A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

 

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art (where we were before we read it and where we were after) and (2) getting better at articulating that response. What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one reading and writing refine into sharpness.

Apparently, in addition to writing some of my favourite long and short fiction, George Saunders is an Assistant Professor in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program, and one of the classes he teaches to the MFA students is on the Russian short story. Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is like sitting in on this class as Saunders dissects seven of his favourite (or, at any rate, illustrative of some point) 19th century stories from Russian authors (three from Chekhov, two from Tolstoy, one each from Gogol and Turgenev), and not only does he explain the methods behind the writing of such precisely-constructed stories, but Saunders also illustrates how to read and recognise the craft in them. The tone is knowledgeable but casual — Saunders invites his students and readers to disagree with him (to employ their own “shit detectors” and trust their own tastes) — and I ended this book feeling both educated and entertained; it receives my highest recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs — or doesn’t — in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though beyond language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

If I had one complaint it would be about the formatting of the analysis of the first story, Anton Chekhov’s In the Cart: For this story only (and Saunders does warn that he’ll be treating the first story uniquely, but I didn’t pick up on his meaning at the time), Saunders shares the story one or two pages at a time and then asks questions about what, as readers or writers, we assume will happen next or how we feel about the latest development or what we think Chekhov intends for us to learn. This process would certainly help writing students to understand the mechanics of the story and its construction, but it didn’t make for an enjoyable reading experience and I was happy to discover that each of the ensuing stories is included in full before Saunders begins to analyse them (this seems a peevish complaint but I’m including it merely as a warning for anyone else who may be turned off at that point; do carry on.)

But to the good: Saunders has studied and taught these stories for decades, in various translations, and knows them intimately. His analyses include historical and biographical information that bring Russia and these authors to life, and by including details about his own life and writing process, Saunders invites us into the mysteries through which art is created — showing how it's done and why it matters. Again, while specific information (on how to write a sentence, for instance, and how to then revise it into a better sentence) seems essential learning for his writing students, Saunders makes it also feel like essential information for those of us who simply want to read and appreciate well-written fiction. And as someone who hasn’t read a lot of Russian short fiction — and also as someone who doesn’t feel like I always understood what I did read — this book entertainingly filled voids in my education of which I was only vaguely aware. I closed this book feeling enriched; enlarged.

To get to a few specifics, Saunders discusses the Russian trope of “the Holy Fool” and debates whether Leo Tolstoy was employing it in Alyosha the Pot (or whether, as a devout Christian, Tolstoy was unironically writing about a character who perfectly displays Christian virtues; the genius of the story being in that unconscious debate in the reader’s mind). Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose was one of the stories included here that I had read before — without really understanding — and I appreciated Saunders’ discussion of the Russian literary technique of skaz that Gogol was employing:

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out`comes...poetry, ie., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasions but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.

Saunders explains the ambivalent appeal of Ivan Turgenev’s journalistic approach to short fiction (Henry James was a fan; Nabakov, not so much), and concludes of The Singers:

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us. I’ve sometimes wondered if this effect was intentional: a sort of apologia from Turgenev for his own lack of craft. If we are moved, Turgenev has, via this story that claims that emotional power is the highest aim of art and can be obtained even in the face of clumsy craft, demonstrated that very thing. Which would be, you know — pretty great craft.

I appreciated that Saunders mentioned that Master and Man was Tolstoy’s effort, twenty years later, to make something more artful out of his experience of getting lost in a storm than his initial effort in The Snowstorm (which I then needed to find and read; also adding Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain — to learn how a story’s action can be urgently propelled a paragraph at a time — and revisiting Saunders’ own Victory Lap — to experience how a story’s action can go in directions that surprise even its author; I do love a book that leads me to do further reading off the page.)

There are many versions of you, in you. To which one am I speaking, when I write? The best one. The one most like my best one. Those two best versions of us, in a moment of reading, exit our usual selves and, at a location created by mutual respect, become one. That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed. That, a person can work with.

