Mind Picker: Thirteen Ways of Looking

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.

Thirteen Ways of Looking (a slim volume containing the eponymous novella followed by three short stories) is the first book to be published by Colum McCann since he was violently attacked and left unconscious (after intervening in a domestic dispute between a couple unknown to him) in 2014. As mentioned in his afterword, McCann published his Victim Impact Statement on his website, and in this particular instance, having this personal information about the author completely enriches and enlarges the reading experience. As these stories explore violence and perspective and forgiveness and grace – even when one learns that coincidental circumstances from the first story were written before the attack on McCann – it's fascinating to see how an author works through his own experiences, creating art out of pain. Before I went to the author's website, I thought that these were strong stories with elegant writing; afterwards, they were elevated in my esteem to something even more.

The years don't so much arrive, they gatecrash, they breeze through the door and leave their devastations, all the empty crockery, the broken veins, sunken eyepools, aching gums, but who is he to complain, he's had plenty of years to get used to it, he was hardly a handsome Harry in the first place, and anyway he got the girl, he bowled her over, he won her heart, snagged her, yes, I was born in the middle of my first great love.

To begin, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a novella in thirteen parts, each brief chapter headed by a stanza from the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (and I have to admit, the meaning of this poem is beyond the likes of me). In this story, we meet 82-year-old Peter Mendelssohn, a retired Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, and he is entirely charming and disarming in his kaleidoscopic memories and self-deprecating humour regarding his failing body. He thinks in rhymes and word-plays, and as his memory pings around the events of his life (and especially his marriage to his dead wife, Eileen), I grew to like him immensely. In alternating sections, we watch police detectives assembling and reviewing all the CCTV footage they can find in which Mendelssohn appears this day, and the reader learns that this is the day that the old man will be murdered. If I'm understanding it properly, this story seems to be a question of where can capital-t-Truth be found: is it in the indisputable proof of video cameras (even if they don't provide the full picture, let alone hint at any human motive, and the detectives need to make leaps of logic to build their case? Is that Truth or trivia?) Is Truth solely to be found inside the human mind (even as it is changed and coloured by the failings of an aging brain? Is that Truth or nostalgia?) Or is Truth a product of art, like poetry: base experience filtered through the human mind to arrive at something higher?

Just like a poem turns its reader into an accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.

In the first of the short stories, What Time is it Now, Where You Are?, an author has been given nearly a year to write a New Year's Eve themed story. He toys with various concepts over the months until he decides it will be about a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, on watch on a ledge above her post, scanning the dark horizon and counting down the minutes until midnight when she can make a satellite call home. This story is all very meta and po-mo – the writer writing about a writer writing – but it is interesting in the details of his process (he knows the Marine is 26 and knows she has a 14-year-old son at home, so he needs to solve the sticky age issue by having the boy be the biological child of her partner) and it totally works in the arc of the bigger picture: if we have already decided that Truth is found in art, this is how art is shaped.

Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water.

In the next story, Sh'khol, we meet a woman living on the barren west coast of Ireland with her deaf, mentally challenged son whom she adopted from a Russian orphanage when he was six. When she wakes to find him missing one morning, and as the search party stretches to days, her mind keeps going back to a story she has been translating recently about a couple who lose both of their children within two years. She keeps returning in her mind to a Hebrew word that was used in the story – “sh'khol”, which means a parent who has lost their child – for which she could find no perfect corollary; the pain captured by the story (magnified by the personal significance of that untranslatable word) perfectly expressing her own tragedy.

In the final story, Treaty, we meet a nun who, after thirty-seven years, is still haunted by violence she experienced as a young woman. When she happens to see the perpetrator on TV – now an apparently upstanding representative in peace negotiations – she becomes obsessed with discovering if he has actually changed; if she would finally be able to forgive him in the proper Catholic sense, “Without hubris, without false charity”. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd think this story is McCann's attempt to directly forge the pain of his own experience into art.

As it happens, when McCann was attacked, he was attending a conference for Narrative4 (a non-profit that seeks to break down barriers among students through story exchange and the promotion of “radical empathy”), and this “radical empathy” seems to be exactly what McCann achieves in these stories: always the reader is transported into the main character's experience (and what is even more remarkable is that in the story about the short story writer, it's the Marine we empathise with, not the author himself). Surely this is the point of art and literature and the pursuit of Truth? Taken on their own, each of these stories is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Seen as pieces of a bigger picture, they approach genius.