10:04 by Ben Lerner (Granta) All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Faber) Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Granta) Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Granta) Family Life by Akhil Sharma (Faber) How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Viking) Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
Only books published in the UK are eligible for the award, but the nominated authors come from around the world. The winner will be announced in March.
The Chair of Judges William Fiennes released this statement with the shortlist:
This shortlist is the result of months of reading and hours of passionate conversation. The eight books we’ve chosen explore vast themes — time, loss, belonging, war, solitude, marriage and family, the making and the mystery of art — with amazing vitality and grace.
They manage to be both epic and intimate — in fact, they show those dimensions to be two sides of the same coin. They’ve surprised, moved, challenged and enchanted us. They’ve made us laugh. They’ve grown and deepened when we read them again.
But it’s not just the richness and fire of the individual books. We’re excited by the range of ideas, voices and approaches represented here, and by the way our shortlist shows the novel refreshing itself, reaching out for new shapes and strategies, still discovering what it might be, what it might do.
Jim Nightshade is a boy’s boy. You can practically feel the grit that dirties his tennis shoes, kicked up from crawling under, climbing over, and squeezing through every inch of his small town — from poking his toe into its every corner, private and public, from never passing up a proposed adventure. You’d think he sleeps with toads in the creekbeds, but in fact he has a safe room in a nice house, next-door to his foil, his best friend, his partner-in-crime, Will Halloway. It’s here abed that the 13-year-old discusses the philosophy of procreation with his single-mom in Ray Bradbury’s 1963 horror-fantasy, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
“Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn’t have the window so high. Mind your health.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t say ‘sure’ that way. You don’t know until you’ve had three children and lost all but one.”
“Never going to have any,” said Jim.
“You just say that.”
“I know it. I know everything.”
She waited a moment. “What do you know?”
“No use making more people. People die.” […]
“Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, brings lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day.”
“I’m never going to own anything can hurt me.”
“You going to collect rocks, Jim? No, some day, you’ve got to be hurt.”
“No, I don’t.”
He looked at her. Her face had been hit a long time ago. The bruises had never gone from around her eyes.
“You’ll live and get hurt,” she said, in the dark.
Bradbury writes as movingly and evocatively about boyhood as any other American writer (well, early 20th-century, white, middle-class, Midwestern, suburban boyhood, anyhow) — he’s up there with Mark Twain, with James Agee. And not just the joy of youth, but also the pain its very existence threatens to impart. The flip side of his bated-breath cusp of adolescence is its destruction, which shows up throughout so many of Bradbury’s novels and stories, as much as or more than whatever else we usually associate with his work: the futuristic, the technological, the speculative, the interplanetary, the bibliophilic.
The Martian Chronicles, his 1950 breakthrough collection of loosely related tales about the Fourth Planet set in the near future, is thick with such sorrow.” ost of the stitched-together story collection’s poignancy arises from the native Martian population’s using its powers of telekinesis on the colonizing Earthlings, as when the former make the latter think in “The Third Expedition” that each has been reunited with a lost family member: the aliens make the Red Planet appear to its visitors as Small Town, USA, populated by dead-and-buried loved ones, from long-lost brothers to long-dead grandparents. It’s a heaven-on-Mars that soon becomes a hell, as the once-mourned revenants, Martians in disguise, bear knives that they soon use.
In “The Long Years,” a man lives in happy seclusion with his wife and two children — or, rather, unaging androids, built after the originals perished decades before. But the book’s creepiest bereavement story is “The Martian,” in which an alien with no identity but the one projected onto him by passersby attaches itself to an elderly couple, who long ago lost their son, and becomes their Tom. He begs them not to take him to town, but mother insists, and there he’s rapidly shape-shifted into another lost child, and grabbed by another grieving family — the Spaudlings, the pseudonym Bradbury usually uses for his own. When the father recaptures the creature, they run for the couple’s boat, anchored at the canal, and each person the Martian passes in town starts to chase it, thinking they’d caught a glimpse of the object of their always-present grief: a lost child or ex-sweetheart or deceased spouse. “All along the way, the same thing, men here, women there,” Bradbury writes. “The swift figure meaning everything to them, all identities, all persons, all names.”
All down the way the pursued and the pursuing, the dream and the dreamers, the quarry and the hounds. All down the way the sudden revealment, the flash of familiar eyes, the cry of an old, old name, the remembrances of other times, the crowd multiplying. Everyone leaping forward as, like an image reflected from ten thousand mirrors, ten thousand eyes, the running dream came and went, a different face to those ahead, those behind, those yet to be met, those unseen.
It’s like if you could coax the truth from ten thousand people on the street about whether they’re privately mourning a loss, you’d get ten thousand affirmative responses from ten thousand pained people. Like Jim’s mother, they lived and got hurt.
The source of this kind of heartache seems twofold, both allegorical and biographical. Bradbury was born in 1920, and raised mostly — discounting a few excursions to the American Southwest — in Waukegan, Illinois, then a city of fewer than 20,000 people on Lake Michigan, 40 miles north of Chicago; when he was 13, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he lived until his death 78 years later. Waukegan, now with more than 80,000 residents and struggling with postindustrial depression, features prominently in Bradbury’s work as the setting, under the fictional name “Green Town,” of Something Wicked, Dandelion Wine (1957) and its long-delayed sequel Farewell, Summer (2006), as well as the subsequent story collection Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007). (I’d also argue 1972’s The Halloween Tree is set here, before it ventures out across time and space, though the locale isn’t specified. The phony small town in “The Third Expedition” also seems modeled on Waukegan. Various stories are also set there, like The October Country’s “The Man Upstairs.” And so on.)
His descriptions of the area tend toward the idyllic. “I left at just the right moment,” he once told a documentary producer, “so that nostalgia set in almost immediately.” Halloween Tree, his short Samhain history for young readers, is clumsily conceived and confusingly plotted, but its opening chapters, describing a group of boys’ descending onto a modest Midwestern community on All Hallows’ Eve, are masterpieces of sensory evocation.
There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of…
Boys.
This same flair — for the unknown worth diving into, which provides for necessary exploration and discovery, knowledge gained through direct contact with the physical world — enhances the constant running through small-town streets that the best friends do in Something Wicked, and the children’s playing across lawns during Dandelion Wine’s small-town summer of 1928. But menace always lurks not far from the surface of his deceptively sentimental telling. Readers who remember the semiautobiographical Dandelion Wine as a those-were-the-days coming-of-age novel forget its chapter with the serial killer who targets young women and his latest victim, discovered at the ravine, who “lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.”