I highlighted far more passages in this book than I could reasonably share — there are so many directions this review could have taken — but this last one hit me personally: My very favourite books have always compelled me to say that they “charmed” me and I have to pay respect to an author who understands that, as a reader, I approach every book with this willingness to be charmed; that my least favourite reads are those that — through sloppy, illogical, lazy writing — make me feel disrespected instead. I love that Saunders’ approach to teaching is to highlight this imperative; that’s where art gets made.

Trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does? Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know — it really does it. The change is finite but real. And that’s not nothing. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.

So, that’s what it’s all about: Through the analysis of seven short stories from 19th century Russian authors (also included are two more from Chekhov: The Darling and Gooseberries), Saunders explains how to write, how to read, and why both matter — and that’s not nothing. I loved every bit of this.

Summerwater

 

She can still do poetry. Deep asleep, deep asleep, Deep asleep it lies, The still lake of Summerwater Under the still skies. Herself in little white socks and the dress her mother made, real Liberty lawn with red berries on it, stepping forward on the stage and seeing her parents in the middle of the front row, smiling, Dad mouthing along with her, Mum in that hat. No, Semmerwater not summerwater, took her ages to remember to say it right, Dad listening to her every night when he came back from work, and here she is getting it wrong again sixty years later. Or sixty-five.

Gosh, this has taken me too long to get to writing this review (#thanks2020), so while the details aren’t entirely fresh, Summerwater lingers in the memory as a quite enjoyable read. The title (and the opening quote) reference the poem Semmerwater by Sir William Watson (in which a land is cursed and destroyed by flood after its king and queen refuse charity to a beggar), and by giving us glimpses into minds of twelve cottagers in a rain-soaked Scottish holiday camp, author Sarah Moss subtly makes commentary on Brexit, climate change, and domestic relationships, asking: are we humans simply incapable of charity and therefore deserving of the briny depths Deep asleep till Doom? There is plenty of nice nature writing here, interesting interactions seen from contrasting POVs, and while the plot felt light (until it became overwrought), viewed as an allegory, I was more than satisfied in the end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Leap a puddle, easier now, wet feet won’t matter later, once they’re warm, and here it is, the shift, the running element, like getting into a lake and at first your body says what are you doing, this water is icy, these are boobs, they’re meant to be warm, but you keep going, you swim, you push and glide, belly and lungs floating the way they did before you were born and it’s not cold, not once you get used to it. It’s like that, running, after the first mile. Your body knows how.

Summerwater is set on the longest day of the year and starts from the POV of Justine — a Mom and wife who has become obsessed with running and fitness, waking at 5 am while on holiday to jog in the pouring rain before her boys wake and clamour for their breakfasts — and as she runs, her thoughts rake over all the small resentments of her marriage (He won’t even sit down to pee now he’s started getting up in the middle of the night, would rather wake her pissing like a horse than sit like a woman just the once.), and while I suppose readers are meant to identify with any character whose mind we’re visiting, Justine doesn’t seem entirely reasonable or likeable — and I found that to be an interesting place to begin. As she runs, Justine thinks passingly about the old couple in the cabin next door, and then the next chapter is from that old man’s POV — in which he not only has a chapter-length stream-of-consciousness overview of his own life and marriage but has uncharitable thoughts about Justine as she runs by in just her sports bra after taking off her sodden shirt — and so the book proceeds: jumping from this character to that, often the second partner in a couple reframing what the first was thinking about in an earlier chapter, and it’s not so much that any character is actually an unreliable narrator but that each of them has trouble seeing beyond their own narrow experience. (My favourite chapters involved these married [or soon-to-be married] characters and many well-observed moments, but I will note that I was less interested in the POVs of angry teenagers and young children.) And while familiarity may breed contempt and the pressure ratchets up as families are shut indoors together while the rains bucket down outside, these proud Scots are unified in their contempt for that one Eastern European family that kept everyone up the night before with their loud music: Are they from somewhere where people yell and scream like baboons all night and keep the babies and old people awake? And weren’t they supposed to have left the country by now anyway? Isn’t that what the vote was about?

The sky has turned a yellowish shade of grey, the colour of bandages, or thickened skin on old white feet. Rain simmers in puddles. Trees drip. Grass lies low, some of it beginning to drown in pooling water, because even here, even where the aquifers are in constant use and the landscape carved by the rain for its own purposes, the earth cannot hold so much water in one day. Under the hedges, in the hollows of tall trees, birds droop and wilt, grounded, waiting. Small creatures in their burrows nose the air and stay hungry. There will be deaths by morning.

At the beginning of each chapter is a small passage describing how the unrelenting rain is affecting the land and animals; the deluge seems unnatural and threatening and ultimately human-caused. This sense of “there will be deaths by morning” looms over everything: The peregrine will starve if she can’t take to the air but the rains would drag her down if she tried. Just who is that man dressed in camo lurking in the woods? And why is there a girl’s patent leather shoe abandoned on the lakeshore? There are many warnings that a tragedy is coming but we humans aren’t very good at reading those signs.

I did very much like this view into Scottish life: I live in a northern country, but I was surprised to learn just how long their summer solstice is (even in a day that saw no actual sunshine). I was also surprised to read about the children being sent out to play in pouring rain in their splash suits (which I think would make me miserable, but do others think we Canadians are miserable when bundled up to play in the snow and cold? Because we’re not.) I was amused when one character winced as his fiance used the phrase “jolly good” (Just so long as she doesn’t say it to his mum. Or in the hearing of pretty much anyone in his family.), as that was the first I realised she must be English and the first I’ve ever considered that an English daughter-in-law would be deemed “foreign” in a Scottish family. Moss paints a very vivid picture of the Scottish experience (within and without human consciousness), and while pride and history and tradition bind these cottagers into a like-minded community, a tendency towards uncharitableness towards “others” (whether the foreign-born or the nonhuman environment) seems destined to doom Scotland (and us all) to Semmerwater’s unhappy fate. I liked the line-by-line writing here quite a bit and the overall picture gives much to think about.

How a Woman Becomes a Lake

 

She understands, now, why people have children. It is because we fail as ourselves, all of us fail. But we have a secret plan, a subconscious desire within us to become something astonishing, like the caterpillar that unwittingly becomes a butterfly. And, so, knowing that we will fail as ourselves, what we do instead is make something astonishing. We make our children in an effort to remake ourselves.

How a Woman Becomes a Lake begins like a lost woman mystery — a police officer finds an empty car idling with its doors open beside a frozen lake while responding to a woman’s call for help from the nearby payphone — but as author Marjorie Celona is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon, this modern “gone girl” trope is used with great intention to explore deeper themes of family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, grief, and loss. On the one hand, I can see that this wouldn’t be the twisty thriller that readers of the (apparent) genre would be looking for, and the sense that the writing is quite calculated and engineered keeps the characters at a bit of a remove, but Celona has a lot of interesting things to say about families, gender-based expectations, and relationships and I won’t fault her (too much) for allowing her craftsmanship to shine through. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

”I will keep your secret,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Because I think it’s the right thing to do.”

This is essentially a mystery, so I won’t give away the plot, but I do want to note the characters. There are two main women: Vera is the one who is missing in the beginning and she is a successful experimental filmmaker, an assistant professor of cinema, and at thirty, beginning to regret that the man she married isn’t actually the most interesting person in the world. Evelina is recently separated from her abusive husband, and as a single mother caring for two young boys, she longs for the days of freedom in her youth when she was an adventure-loving cook on a fishing boat. As for the men: Leo is the abusive husband, and as fundamentally unlikeable as he is (heavy drinking, quick temper, violent rages with his sons), he knows he should become a better man and notes that at least he isn’t as hard on his boys as his own father had been with him. Lewis is the young and handsome police officer who responds to the initial call and we eventually learn that it was a difficult relationship with his own father that made him want to become a defender of the public. And Denny is the husband of the missing woman — both pitiful in his grief and the focus of the police investigation — and besides knowing that his parents died just before he met Vera (and that they were Russian Orthodox immigrants, his father teaching Denny the goldsmithing trade before Denny decided to move far away from them), and that Denny is an older husband who couldn’t stop himself from drinking too much and oversleeping to Vera’s disgust, Denny is almost here as a foil for the other characters. Jesse and Dmitri are the two boys (10 and 6 at the beginning) and their pain, fear and yearning for love and approval drive the emotional heart of the story.

And I want to note a major motif: It becomes very apparent that mirrors are an important element in Celona’s ideas. Not only was Vera’s Cannes-screened short film named Mirror, but eventually, Evelina notes that the lake from the beginning has at some point been named Mirror Lake. In between these two points — and because I read a digital copy and could easily go back and confirm my suspicions — pretty much every character has a transformative moment of self-recognition while looking at themselves in a mirror. And noting this, I had to wonder if the names “Vera” and “Evalina” were meant to be wonky mirrors of one another (it can’t be a coincidence that both of them are described as being distanced from their parents in a book about parenthood and emotional inheritance), as are “Leo” and “Lewis” (and especially because they were both most pointedly formed by their relationships with their fathers). The presence of mirrors is so prevalent that Celona obviously wants the reader to notice and reflect upon them (har har), and that’s the kind of engineered writing that can make me impatient. On the other hand, and contrary to some of the reviews I have read for this book, I did really like the lyrical disembodied sections; I’m all for noticing lovely language.

The past is not buried. The past is right there, like a coin in a shallow pool, and all she has to do is reach.

And I want to end by talking about the title. In her endnotes, Celona writes that she took it from an essay in The New Yorker from 2018 by Jia Tolentino. The essay talks about rape culture and the patriarchy — from Greek mythology (wherein virtuous women could be transformed into streams or laurel trees but the rapacious gods would yet pursue them) to Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 book Against Our Will (which argued that “a politics of dominance over the earth, the poor, the vulnerable, is fundamentally connected to the belief that women’s bodies are rightfully subjected to men”) to Tolentino’s present in 2018, in which Trump had recently given power to a string of rape-deniers and anti-abortionists — and as abstract as “How a Woman Becomes a Lake” feels as a title for that essay (Tolentino does write of her moment, “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt lake-like — cool and still.”), I really had to meditate on how Celona meant it as a title for this book. There are no rapes here or men dominating helpless women: Evelina was madly in love with Leo, but she found the wherewithal to kick him out before the book begins; Vera was incredibly accomplished and held down by no man (is the sign she taped up in her office — work harder than everyone else, but never feel like you’re working — meant to signal how this “workaholic” succeeds in a man’s world?). If anything, it’s the men (and boys) in this story who are burdened by the weight of the patriarchy as passed down by their fathers, and that might be Celona’s point, but I am left still confused about the title. (In the essay, Tolentino describes some of the artwork at an exhibition she attended — in which women artists exposed rape as an unheroic act in counterpoint to classical themes — and she writes, “What we do to ourselves in order to weather trauma often feels similarly abstract, silent: a patch of skin becoming bark-like, a former softness growing spikes.” And that feels closer to Celona’s themes than what is evoked by “a woman becoming a lake”; I’m still pondering her meaning.)

This is hard to evaluate as a straight story — the plot takes some quirky turns, and like others have written, the ending is a bit underwhelming — but there is much to learn from the characters and their backstories and their development. I do admire Celona’s craft, wish it wasn’t quite so visible, and appreciate that she’s given me so much to think about; more to love than merely like.

The New Wilderness

 

There used to be a cultural belief, in an era before she was born, that having close ties to nature made one a better person. And when they first arrived in the Wilderness, they imagined living there might make them more sympathetic, better, more attuned people. But they came to understand there’d been a great misunderstanding about what better meant. It’s possible it simply meant better at being human, and left the definition of the word human up for interpretation. It might have only meant better at surviving, anywhere, by any means. Bea thought living in the Wilderness wasn’t all that different than living in the City in that respect.

The New Wilderness is set up like a dystopian cli-fi — people are crowded together into the smog-choked City, the last natural areas are patrolled by the power-crazed Rangers, both ruled over by the nebulous Administration — and the reader can tell by all of these capitalised nouns that things have gone very, very wrong in our not-so-distant future. Into this reality, an experiment is introduced: Twenty ordinary people are dropped into this last (and vast) natural area (called the Wilderness State), and following strict rules set out in their Manual (no settling in one place, clear each campsite of microtrash and cart it out, no splintering) and monitored and directed by the Rangers (who send the Community on foot to farflung Posts in order for them to receive and send mail, have their trash weighed and associated fines assigned, receive addendums to their Manual), the group must adopt a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to...something or other. Author Diane Cook has set up a pretty interesting concept — and the first few chapters had me very interested as I tried to figure out what was going on — but the whole thing is ultimately pretty pointless: The Community walks from Post to Post for years, eventually meeting Newcomers and Trespassers and other Mavericks (as the City becomes increasingly unlivable and people become desperate to break into what they believe to be a new Eden), but there’s never any insight into the politics or the climate events or the social changes that led to this point. For some reason, a population of unknown number had been corralled into a City of unknown size and twenty people have been given a chance to live a nomadic lifestyle under strict, and sometimes arbitrary, rules. Because of these rules (and other interferences by the Rangers, under orders of the Administration), the Community doesn’t organise itself organically (so there’s really no insight into how such a group might have actually lived at some point in our actual human history), and with only a few of the twenty serving as “main characters” (I don’t think I could name everyone in the Community even after just finishing this; why were there a couple of kids named Brother and Sister if they’re only mentioned maybe three times — and never doing anything important — over all the years covered in the book?), and with those main characters not necessarily behaving in ways I understood, Cook provides no real insight into how individual members of such a nomadic group might have survived. HOWEVER, despite not learning anything from The New Wilderness, and despite some frequently uninspired writing, this is not among the worst books I’ve ever read — it was fine. (But on the Man Booker shortlist? That I don’t understand.)

In the beginning there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources — oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food — or storage — trash, servers, toxic waste — such interactions had become lost to history. But most of the twenty didn’t know much about science, and many of them didn’t even care about nature. These twenty had the same reasons people have always had for turning their backs on everything they’d known and venturing to an unfamiliar place. They went to the Wilderness State because there was no other place they could go.

That’s about as much explanation as we get for this experiment, but we also know: Glen (probably an Anthropology Professor?) worked at a university, and when his stepdaughter, Agnes, became deathly sick from the air in the City, he championed the Wilderness experiment, and when it was approved, he, his wife Bea, and five-year-old Agnes were among the twenty dropped into the Wilderness State. The story begins several years into their experience (for some reason, no one keeps track of the months or the years as they pass, so we never know exactly how old Agnes is at any time) and the narrative alternates between third-party POV focussing on either Bea or Agnes. Bea is a survivor and a natural leader, and as the story goes along, she is prepared to do anything to protect her daughter — even if Agnes can’t seem to ever understand her mother’s rationale for anything. This mother-daughter relationship is really the heartbeat of the story, and by showing how hard Bea’s own mother fought to keep them in the City and away from the Wilderness State (and before that, how hard Bea’s grandmother — one of the last people to live in a private home — had fought being brought to the City when she could no longer care for herself), Cook develops this theme of mothers and daughters forever misunderstanding one another until their roles reverse; I did mostly like these bits, even though they could feel overwrought:

Agnes stiffened, withdrew her limbs, her self, and crawled back under the corner of the pelt, curled up. She did not want her mother’s aggressive overtures of love. She wanted her back rubbed, her cheek caressed. She wanted murmurs against her neck. Her hand held lightly. She wanted to not have to ask questions. To be confused. She wanted confessions she didn’t have to demand. She hated her mother’s fierce love. Because fierce love never lasted. Fierce love now meant that later, there would be no love, or at least that’s what it would feel like. Agnes wanted a mild mother, one who seemed to love her exactly the same every day. She thought, Mild mothers don’t run away.

I could go on and on about all the parts that just didn’t make sense, about clumsy writing and the lack of a through theme that made some kind of a point, but again, this was fine; I kept reading to the end because I wanted to know what was going to happen; I could almost even say that I was entertained.

The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.

Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life, A Memoir

 

I would read in the New York Times that in the Khmer language, the term for giving birth — chlong tonle — means “to cross the river”. The phrase startled me. I put the paper down, then picked it up and reread it. Exactly, I thought. This gave me a way to describe my life back then. Losing Christopher was like having to make the dangerous journey back across the river. Every day felt like drowning. There were times I wanted to yield to it, to go into the stillness below the rush of the current and watch the light fade from beneath the surface. Reporting stories like Seth’s became my lifeline. It kept me above the waves, kept me from giving in. These people I reported on were the ones who showed me the way back across the river.

Crossing the River is a memoir of grief by Carol Smith, who was blind-sided by the sudden death of her son when he was seven years old. Although born with health challenges (and declared by doctors at the time to be suffering conditions “incompatible with life”), Christopher defied the early odds and was growing into a sweet and capable little boy when his life was cut short. The grief that descended onto Smith was overwhelming and lasted for decades, but as an award-winning newspaper journalist who specialises in medical stories, she would eventually write about many people who were facing incredible health challenges that would show Smith a pathway for dealing with her own pain. This was a hard book to read (perhaps a harder book to rate), but I truly appreciate the honesty, humanity, and vulnerability that Smith displays here. Her voice is clear and engaging, and through the stories of the seven individuals about whom she writes, Smith eventually relates her own entire history — before and after her time with Christopher — and besides being a moving look into a difficult life, I can see how this might be a useful resource for others suffering debilitating loss. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There is something called complicated grief, or in clinical terms, persistent complex bereavement disorder. It’s when you cannot accept a death. When you cannot resume your own living after a “normal” period of sorrow. I don’t know whether a clinician would apply this term to me. I do know this. After Christopher’s death, I lived in fear. I was afraid of forgetting who Christopher was, of letting go of him. Afraid I had failed him in his life and death, that I hadn’t been there to say goodbye. I lived warily, avoiding entanglements of all kinds, especially relationships, especially children. I dissociated from my own life, living in an orbit that let me slide frictionless through my days, interacting only with my small circle of close friends, who were exceedingly patient with me.

Carol Smith’s story of losing her son is profoundly moving and the stories she shares of seven of the people she profiled over the years (a burn victim, a double amputee, a boy with a terminal illness) each provided her with a lesson that she could apply to her own life (on resilience, gratitude, recognising that Christopher had made the most of the days he had been given). Smith obviously connected deeply with these people — she writes about continuing to visit with some of them long after their stories had been published in her newspaper — and her compassionate writing style brings all of these people to breathing life. If I had the smallest of complaints it would be the slightest sense that these people and their suffering were somehow intentionally put into Smith’s path in order to teach her these lessons. In the chapter on General John Shalikashvili (a United States Army general who served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1992 to 1993 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997) and the stroke that forced him to relearn basic functions, Smith writes:

Strokes are one of the great levelers in life. A stroke strips you of control. It forces you to start over, relearn basic skills from how to chew and swallow to how to read, speak, and walk, depending on which area of the brain is damaged. Grief, in some sense, had done the same to me. Everything required deliberate effort. Eating, sleeping, getting up in the morning. Nothing was by rote. I moved in slow motion, executing the daily mechanics of life against the weight of water. Grief had knocked me off balance. Forced me to rewire, reexamine my relationships, reconsider my future. It had removed the illusion of control. But the nurse’s words to Shali were strangely hopeful to me. Only when the body understands, he’d said. Not if.

Obviously, this is Smith’s memoir and it’s appropriate for her to relate everything she experiences back to herself but if these were my experiences, I wouldn’t want them treated as universal object lessons instead of something more deeply and uniquely personal (if that makes sense?) At any rate, Crossing the River is moving and thought-provoking, and ultimately, inspirational. I am grateful to Carol Smith for sharing Christopher with us.

The Vanishing Half

 

The Vignes twins vanished on August 14, 1954, right after the Founder’s Day dance, which, everyone realized later, had been their plan all along.

I was really looking forward to The Vanishing Half, both due to enthusiastic friend reviews and from what I understood of the concept as outlined in the book’s blurb: Twin sisters, raised in a southern all-African-American town known for the self-perpetuating lightness of its residents’ skin, run away first to New Orleans and then from each other — one sister marrying a dark-skinned man and eventually returning to their home town with a scandalously “blue-black” daughter, the other deciding to “pass as white” and disappearing into that mysterious world. I thought I would read a thoughtful examination of racism (including colourism within the Black community), self-formed identity, and family ties that bind and break, and while most of that is gestured at, nothing really went deep enough for me. Author Brit Bennett has a very smooth and engaging writing style — I was entranced at the beginning and it’s probably the dashing of these heightened initial expectations that leaves me somewhat disappointed — but while Stella’s story of passing into the white world was thought-provoking and tense, no one else’s storyline felt nearly as important or credible. This isn’t the book I was expecting, and while that’s not Brit Bennett’s fault, I can’t help but feel a bit let down. (Some spoilers beyond.)

The passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse. Desiree only knew the failures: the ones who’d gotten homesick, or caught, or tired of pretending. But for all Desiree knew, Stella had lived white for half her life now, and maybe acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether. Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.

Stella’s story is fascinating: Haunted by her father’s lynching and keeping experiences of abuse to herself, after successfully passing as a white woman in New Orleans in order to get a good job, she eventually runs away from her twin, Desiree, in order to join the white world — and its perceived safety — completely. Afraid that another Black person might guess her secret, Stella finds herself posing as the worst kind of racist to keep distance from people of colour, and as profoundly lonely as it makes her, Stella spends her life hiding from her family and denying their existence to her husband and daughter. I believed everything — psychologically and plot wise — that happens in Stella’s thread. But that’s about it.

After Stella leaves New Orleans, Desiree drifts until she marries a handsome and successful man — nothing in their story makes it seem as though she perversely went out to find the darkest man she could in order to buck her hometown’s penchant for “marrying light” — but when her marriage doesn’t work out, Desiree returns to Mallard with her daughter, Jude, and accepts a life of working poverty (when in D.C. she had worked for the FBI) in order to raise Jude in an insular community that would never accept a girl with such dark skin. Other than reuniting with her widowed mother, I could see no reason for Desiree to return to Mallard.

The timeline moves forward and back, and we eventually join Jude as she escapes to college in California on a Track scholarship, and nearly immediately, she falls in love with a trans man, Reese. With the major theme of The Vanishing Half seeming to centre on identity as a matter of self-invention, I was kind of offended by the offered equivalence between a Black woman choosing to pose as white (something she did not believe herself to be) and a trans man choosing to live as his authentic self (not to mention the fact that the character of Reese makes it look incredibly simple for a person in the 1970s to have bound his breasts, scored black market testosterone from bodybuilders on the beach, and then successfully “pass” and be accepted as fully male by everyone he meets). This theme of self-invention is further muddied with drag queens, an actress who states, more than once, that she invents a new life every time she goes on stage, and later as a real estate agent, that she invents a new life every time she offers a home to a buyer. This theme worked with Stella, but for me, it felt strained with any other character. (Even Desiree’s long term boyfriend, Early, was given to an Aunt and Uncle to raise as a child and he — a successful bounty hunter in adult life — could never again find his own parents; also, Desiree and Stella's mother eventually gets Alzheimer's and confuses the daughter who returned with the one who stayed away, and it all eventually felt like Bennett throwing ideas about identity at a wall to see what would stick.)

I did really like Bennett’s writing style but the frequent aphorisms began to wear on me:

• You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

• There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

• The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack...Only white folks got the freedom to hate home...You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood… It might be peevish to balk at wisdom, but these sparkly nuggets kept bringing me out of the story; and I wanted more story. Again: I was truly struck by Stella’s tale, but no other character affected me emotionally; no other storyline felt credible to me. Still happy to have met Stella.