughly realistic setting, but a few elements–most obviously the talking octopus–offer boggling departures. By relying on metaphor, Rowley creates a fantasy world with touches of magical realism, somehow both more affecting and more comforting than reality.

Lily and the Octopus comes with the trappings of humor, canine antics, strong characters and profound emotions. Rowley, who is also a screenwriter, peppers the story with Cate Blanchett, Ryans Gosling and Reynolds, Bradleys Cooper and Milton. Equally prominent are the literary references: Kipling’s jungle, Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” and a reading list to prepare for an octopus hunt: Hemingway, Melville, Patrick O’Brian. The book opens in the spirit of a fun read, but the tone quickly deepens to a sadder and a more intense experience. Ted and Lily’s story centers around relationships: love and life partnership, the nature of commitment and of loss, and what it looks like to fight for one’s friends. As Ted battles the octopus and tries to shore up his darling, he ends up examining every aspect of his own life, his own shortcomings and the strengths he discovers in himself, almost by surprise. His journey, then, is not only about a man and his dog but about breaking out of life’s stalemates. This introspection and interior aspect to the novel is only one of the depths that make it both more than another story about a beloved dog, and more than a whimsical work of fantasy–although it is a superb example of both.

Lily and the Octopus is literary and raw, and relentlessly heartfelt. Questions of who and how we love are at its center and, vitally, the question of how we part. Imaginative, ever-astonishing, suspenseful and wise, Rowley’s surprising novel is thoroughly gut-wrenching, but well worth the pain. With a winning dog at its robust heart, no reader could ask for more.

Rating: 9 moments with the red ball.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Rowley.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Alligator Candy by David Kushner

Posted on April 11, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This tender, intimate memoir probes the childhood murder of the author’s older brother.

alligator candy

On a Sunday afternoon in 1973, 11-year-old Jon Kushner rode his bike through the woods to the 7-Eleven. His four-year-old brother, David, had asked for one kind of candy in particular. Jon’s family never saw him alive again. Journalist David Kushner still struggles to fathom his brother’s murder and his family’s experience; Alligator Candy is his memoir of investigation and connection.

Kushner lovingly portrays his hippie parents, eldest brother and Jon, who struggled with an auditory deficit disorder and was known for his compassion. Their community in Tampa, Fla., included activists and academics, and emphasized freedom and the outdoors. It was perfectly natural for a boy to ride alone through the woods. Jon’s murder presaged an end to the “ability of kids to simply get on their bikes and go,” as one family friend put it.

Alligator Candy explores how a family and community survive loss. The twin terrors of not knowing fully what happened versus knowing the horrific details of exactly what was done to Jon comprise only two reasons that this is a painful story. However, Kushner can also be funny, and he skillfully captures a child’s innocent curiosity, even in loss. He writes so simply, but this is deceptive. Alligator Candy is sensitive, insightful and understated.

Forty years later, Kushner (Bones of Marianna; Masters of Doom) still struggles with grief, isolation and guilt. In writing Alligator Candy, however, he discovers certain details of his brother’s case for the first time, begins to comprehend his family’s coping methods and, finally, achieves a long-sought connection with Jon.

This review originally ran in the March 25, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 pieces of gum.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (audio)

Posted on February 2, 2016 by pagesofjulia

I said I was laying off the audiobooks, because my present life & schedule don’t allow for enough listening time. But then I picked up another, and another. Among other things, I’ve hurt my knee again and am back in the gym. But you’re not here to hear about my knee.

year of magical thinkingI’m so glad I tuned into The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s not a feel-good story: it tracks the year in Joan Didion’s life following her husband’s death, and maps her experience with grief. It’s almost New Year’s, and Joan and husband John have been visiting their daughter in the hospital, where she is unconscious with a life-threatening case of pneumonia and septic shock. On December 30, 2003, he collapses at the dinner table, is rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead that night. John is John Gregory Dunne, also an accomplished writer, and their lifestyle has always kept them very close: working from home, together, consulting on every aspect of their lives, from work, food, family and world events to the most insignificant details. Didion is of course, obviously, shocked and unmoored. During the year that follows she experiences different types of grief, shock and bafflement. This book is a little like a diary of that time, which it charts chronologically, ending one year and one day after John’s death.

Along the way, she nimbly weaves in the research she performs on related subjects within psychology, medicine and anthropology: research on grief, on cultural relationships with death and dying, and on medical issues, as she tries to understand when, how and why John died. This last is a surprisingly opaque question, covering the time between his collapse and the doctor’s pronouncement about an hour and a half later. What had been done in the interim? What could have been done? She examines the reports of the ambulance team, the nurses and the ER doctor.