The book is Bradbury’s masterpiece, his fullest, most deeply felt and lyrical expression, touching on his usual themes of youth, old age and small-town life but stripped of their usual layer of sci-fi remove. It begins with a 12-year-old boy, Douglas (Ray’s middle name), becoming aware of his being alive, discovering the joy in the realization; the Winesburg-esque tales that follow, a portrait of a town in bite-size pieces, teach him the correlating truth: “I’d have to die someday,” as he explains it to his little brother late in the book. “I never thought of that, really. And all of a sudden it was like knowing the Y.M.C.A. was going to be shut up forever…and all the peach trees outside town shriveling up and the ravine being filled in and no place to play ever again and me sick in bed for as long as I could think and everything dark, and I got scared.” (This might seem morbid, but it’s honest. As the father in “The Veldt,” in 1951’s The Illustrated Man, worries about his 10-year-old children: “They were awfully young…for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really.”)
It’s easy to see where this realization of death came from for Bradbury — not from adulthood, as all four of his daughters outlived him, and he and his wife were married 55 years, but from childhood. He’d lost a grandfather when he was five. When he devotes several of the final pages of Fahrenheit 451 to a newly introduced character’s reminiscences of his grandfather, it’s easy to read it as a little inserted autobiography, the writer writing what he knows. “When he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again…He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death.”
A grandfather wasn’t Bradbury’s only childhood loss. Bradbury’s older brother Sam (a family name), twin to Leonard Jr. (another family name), died two years before Ray was born, during the incomprehensibly deadly 1918 Spanish flu epidemic estimated to have killed three to five percent of the world’s population. “Bradbury sensed an unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, desire within the family that he would grow to stand in for his brother’s lost twin,” Jonathan R. Eller writes in the biography Becoming Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury’s baby sister also died, from pneumonia in 1927, which he surely describes in Dandelion Wine when he writes, from the point-of-view of the hero’s ten-year-old brother:
Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she’d never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death.
“The deaths of these siblings most assuredly contributed to Bradbury’s fascination with death,” Steven L. Aggelis writes in his introduction to the collection Conversations with Ray Bradbury. (It only takes Fahrenheit 451 three scenes, fewer than 15 pages, until a character tries to kill herself.) There was also the curious incident from his youth in which he spent a day playing with a girl on the edge of a lake; then she went swimming and drowned. This formed the basis of his first major story, “The Lake” (1942), republished in his first story collection, Dark Carnival. As a result of the writing, he “was able, at least partially, to purge from his system a demon that had long haunted him, the memory of her death,” Aggelis writes. If that’s true, he had quite a few such demons to purge, which must be why you see such loss show up again and again in his books! One of his most death-obsessed stories, “Next in Line,” opens with the funeral procession of a tiny coffin in a small Mexican town.
Bradbury’s work often oscillates between young death and old. In October Country’s “Jack-in-the-Box,” an isolated child, poorly educated in seclusion by his nutty mother, doesn’t know what death is, and he mistakes it for life after he finally sees the outside world, which he was always told would kill him. To the bemusement of a beat cop, the boy runs wild down the streets, tears streaming, shouting, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m glad I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m glad I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, it’s good to be dead!” The collection’s next story, “The Scythe,” opens with a down-on-their-luck family discovering the lonely corpse of an old man in a remote farmhouse. The patriarch picks up the deceased’s wheat-culling gig with the title’s tool, only to figure out he’s become Death, and part of his responsibility is to chop down the stalks that represent his children’s lives.
At the same time, I don’t think we should take Bradbury too literally: what also animates his oeuvre is the melancholy of age, the realization of inevitable, inexorable death. The death of old men is straightforward, the lurking fear of all aging humans. But its warped reflection, the death of children, seems to exist in Bradbury’s subconscious as a metaphorical motif, an expression of mourning for a man’s lost childhood, for his alienation from its starry-eyed innocence, killed off by the ever-lurking menace, whether it’s in Midwestern Green Town or on Mars. It’s not the children dying but childhood itself — the metamorphosis of a man that haunts his aged self, reminding him of his impending cessation.
Often the most moving and melancholy passages in his books concern older men ruing their age. In Dandelion Wine, we see it again and again: the elderly shoe-store proprietor transported emotionally back in time by a pair of sneakers, the colonel on his death bed listening over long-distance to the sounds of people just living their lives in Mexico City, or the 95-year-old spinster who meets her ideal mate six decades too late. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Will’s father throughout longs wistfully for his youth, especially in Chapter Three, the book’s most poignant, which begins:
Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.
Older people in Bradbury’s books are always sad about being older, even the occasional woman that Bradbury hasn’t confined to proudly suffered motherhood. In Dandelion Wine, the widow Mrs. Bentley loses an argument with a few local children about whether she were ever a little girl, ever pretty, ever really called “Helen,” points she tries to prove by showing them trinkets and a photograph, all of which they accuse her of stealing from some little girl. “I don’t mind being old — not really,” she later confesses to her teacup — “but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.”
In contrast, Miss Foley, the boys’ former teacher in Something Wicked, comes to resent having been given it back. Miss Foley fears mirrors — those ultimate indicators of age, reflecting senescence right back in our faces — and it’s not only the magical mirrors at the carnival that almost get her, those funhouse captors, but also the ordinary variety in her home, which both in Bradbury’s prose threaten “drowning.” And it’s this fear of old-age that tempts her to ride the book’s age-changing carousel, leaving her a helpless child, weeping in the rain under “a vast oak tree” in a particularly chilling scene. (The devastating honesty of mirrors also turns up in “The Dwarf,” in which the title character spends every night posing before an elongating fun-house reflector, until the carny pulls a mean-spirited prank — replacing it with a diminishing one — sending the man into a murderous rage.)
The commonality between Bradbury’s junior and elder deaths is that both prove we can’t count on ourselves or other people, because other people and ourselves are prone to an inescapable change whose endpoint is death. It’s all part of the same problem: the ephemerality of all existence. As the uber-skeptical hero of Illustrated Man’s “No Particular Night or Morning” puts it: “My wife died. You see, nothing stays where you put it — you can’t trust material things.” Or as Dandelion’s Douglas puts it, summing up the book to that point:
YOU CAN’T DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE…
…they go away.
…strangers die.
…people you know fairly well die.
…friends die.
…people murder other people, like in books.
…your own folks can die.
He’s too terrified to write down the obvious final item on that list: that he, too, can die — or, you might say, grow up, because in Bradbury it’s the same thing, just different points on the continuum.
I have a dream. In it I’m pushing my wife in a wheelchair on a narrow street in New York. Chinatown, during the lunch hour. Four- to five- story buildings, lots of small restaurants, sidewalks very crowded and people walking fast. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I say to people in front of us. “Better watch out. I don’t want to run in to you.” I’ve no idea where I’m going. I’m just pushing. My wife sits silently, looking straight ahead.
Then the scene changes to a street on the East Side of New York. In the 40s; near the East River. Not a street but an avenue: First or Second or Third. The sidewalks are wide and again very crowded. Lunch hour. People walking very fast. Despite the tall office buildings on both sides of the avenue, plenty of sun. “We’re in the Gravlax District,” I say to my wife. “Can you hear me above all this noise? The Gravlax District. I only used to come here to go to a steakhouse or an art movie theater.” I stop pushing and look around. “So many people,” I say, with my back to her. “We never get crowded streets like this where we live. Nor the car traffic. It’s exciting, don’t you think?” When I turn back to her, she and the chair are gone. I took my hands off the chair’s handles, something I almost never do when I’m outside with her and we’re moving, or even when we’ve stopped but people are moving around us. Where could she have gone to? She wouldn’t have just left without saying something to me. She must have been in a hurry, probably to pee. And stood up, told me where she was going and what for — most likely to a restaurant to use its restroom — but I didn’t hear her because of the street noise, and then pushed the wheelchair there, or else wheeled the chair there while she sat in it.
I’m on a corner and see a restaurant a few doors down the sidestreet. I run to it and say to a man behind the lunch counter, “Did a woman in a wheelchair come in here in the last minute or so?”
“In a wheelchair?” he says. “Couldn’t have. We’ve three steps leading up to our door.”
I run farther down the street to a park at the end of it. Jacob Riis Park? Does it come this far downtown? Anyway, a park that borders the river. Maybe she thought there’d be a public restroom here, and I look around. No Abby. She’d be easy to see, too, because she’d be in the wheelchair or pushing it. She can’t walk on her own. No public building anywhere around, either. Just a playground, surrounded by grass and trees.
I run up the same sidestreet on the other side of the block. I look through the vestibule doors of all the brownstones on that side of the street, just as I did on the other side of the street when I ran down it to the park. In one dingy hallway I see at the end of it what looks like a wheelchair turned over. Oh my God; is it on top of her? I ring all the tenants’ bells, am buzzed in. I run down the long hallway. It’s a baby carriage turned over, nobody under it.
I run to the avenue where I last saw her, cup my hands over my mouth and shout “Abby, it’s Phil; come back to the spot, Abby, it’s Phil; come back to the spot.” People stare at me as if I’m crazy. “I’m looking for my wife,” I say. “She was here, in a wheelchair; now she’s not.” I shout again “Abby, it’s Phil; come back to the spot.” I keep shouting that while also looking in every direction for her. It’s better to wait for her here than run around looking for her. If she comes to this spot and I’m not here, she might not know what to do to find me. I don’t see her or anyone in a wheelchair. The street’s still very noisy and crowded. And now I hear music, symphonic, coming from someplace, and which is so loud I won’t be able to shout above it.
I wake up. The music’s from the radio on my night table. I was listening in the dark to the classical music station, when I fell asleep. I think about the dream. We were in Chinatown first and then on the East Side in the 40s. I have to go there. I have to find her. This is crazy, I know.
I drive to the train station, park the car in its underground garage and buy a roundtrip ticket to New York. When I arrive, I go straight to Chinatown. I don’t quite know how to get there, though. It’s been five years since I’ve been in New York, my home city and also Abby’s. The borough narrows at the southern end close to where Chinatown is, so just take any subway train south and get off at Worth Street or Canal Street or Chambers, whichever comes first. I get on the subway and get off at Houston Street — I forgot Houston — and think I’m near Chinatown, but it turns out to be a long walk. I’m hungry — I rushed out of the house so fast, I didn’t have anything to eat and the train didn’t have a food car. I should stop in one of the small restaurants here and sit at the counter and have a bowl of soup and plate of noodles, but I don’t want to lose any time in looking for her.
I walk all around Chinatown. I think I cover every single block. This is crazy, I know, but I thought I could find her down here, or at least there was a chance. I don’t want her to be lost. She’ll get sad, frightened; maybe even terrified. She’s become that vulnerable. She used to like going alone to places — even faraway countries — she’s never been to before or hasn’t been to in a while. But not since she got so sick. She needs me. She once said I keep her alive. Not said it to me but wrote it four or five years ago in one of the notebooks I found of hers. “Phil keeps me alive. What to do?” and she dated it: October 6th; I forget the exact year. I give up looking for her in Chinatown. Only other place to go is the east 40s. Maybe I’ll find her there. Since it was the last place I saw her, I should have gone there first.
I take the subway to Times Square, then the one-stop train shuttle there to Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street. I go upstairs and walk on 42nd Street to First Avenue. I walk down First Avenue to 34th Street, then walk up Second Avenue to 42nd Street, then walk down third Avenue to 34th Street. Then I walk along all the sidestreets between First and Third Avenues from 34th to 50th Streets. I look in stores. I look in most of the brownstones I pass and also the lobbies of the tall apartment and office buildings and even in a few movie theaters. This is crazy, I know, but for some reason I begin to think I’ll find her, that it’s more than a slight chance. But no Abby or wheelchair anyplace. And no wheelchairs in the ground-floor hallways of any of the brownstones, though plenty of baby carriages, none turned over.
I have to go to the bathroom. I go into a coffee shop, order a coffee at the lunch counter and go to the men’s room. I drink the coffee, have a buttered English muffin with it and ask the server behind the counter if she’s seen a woman in a wheelchair here today, and I describe Abby and the chair and its tote bag hanging on the back. “I was pushing her in the chair, got distracted for a few seconds and let go of it, which I almost never do, and she was either wheeled away by someone or wandered off by herself.”
“If she was in here I would’ve seen her,” the woman says. “I’ve been on duty all day, never a work break. The door to this place is hard to open from the outside by someone in a wheelchair, so I always have to come out from behind the counter to help.”
I pay and leave. I go to the corner of 40th Street and First Avenue, which is where she disappeared, and look around some more for her and then cup my hands around my mouth and shout “Abby, it’s Phil; come back to the spot. Abby, it’s Phil; come back to the spot.”
Lots of people look at me. One man stops and says “Anything wrong, Chief?”
“Yes,” I say, “I’ve lost my wife. She was in a wheelchair.”
“If she got separated from you in a wheelchair and was able to move it by herself, she’ll come back.”
“That’s why I’m shouting for her,” I say. “The streets are crowded and she’s sitting so low in the chair that she won’t be able to see me from it. But she’ll hear me and come back to the spot I lost her at.” I cup my hands around my mouth again and shout “Abby. Abby, it’s Phil. Come back to the spot.”
A policeman comes over and says to me “You can’t be shouting out like that, sir. Is it something I can help you out with?”
“My wife, in a wheelchair, was here with me and then vanished.”
“I can take down a description of your wife and have a patrol car look for her.”
“No,” I say, “it won’t help. This is crazy, I know, to do what I’m doing, but I had to see it through. Thank you. I’ll go home now. I’ll just have to believe she’ll be okay.”
I hail a cab, take it to Penn Station, and get the next train back to my city. I better watch out, I tell myself. I could get arrested. Put away. And that’s not something I need.
“It’s a war book,” I might have told the gentleman. “Kind of. But not really. It’s also about Jack Nicholson and Condoleeza Rice. Mark Zuckerberg appears, too.”
I’d just finished reading the galley for Mark Doten’s debut novel The Infernal on a flight from Seattle. The 737 descended toward O’Hare airport as I closed the book and rested it face down on my leg. I peered out the window to get a look at the Chicago skyline like a fortress guarding Lake Michigan. The plane banked left, the book slipped, and the older gentleman next to me stopped it from sliding past his feet. He bent and handed it to me. “Thanks, I said.” He nodded, but his eyes lingered on the cover for a bit, the design like black ink or a virus seeping into swamp water.
I did not want to have a conversation, especially with someone I would be sitting next to for several more minutes of taxiing and deplaning. I made a show of adjusting my headphones and selecting new music. Really, I was thinking of how I would respond if the gentleman asked me what the book was about. I’d noticed he had been reading Hector Tobar’s Deep Down Dark, a book I’m still curious about.
Talking to a stranger, when I’m not ready for it, is a kind of chaos. It’s not that I didn’t think I could have a good conversation with the gentleman. It’s that when chaos like this beckons, I instinctively seek to maintain control and order. (NOTE: This is a metaphor for what’s to come in this review).
“It’s a novel of, like, ‘war on terror’ stories,” I decided I would say. But only if I had to, if the plane subtly crashed and the gentleman and I were lying on the tarmac, pinned next to each other by a piece of wing. “There’s a chapter that might very well be the best post-war/PTSD short story I’ve ever read,” I would say, and then tell him about the veteran with the blown-off leg, the one who tries to make wedding anniversary reservations but can’t because his mouth keeps filling with maggots.
We got off the plane. I wrote advertising things for a couple days. Then I flew home to New York.
Now I’m writing this.
2.
The notes I made in the margins of The Infernal have to do mostly with voices. Osama Bin Laden’s searching, imploring voice emerges from a cave of experiments being conducted on “the Jew Boy.” A dialectically confused pair of voices comes from friends Rashid and Hakim in the aftermath of a drone strike. The vice-trinity of the War on Terror — Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, and L. Paul Bremer — all appear, in ways unexpected and sometimes hilarious. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in the book, as is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, and Jack Nicholson circa Chinatown. And of course there’s the “author” Mark Doten himself, whom in The Infernal (and outside it) is an editor at a New York City publishing house.
I page through the marked-up galley from the airplane. What is happening? I scribbled early on. Then, largely, How is this going to work? Toward the end, after many other questions, underlines, and arrows, WHY THE HELL DID THAT WORK???
So, a bit of plot overview. Because The Infernal resists obvious plot — and indeed the novel is in many ways about how life resists clear order and story — answering these What? How? Why? questions in a review needs at least some kind of easy-to-follow-ness.
The Infernal begins with a cast of characters — those listed above are just a smattering of the many who appear and return in the “Omnosyne extractions” that make up the bulk of the novel. What is the Omnosyne? It’s a “mahogany box stuffed with Clockwork Threads; a helmet on a swiveling copper arm; a modified Jensen dental gag…” The important thing to know about The Omnosyne is that it is used for intense interrogation purposes.
“The Akkad Boy” is the subject of said interrogation, and his forced tongue is the source of the cast of voices. The novel continues from the list of characters with a “Memex report” (the Memex being, essentially, a governmental internet). The report details the discovery of “The Akkad Boy” at a location called “al-madkhanah (The Chimney).” According to the report, the boy was found naked and in convulsions, having burned alive or still burning alive, somehow not dead and not dying. The first scout who attempts to help the boy dies shortly after coming in contact him. Something is terribly wrong — “Something was happening,” the report reads — but no one knows exactly what or how or why. These are soldiers taking orders, and no one understands. How could the boy possibly be alive given the terror the Scout reported from The Chimney? But despite all the boy’s “scorched hair and flesh” and the surrounding “carrion birds” ready to “fill their stomachs with the flesh of the boy,” The Akkad Boy has “a perfect pink tongue” that he refuses to use. He refuses to explain himself, and that is unacceptable.
The forces in charge — “The Commission” — determine the Omnosyne is the only way to make The Akkad Boy talk. Their response reads: “He is part of what is happening and we need — now, today — the information that is inside him.” It’s been fifty years since the Omnosyne was used, when Jimmy Wales used it to sabotage the Memex, and the Memex “began to burn up from within, to lose connections, to make new ones arbitrarily, cancerously.” So, despite the threat Wales poses to the laws and order the Memex provides the world, he’s released from prison, and he begins to operate the Omnosyne on the Akkad Boy.
Then the “perfect pink tongue” begins to speak. For nearly four hundred pages, we receive extraction after extraction (monologues or chapters, really) each one interrupted by glitches of code-gibberish like:
“T B Z0#0V092QS0KCG6 P-LYMRZ
5NCYL0TBETWL BPKLG#XO0 01 0CMK10LX3Y=.V”
The code reminds us of the Omnosyne and source of these texts. We hear from Zuckerberg and Paul Bremer, in first person chapters, but never forget, because of the code, that these are recordings, documents, extracted via a radical interrogation technique.
That’s an accurate quote, by the way, of the code.
3.
Here’s the truth, and perhaps the only thing I understand for sure about The Infernal: it is a success, and an utter delight, and these qualities come from my not being able to understand it entirely. It’s a book of yearning and want, an adventure through war and chaos that, in the end, tells me it’s okay if I don’t understand, because nobody really understands anything about war.
I’ve read so many beautiful books. Some are escapism, easy to suture into and disappear, with structures and plots that are easy to understand and let play with my emotions. Others are complex, language-driven, and plot-less. The latter I read sentence-by-sentence, noticing gerunds and verb choice and meter moreso than character development or story. The former I just read, hope to weep.
I could give examples of either, but then so could any of you.
The Infernal is both and neither. The characters have recognizable names, but they aren’t completely recognizable themselves. Condoleeza Rice shoots still photography of Jack Nicholson on the set of Chinatown, and somehow Doten makes this make sense as metaphor (or at least I think he does). Osama Bin Laden whispers instructions to his students while birds caw and caw in cages dangling from cave ceilings (what the metaphors are for this, I’m not completely sure). The veteran with the blown-off leg I already mention struggles to make a dinner reservation over the phone because his mouth keeps filling up with maggots (the maggots might very well not be metaphors. I hope they aren’t. I like them just being maggots).
Like I would have said to the older gentleman on the plane — The Infernal is not exactly a war book. Not entirely. It’s not an easy book to describe, either (clearly). But what I know for sure about the War on Terror, is that we all want to understand it. Because in the chaos of terror, understanding (maybe) brings peace. And what I understand about The Infernal is that the more I read it, the more I couldn’t stop reading. And the more I read, the more I felt like I did.
Every writer knows that novels have a way of turning into something you didn’t expect. That’s part of the joy of writing. But it is always interesting to see how an author’s original idea for a work changed, especially if the work is as massively popular as George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (and it’s HBO adaption Game of Thrones). Fans of the show and book now can get a peek at Martin’s original plans after the Waterstones bookstore Twitter leaked it online. (It was removed, but fan site Winter Is Coming grabbed it.)
The original plan, submitted by Martin to his publisher over 20 years ago, included the broad outlines of the story that we know: “the enmity between the great houses of Lannister and Stark” with a background of “plot, counterplot, ambition, murder, and revenge, with the iron throne of the Seven Kingdoms as the ultimate prize.” Meanwhile, “the Dothraki horselords mass their barbarian hordes for a great invasion of the Seven Kingdoms, led by the fierce and beautiful Daenerys Stormborn” and way up north “half-forgotten demons out of legend, the inhuman others, raise cold legions of the undead and the neverborn.”
Martin’s letter is for “the first volume in what I see as an epic trilogy with the overall title, A Song of Ice and Fire.” Of course, every fan knows the plan for a trilogy quickly expanded and the book series is now planned for 7.
* Jaime Lannister was going to murder his family and become king: “Jaime Lannister will follow Joffrey on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms by the simple expedient of killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession.”
* Sansa was going to side with Joffrey over her family: “Sansa Stark, wed to Joffrey Baratheon, will bear him a son, the heir to the throne, and when the crunch comes she will choose her husband and child over her parents and siblings, a choice she will later bitterly rue.”
* Arya, Jon Snow, and Tyrion were going to have an bitter series-long love traingle: Arya “realises, with terror, that she has fallen in love with Jon, who is not only her half-brother but a man of the Night’s Watch, sworn to celibacy. Their passion will continue to torment Jon and Arya throughout the trilogy.” Meanwhile, Tyrion falls “helplessly in love with Arya Stark while he’s at it. His passion is, alas, unreciprocated, but no less intense for that, and it will lead to a deadly rivalry between Tyrion and Jon Snow.”
* As Winter is Coming notes, the number of players in the game of thrones is much simpler with basically the Lannisters, the Starks and Dany as the only major players. No mention of the Boltons, Freys, Baratheons beyond Joffrey, or most of the other houses who’ve had a major impact.
***** POSSIBLE SPOILERS*****
There are also some possible spoilers in the letter.
* Martin said the story would center around five characters who would be there in every book: Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Jon, and Bran. This isn’t much of a spoiler, since most fans would expect all five of those to make it to the last book. Still, it seems extremely unlikely that any of those five will die in The Winds of Winter. (On the other hand, as the books went along it seems Sansa has overtaken Arya as the most prominent Stark sister.)
* Originally, Daenerys finds dragon eggs and regains a Dothraki horde to invade Westeros with. The end of book 5 implies part of this will happen, so again not a major spoiler for anyone who has read all five books.
I don’t usually admit this kind of thing when it comes to other writers, but I’m a huge Kelly Link fan — like in a very nerdy way. If I had the power to write fiction like one contemporary writer, I think I’d probably say Link. She has this uncanny ability to stretch a short story way past the boundaries of both length and possibility without ever crossing the line into fantasy. And no, I don’t mean that in a phantasmagoric, Borgesian kind of way (although you can also see his influence from time to time when reading Link); rather, Link’s work feels fully realized, emerging from her brain as truly and impossibly colored. She’s the sort of writer always able to surprise me, even though I’ve finished all of her other books, even her latest collection, Get In Trouble. Link’s writing has been compared to everything and everybody, from H.P. Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hardboiled noir writers, but stands out in its originality and idiosyncratic loveliness. Like her prose, Link is one of the easiest writers to get obsessed with, but also nearly impossible to explain.
Jason Diamond: This is the one long one, I swear: Probably one of my favorite lines I’ve read in a long time is in “I Can See Right Through You”: “Florida is just California on a Troma budget.” I liked it because not only does it sum up Florida in maybe the most perfect way I can imagine, but it gives me a chance to ask you about Florida. I was thinking about how a number of my favorite current fiction writers (Karen Russell, Sarah Gerard, Laura van den Berg, a few more) either grew up or spent a lot of time in Florida, and when I mentioned this on Twitter, people named a handful of other writers including you since you were born in Miami. My question is: what kind of influence do you think particular places have had on you as a writer? Do you think originally coming from somewhere as strange as Florida has influenced your work more than the east coast, or does it not factor in?
Kelly Link: Let me hedge, for just a second, and say that that line is from the point of view of an actor who lives in L.A. Not mine! I love Florida in all of its weird, overgrown, lizardy splendor, even if the physical me wilts once the temperature and humidity get over a certain point. Say, 89 degrees. I grew up in North Carolina, and Tennessee, and Florida — I hadn’t really done much with those places as settings until the stories in this book. Maybe I needed a certain amount of distance and time before I could think about those places as a writer. I certainly grew up loving the mystery novels set in Florida (John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, and so on) and so maybe I thought of Florida as more of a landscape for mysteries than a landscape for the fantastic. The development where we lived was mostly wilderness, outside of a few blocks, and it was used more than once as a dumping ground for murder victims. Anyway: hard for me to say what kind of influence place has had. I expect it’s had one, but it’s easier for me, instead, to see the influence of books and writers.
JD: What about teaching? How does teaching help you as a writer?
KL: I love teaching because I love the work of the workshop. I went through an MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and straight out of that I went to the Clarion Workshop in Michigan. Clarion is a six-week workshop in which you have six different instructors, all with very different points of view, and ideally produce six stories. I’ve taught at Clarion quite a lot. I’m asked, on occasion, to teach for a semester at different programs. I don’t know, precisely, how it helps me as a writer. Certainly I don’t get as much writing done while I’m teaching. But it’s a point of access for me into workshops where writers with, one always hopes, different perspectives on how stories work will sit around for a couple of hours talking about how they read, and what they notice, and what threw them for a loop — and I crave that. If I could design my own workshop, I’d get a poet and a fiction writer to teach together. And bring in a bunch of visual artists — (And yeah, I know Lynda Barry teaches a pretty spectacular workshop!) — just to expand the scope of the discussion about what narrative is able to do and how.
JD: Probably my favorite novel from last year was Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. I love the way she takes stories that are familiar to us (in the case of the latest book, in case you didn’t read it, Snow White) and reshapes it into something that’s her own. I think part of the reason I love your stories so much is because I feel like you tend to do something similar, where you play with certain genres that I love, but you make them totally your own. Do you ever find yourself working on a story and thinking, “This is moving too far in a certain direction, I need to clamp down and try something else”? Because whenever I read one of your stories, I think I know which direction you’re heading in, but I’m always happy to find I was wrong.
KL: I love Helen Oyeyemi’s work so much! I heard her read at the Brookline Booksmith last year: something that had been a life goal. I’ve said this before, but why not say it again: the fantastic is a flexible metaphor. With a fairy tale or a story about an impossible thing, you’ve introduced an element that readers will try to assign a meaning to. (Actually, we do this with the mimetic bits as well, but with vampires or ghosts, the reader is on slightly shakier ground, and therefore you can make them work a bit harder to find their footing while still entertaining them.)
I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we’re being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.
Sometimes I think of narrative progression less as plot and more as a series of turns or reversals. You begin to suggest the direction that a character or story may be taking, and let the reader begin to supply the rest of the story or set of possible actions, or general emotional state. If you do what the reader expects, the story slows down. And if you do something that feels false to the reader, the story breaks. So there’s a lot of fine-tuning involved. I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we’re being told a story. Just a little wrong footed. Even if it’s only by the way that the sentences have been put together.
JD: How long, generally, do you work on a story?
KL: Depends on the story. “The New Boyfriend” and “The Summer People” both took about a week to write. “I Can See Right Through You” took over a year. I used to think that the stories I loved best were the fast ones to write, because I didn’t have time to let the approach get stale. But in fact, I love “I Can See Right Through You” — maybe because once I figured out how to make it really work, it only took a week to do that work.
JD: Do you have a daily writing routine?
KL: I don’t write on a daily basis. I don’t have enough stick-to-it-iveness. But I am often hanging out, on a daily basis, with people who manage to get a great deal of writing done day in and day out. I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I’m past that phase, it doesn’t really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else’s house, my dining room table), I’m pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I’m working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I’m checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.
JD: Whenever I interview a writer with a short story collection, I always mention this quote I read by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I don’t recall the exact phrase, but it’s basically short stories are more difficult than novels because you have such a limited amount of time to write everything. Why do you think you’re drawn to writing them?
KL: I have no idea! I loved reading anthologies and collections as a kid. I wrote a short story for a workshop at Columbia, taught by Raymond Kennedy, and liked both the workshop and the feeling of having done something that wasn’t terrible. After I got out of college, I eventually applied to a workshop because I thought it would be awesome to spend more time writing short stories and hanging out with other people who wrote them. I’ve spent more than half of my life, at this point, thinking about short stories. But not so much time thinking about why short stories. Actually, what I’ve been thinking about recently is paragraphs. And I’ve been told that thinking about paragraphs is something that you do when you’re moving more into novel space.
Electric Literature and Grove Atlantic are excited to announce Literary Hub, “a new home for book lovers” (Wall Street Journal). Literary Hub will launch on April 8, 2015, which also happens to be the first day of the AWP Conference.
The site was conceived by Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic, and Terry McDonell, the former editor of Sports Illustrated and Esquire, as a daily destination for readers, from self-described book-lovers to casual readers.
Electric Literature came on board to develop and design the site, and help craft the editorial and outreach strategies. “When Grove came to us with the idea, we were attracted to its optimism. Lit Hub supports the whole ecosystem that literature needs to thrive, from the writers, to the publishers, to the bookstores, to the readers,” said Andy Hunter, co-founder of Electric Literature. “Our cultural conversation happens online now, and literary culture needs to play an important part. That’s Electric Literature’s mission, and Lit Hub fits.”
Jonny Diamond, former editor of Brooklyn Magazine and The L Magazine, is Literary Hub’s Editor-In-Chief. He’s joined by Executive Editor John Freeman, and Contributing Editors Roxane Gay, Adam Fitzgerald, Rebecca Wolff, and Alexander Chee. The team also includes Managing Editor Emily Firetog and Assistant Editor Ben Philippe (who both used to read EL’s slush pile!).
Literary Hub has over 65 committed partners (see a full list below) and will feature a mix of content contributed by partners and original material, including author interviews, features, excerpts, and essays.
CONFIRMED PARTNERS:
Grove Atlantic · Electric Literature · City Lights · Knopf/Vintage · Book People · Publishing Genius · PANK · Argos Books · A Public Space · Little, Brown · BookCourt · FSG · Slice Magazine · Story Magazine · Parnassus Books · BOMB · Ecco · O/R Books · Post Road · Algonquin · Scribner · Tattered Cover · Norton · Politics and Prose · New Directions · Housing Works · Penguin Press · Brazos Books · Conjunctions · Malvern Books · Fence · AGNI · Bloomsbury · Green Apple · Ugly Duckling · Harvard · Penguin Books · Skylight · Square Books · PEN · Riverhead · Newtonville Books · The Paris Review · The Strand · Akashic · Melville House · Archipelago · Book Passage · n+1 · Soho Press · McSweeney’s · Powell’s · House of Anansi · Unnamed Press · Zyzzyva · Last Bookstore · Graywolf · Books Inc · Tin House · Seven Stories · Community Bookstore · Poetry Magazine · Catapult
Donald Hall has been at the forefront of American poetry for more than half a century. He has produced countless books of poetry since the publication of his first in 1952, as well as numerous books of essays, fiction, drama, and memoir. He has lived through a career in academia followed by a life of freelance writing while living at the New Hampshire farm that has been in his family for generations. He was the first poetry editor of The Paris Review in 1953 and was the Poet Laureate in 2006. Cancer afflicted him but he survived, though shortly after, his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died after being diagnosed with leukemia.
I came to the poetry of Donald Hall with The Painted Bed, a quietly unrelenting account of his life after Kenyon’s death. I then worked my way back through his decades of work with the collection White Apples and The Taste Of Stone. At the age of 86, Hall no longer writes poetry, but continues to write essays. His newest collection, Essays After Eighty, takes the different motifs of his life in work, love, and grief and uses them as landmarks to draw a coherent line through his vast swath of time. Hall’s voice is lucid and knowing, though never condescending, and always imbued with characteristic wit and candor.
Aaron Calvin: In your essay “Out The Window,” you describe old age as “alien, and old people are a separate form of life” and as being “permanently other.” Do you think it’s possible to communicate through the veil of this otherness to someone on the far side of it, someone in their twenties?
Donald Hall: When I wrote “Out the Window” I was trying to communicate to younger folks. When I was younger, I’m sure I regarded the very elderly as “permanently other,” so maybe there’s no hope. I tried to overcome it by prose, style, and by wit.
AC: Essays After Eighty does seem to read almost like a map through a life in literature and poetry. If there’s one thing you wish someone had told you as a young poet, what would it be?
DH: I think that my essay is mildly instructive, defining what “a nice old gentleman” is.
AC: You talk about a specific incident in the essay that garnered a lot of attention when it was first published, when a security guard at a museum treated you very condescendingly. Do you find the disconnect you feel between your own cognizant mind and your physical limitations frustrates you in other ways? Are you able to take that and do something constructive with it?
DH: Of course the museum guard was an idiot. I was grateful to him for giving me a counter motion in that essay. If it had been all “out the window” and landscape and weather and birds, it would have been flat. I’ve seen a tendency in some other people to suspect dementia. I have a younger girlfriend with whom I have flown everywhere. Sometimes she and I have approached a counter in an airport, her pushing me in a wheelchair, and I have approached the clerk behind the counter and she has ignored me and talked to my lady, who’s almost thirty years younger. I put up with it.
AC: In “Three Beards” you address the relationships that have shaped your life directly, but they often appear in other essays throughout the collection. After all you’ve been through, what do you think has been important for a successful relationship in your life?
DH: I think in the book that one “relationship” stands out in particular. It certainly does in my life! I keep returning to it in the essays. I had a first wife who was a good human being, and others that have been quite wonderful, in sex or in kindness or both, and Linda is my dear if irregular (two nights a week?) companion now. She was the one in the airports. We would not do 24/7, but we love each other and she’s a great help to me.
AC: Do you find that it’s been important in your life to consistently have a companion, to have that kind of relationship in your life?
DH: I was lucky. Most marriages are no good. It happened that I had a superb one. Of course competition was in the air around us, but we had the brains to admit it, to avoid controversy. When we began and Jane had not published much, we were subject to English Professor idiots who told Jane that it was cute that she also wrote poetry. When her best stuff began to be known, the same idiot Professors or interviewers let us know how funny it was that the younger was actually better than the elder. We did not let it bother us. Earlier, I was an only child, and liked solitude. In Jane’s absence, I have largely had solitude. I do have a sweetheart, but I’m not sure that she leads me to more work. Of course she’s helpful reading over my stuff.
AC: You’re around the age Robert Frost was the last time you saw him and you talk about his concern for his image, despite his age. Did that incident influence your somewhat relaxed view of your legacy?
DH: I knew him (beginning when I was sixteen) and saw him from time to time. I certainly admired him. The last time I saw him he was in the last year of his life, approximately my age, and he did something I can’t do. As I drove away from his cottage, I looked up to see him trotting after me!
AC:Despite your inability to continue to write poetry, do you still consider it the main concern of your literary life?
DH: Poetry is the first thing for me. But without it, I am extremely happy writing my prose. No line breaks — but still sentence structure and word choice et cetera. Next year I will publish The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. I love poetry, but for the first time since 1940 the practice of poetry is a bit distant.
AC: You mentioned to me that you feel that the last time you collected your poetry — in White Apples and the Taste of Stone — it was much too long and that a future collection would be much shorter. Do you feel now that a poetry collection has more value the more selective it is?
Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems.
DH: Yes, the more selective a collection is, the more valuable it is. Too many recent collecteds go six hundred to nine hundred pages. They are too heavy to hold. Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems. I used to think Thomas Hardy was magnificent because there were twenty good ones. By now I think there are fifty. But the collected poems from Oxford take three volumes. That’s okay. If you love somebody’s work you are fascinated to read the inferior things.
AC: You talk about your leaving teaching to return to your family’s farm in New Hampshire as a formative experience in your life. Did you find the world of the university not conducive to the poetry you wanted to write?
DH: I loved teaching and didn’t find it hurtful to my work. Reading poetry aloud to students, I learned how to read aloud. Still, these days, I hear from old students, or they write something down — as in the Letters to the most recent Poets & Writers. I loved lecturing, but after a lecture I went home and got to work. Work was a sacred word, and always apply to writing. Teaching was sort of a hobby that paid my living. Although I loved teaching, I always wished I could write all the time. Then I was able to! So was Jane. You must know her poems.
AC: I am familiar with Jane’s, particularly the poems collected in Otherwise. I also found your work with The Painted Bed, a collection of poems about mourning her. Do you feel as though grief transformed your poetry?
DH: Jane’s death gave me a perennial subject. For five years I wrote about nothing but Jane, except for a few of the flings that I undertook because of her death. I don’t think that Jane’s life and death had anything to do with the forms and shapes of my late work — except that the better she got, the more I tried not to sound like her. I didn’t worry about that any more.
AC: You talk briefly in the book about Jane’s legacy and your own. Do you feel like you have some responsibility to her poetry and estate, or do you leave that to the publishers and biographers?
DH: I plug Jane as much as I can. For years, I began all readings with her poems. Otherwise, anthologists and writers are tending to her on their own. I think they will continue without my help.
AC: The way you discuss time in the book seems to negate the popular notion that things are steadily getting worse in the world. Has your conception of progress changed as you’ve aged?
DH: I am a great reader and proclaimer about politics. Of course things are getting worse every day! Almost every one of us knows the same thing. Maybe we are wrong.
AC: Who are the poets that have really stuck with you over the years and who are some that you may have grown out of or may have aged poorly?
DH: I think that Hart Crane was very important up to twenty or so, then Yeats for many years, then Thomas Hardy — Walt Whitman and, more lately, Emily Dickinson.I’ve always loved Marvell — and the 17th century in general. Maybe I’m saying “everything?”
AC: You talk about feeling like an ineffective poet laureate. Did the job just not suit you?
DH: When I was appointed Poet Laureate, I had all sorts of plans. At the beginning, I was certainly interviewed and provided a million moments of poetry on television, on radio, and in print. When I went to Washington first, I thought I had discovered a weekly radio appearance — but it didn’t work out. Then my strength began to ebb. I think I had a reaction to a medicine that should not have been prescribed. I felt awful. I could not write anything and I could not do anything. I did what the Library needed, for a minimum, but never did anything truly useful or energetic. (Many poet laureates have done virtually nothing. A few have done a lot.) I didn’t do a second year, as they wanted, because I had been so wretched the first time. It was a disappointment. It was an honor of course, and lots of attention — but my performance was a disappointment. By this point, I feel much more energetic though infinitely older and life is better.
AC: You’ve spoken before about the constant editing and revising of your poetry and how you tinker with poems long after their initial publication. Has revision continued for you or has that stopped with the poetry as well?
DH: Essays After Eighty came out in December 2014. In December 2015, I will publish The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. It’s a short selection, which is what I wanted, and my main concern has been the choice of what I hope is the best. But I have also made some small changes. There is one poem which I almost cut in half and touched up. There is another where I was able to reverse the order. There are several others where I changed a word or two. I remember adding a word. I remember cutting a word. I remember changing a word for mere accuracy — nothing that anybody would notice, even if they already knew the poem. I had been reading aloud so many times, especially in 2009, and it seemed to be that I saw mistaken things in poems that I read over and over again. I could revise them, without thinking that I was writing new poems — which I could no longer do.
Joy Jones makes lists. Lists of rules, of patients, of facts about Kansas. She is a woman who sometimes has trouble navigating the minefields of her own past, and yet, she is our guide through a cataclysmic “epidemic of forgetting.” In Laura van den Berg’s gorgeously contemplative debut novel, Find Me, America is in the thick of a near-apocalypse brought about by widespread memory loss and eventual death. “To be looked for is to matter,” Joy tells us. Her list-making forges pathways through the prose like a trail of breadcrumbs, a preparation or a warning, as though someday soon, we all may need to double back and find ourselves.
Joy is immune to the disease and is shipped off to a hospital in Kansas with her kindred would-be survivors. They submit to tests and exams in the hopes of finding a cure. They check the website WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com, scanning the names of the dead for loved ones that may have survived. The hospital is a change from Joy’s job in Somerville at the Stop & Shop, where she numbs herself with cough syrup and hides away from the world in a basement apartment, the first of many subterranean images in a book populated by basements, homemade tunnels, and deep-sea diving.
This is a disease that encourages digging, and Joy is digging for her own origin story, sifting through memories of group homes and foster families, carefully tiptoeing around traumatic gaps in her personal history. There is an entire year of her life blocked from view, a miniature epidemic of forgetting. When life at the hospital breaks down, Joy escapes on a quest to the Florida Keys, searching for the mother who abandoned her at birth. The second half of the novel unfolds on her path through the American South, a literal memory lane.
Joy’s journey from Kansas to Florida is not unlike Dorothy’s adventure to Oz, her internal mazes often projected onto a surreal, unfriendly, and dangerous landscape. But in van den Berg’s universe, no one is in Kansas anymore, so to speak. In this and other ways, Find Me is a distinctly American book, spotted with pilgrims and protesters dressed in black, concerned with questions of national identity. The plague is confined within the states, and Joy’s journey has glimmers of a cautionary travelogue. When her bus passes through Centralia, a condemned mining town, the landscape is as frightening as any post-apocalyptic vision, toxic and ruined. “This is not damage done by the sickness,” van den Berg writes. “This we did all on our own.” It’s impossible to read this book and not consider other epidemics of forgetting, the kind that happen every day. A sort of institutionalized memory loss, or a convenient omission. Joy wonders, “does anyone care about history anymore?” But the shadow of her question is, did we ever?
The survivors in this book are historians by default, but Find Me asks how we can all be better historians for each other, caretakers of each others’ stories.
Van den Berg’s prose is honest and searching, an inquisitive tonic for a destroyed world. Questions plant themselves between paragraphs, unanswered, and curiosity steams through her book like a freight train of hope. Self-discovery has seldom felt like such an optimistic and essential pursuit as it does in the hands of Joy, for hers is washed in a painful desire to connect. “Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?” van den Berg writes. In Find Me, to be looked for is to matter, but to be seen is to exist. Her story sticks somewhere inside, impossible to forget.
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