And to compound the complicated and tragic story, daughter Quintana spends most of this year in and out of hospitals, near death on multiple occasions. What we know, although Didion at the time of writing does not, is that Quintana died within the year after the book’s timeline closes. Her later memoir, Blue Nights, covers that personal loss. I haven’t read that one – yet.

The difficulty of this book, then, is obvious: it is filled with sad stuff. Didion is a deft and clever writer, though. We see more than a little joy, although much of it is remembered. We see a strong family, and we see good times. The entwining of personal experience (past and present) and research is beautifully done. Didion uses repeated phrases to draw her reader along the book’s line, to tie everything together. It’s a lovely piece of work, although I did have to turn away when I had a particularly bad day. The subject matter is what it is.

My one criticism is that Didion fails to recognize and acknowledge a certain privilege: that her life is set against the Ritz, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, the fancy home in Malibu, Chanel, Brooks Brothers, an endless parade of the food, clothing, and scenery of her choice and at her command. This privilege, compounded by her failure to acknowledge it (is it possible she is unaware?), distanced me from her. She is both a fine writer and a complex and sympathetic person; it is my instinct to identify with her, and that is where this memoir shines; but that effect is lessened by her experience of the world to which she is apparently blind. Near the end, she describes a difficulty early in her marriage, when she and John had made a $50,000 down payment on a house in an L.A. suburb but hadn’t yet sold their home in Malibu: where would the money come from? They go to a luxury resort in Hawaii to think it out, then find that the Malibu home has an acceptable offer. She does speak briefly to the irony of the Hawaiian brainstorming session. We could call this a partial exception to my complaint. The episode still comes off a little tone-deaf, though.

This is a fairly small criticism. Because of this privileged position, Didion lost a few degrees of identification with her reader. On the whole, though, she is a sympathetic and fully realized character. Her story is shocking but true; it is beautifully structured and well written, and I will definitely read more Didion.

Barbara Caruso’s narration felt spot-on to me.

Rating: 7 leis.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky

Posted on January 14, 2016 by pagesofjulia

The Narrow Door is literary, smart and poignant, an extended eulogy for a friend and a meditation on friendship.

narrow door

The Narrow Door is a striking memoir of love and loss by Paul Lisicky (Lawnboy; The Burning House). At its center are the life and death of Denise, Paul’s longtime best friend; in parallel, Paul and his husband slowly pull apart and finally break up. The ups and downs of these two relationships define the story Lisicky tells, but they also give him space to muse on larger questions: the craft of writing, competition among writers, the meaning of love and events in the larger world.

Paul met Denise in the early 1980s, when they were both teaching assistants at Rutgers. They became fast friends, talking on the phone for hours, sharing the pain and joy of writing. Denise becomes a published novelist first, but Paul’s later success threatens her. A tender passage about “Vincent” and Gauguin, about the painters’ competitive feelings and their wrecked friendship, helps Paul deal with his struggle with instincts leaning both toward and away from competition with Denise. This is only one example of the wide range of Lisicky’s subject: the Deepwater oil spill and the Haitian earthquake likewise influence his reactions to Denise’s cancer diagnosis and other immediate concerns. Paul and Denise are Joni Mitchell fans, and their story is guided by her music. When a hotel in Atlantic City is demolished, Lisicky writes, “It comes down as a person would…. I take it personally.” These disparate threads are tied together expertly, with tenderness, in careful prose.

Paul’s husband, identified simply as M, is a successful poet and has his own, weaker friendship with Denise. He supports Paul when she dies, but soon after, the couple begin their drift apart. The Narrow Door employs a disordered chronology, in sections headed by year: 1983, when Denise and Paul’s friendship is budding; 2008, when she dies; 2010, when Paul and M are at their rockiest; and times in between, as these relationships grow, change, climb and descend. When he fights with Denise, Lisicky considers losing a friend, as opposed to breaking up with a lover: “Sure, it might feel like rage, but aren’t rage and love part of the same water?”

This is an artistic work, poetic and layered and carefully structured. The tangled sequence of events emphasizes the ever-changing nature of relationships and emotional reactions. Lisicky’s tone is sometimes elegiac, sometimes gently humorous, and consistently introspective, questioning. The Narrow Door is not a long book; nonetheless, it requests the reader’s measured consideration of language, pitch, philosophy and emotion. This portrait of a friend in all her complexities is lyrical, intellectual and occasionally challenging. In an austere mood, Lisicky avoids the idea of comfort for its own sake but asks, “Couldn’t there be some rigor to comfort?” The Narrow Door answers with both, in a compelling package.

This review originally ran in the January 4, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cups of coffee.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »