NOTABLE

What a year for reading. There was a lot on my list and, while I did get through most of it, there remains plenty more. Without a doubt, the best and most memorable book of the year for me was one I read just recently, Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. This is one that takes you to a place you may not know much about, Chechnya, specifically over a span of time that includes both wars there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is Marra's first book and with its quality he sets a high bar for himself. But, he is one from that favorite of places for me, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so the high caliber of his work is not a surprise at all. He is also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Two things that stood out were, firstly, the unique way he structured the book, moving back and forth over the course of about twenty years and giving us the points of view of a number of characters, all of whom are so well-constructed that they will make you ache. Instead of feeling as if you are reading a collection flashbacks, though, it is more akin to watching the pieces of a puzzle fall steadily into place in a satisfying kind of way. The second thing to savor was the absolute quality of his prose. It sings. Find this book and read it.

And what of my favorite end-of-year list? Take a moment to peruse the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013. In the fiction portion, you will find Marra's book as well as our friend, Jhumpa Lahiri, and her novel, The Lowland, which is one that I wholeheartedly recommend, of course. I was also able to read Philipp Meyer's The Son and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, yet another first time novelist with roots at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I picked up We Need New Names fully expecting to be blown away, but I am getting much better at not wasting my time with books that do not grab me and this was one. Two that I have not gotten to yet but that are lying on the desk beside me as I write are Local Souls by Allan Gurganus and Dirty Love by Andres Dubus III. These two are from the house for which I am honored to work, W.W. Norton. Though I have generally only hinted at my work in publishing here on the blog, I have to take the opportunity to share my good fortune through my job to have gotten to meet and chat with Andre Dubus over the summer. It was a treat, not only for his openness and willingness to talk about his writing, but also for his gracious inquiries about my own and his genuine curiosity about the place I call home.

The year was unusual for me with very little in the way of nonfiction added to my list of reads, though I did read Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World and enjoyed it very much. And the NYT list definitely adds to the t0-be-read list, including the new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, though I am not quite sure I am up for it yet, and Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, which will likely take some serious commitment. The one I really want to read and plan to grab from the library as soon as I see it there is Ari Shavat's My Promised Land, which I actually started in a bookstore but did not plunk down the money to buy. I have heard good things about both Wave from Sonali Deraniyagala and Year Zero by Ian Buruma, so while I am at it, I might as well add them to the list, too.

And just like that, I am already behind. 

    

POWER

I was lucky enough to be directed this week to an interview with novelist Ann Pancake in The Georgia Review that let me build upon the thoughts I discussed in my post from October, entitled POLITICS. That post centered around the political decisions we all make on a daily basis and around questions about writers and their responsibilities as public figures. I read Pancake's novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, shortly after it was published some years ago and it remains one of the most important books I have ever read. It is far and away one of the better books of and about the Appalachian region. It is also a singularly important exploration through fiction of the devastating impacts of mountaintop-removal mining, not only on the landscape and natural habitat, but on the human beings who live directly in its shadow and on the communities they have built. I have also read no other author who so perfectly captures in her work the Appalachian dialect. It is a difficult thing to write, a way of speaking that is hard to authenticate in printed form. It must be heard and felt and Ann Pancake gets it right.

Take a few minutes to read the interview here and also her essay published in the same issue of The Georgia Review here.

There are a couple of things in Pancake's essay that especially struck me and that also hit upon issues that we have spent much time discussing here before. One, the unique and powerful way that fiction can create empathy. This was an important factor in her decision to approach the issue of mountaintop-removal mining in the form of a novel and not as a work of nonfiction. 

"I started to perceive the unique abilities literature, including fiction, has to educate, move, and transform audiences that are possessed by no other medium, including reportage and documentary . . . It's not easy to actually feel, with our hearts, with our guts, overwhelming abstract problems that don't directly affect us, especially now, with so many catastrophes unfolding around us, and it's tough to sustain compassion for the nameless souls struggling with those catastrophes. But we do have great capacity to empathize with the personal stories of individuals."

It is one thing to say the practices used to extract a resource like coal are simply part of the cost of having the luxury and convenience of electricity, to see the issue in stark black and white or purely pragmatic terms. It is quite another to see and understand the people in those places where it is happening as individuals and as human beings with the same needs and fears that we ourselves carry. Fiction provides a space in which we can be fully immersed in the sufferings of others in a way that lets us imagine clearly our own suffering.

 "Pushing a little deeper into the relationship between literature and the imagination, I want to point out, too, the way literature -- both the reading of it and the writing of it -- can reunite an individual's conscious and unconscious . . . our very business as artists is trafficking between the conscious and the unconscious . . . "

And here is where she really gets me.

" . . . I'll propose that artists are also translators between the visible and invisible worlds, intermediaries between the profane and the sacred. How is this pertinent to the case I'm making for art's ability to create change in the world? Only by desacralizing the world, over centuries, have we given ourselves permission to destroy it. Conversely, to protect and preserve life we must re-recognize its sacredness, and art helps us do that. Literature re-sacralizes by illuminating the profound within the apparently mundane, by restoring reverence and wonder for the everyday, and by heightening our attentiveness and enlarging our compassion." 

I underline that last statement because it encapsulates for me the truth of why all art, but most especially literature, is so important. Later in the piece she refers to writers as the mythmakers of human history. It is and has been the writers among us who tell our stories, the most important ones, the stories that define us and give meaning to our being, the stories that bridge that ghostly gap between our profane physical world and the unknown sacred one.What a way to talk about the work a writer does. And, what a way to make us think of the sheer power of telling stories.

HUMOR

All this time there has been Thomas McGuane. Do you ever discover an author's work and realize in an aching way that how you see the world might have been entirely changed if you had read it earlier? I have known for a long time who McGuane is, of course. I had some sense of his style, of the kind of writing for which he is known and I am a big enough Jimmy Buffett fan to have been familiar with Rancho Deluxe and Captain Berserko. But because I must have seen slapped onto the spine of one of his books somewhere sometime that narrow label, humor, I had dismissed him. You can pretend for my sake that you do not know that I tend to take myself too seriously at times. Which is why I asked such a hyperbolic question. Perhaps reading Thomas McGuane would not have entirely changed the way I see the world, but it surely would have given me a glimpse of other possibilities.

What McGuane is showing me is how a master storyteller operates. Because, when it comes down to it, is that not why we read in the first place? Because we like a good story. It is something all humans share, whether they are readers or not. We relish tales. We wonder how it ends. We live our lives in our heads as a story we are telling to ourselves. It is a thing about our species that stretches itself all the way back across the full history of us. We owe our very survival to telling and listening to stories. Think of that.

It is one thing to tell a story, though, and quite another to craft one as if working in wood or clay or with oils, bringing in all the disparate elements, creating from jumbled bits and pieces a whole thing that is carried up on itself. In writing, I think of it as wordsmithery. It is the way a skilled writer finds the exact places in which to fit the only words that go, maybe a little trimming here and there, but shaping the words into a form that allows them to seem as if they came that way from the very beginning. It is a way of putting something that makes it like nothing anyone else would have said. There are lots of quality writers out there. There are very few true wordsmiths.

I spend time scratching in pencil a line under such a passage as this:

"Visiting my mother's family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They're crazier than pet coons."

Or finding scattered all through his narrative quick gems like:

"I was in that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round." 

McGuane writes out of a Montana landscape and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. I have written before of Stegner and of Ivan Doig, his literary successor, and also of my penchant for literature set in the west and in Montana. And Wendell Berry, who we know well here, of course, was also a Stegner Fellow. But McGuane's work is decidedly different from that of Stegner and Doig and Berry. Though place and the land are as much a part of the work as any character for all of them, McGuane's writing might be considered the mirror image of that of the others. His carries a sort of cynicism in the face of Doig's and Berry's continual leaning toward hope, though it is a style not without keen observation and a profound understanding of the world and people around us. McGuane points out through his stories the absurdity of our situation as human beings, the irrationality of most of our endeavors, the seeming pointlessness of our day-to-day existence. Berry and Doig, on the other hand, guide us to something outside ourselves.

What I think, though, is that both approaches provide meaning.

When I was in college I took a memorable class called Appalachian Political Economy. One of our first assignments was to spend some time looking at collections of photography focused on the region and to then write about our reactions to it. Already you can imagine in your mind the sorts of pictures we saw, black and white, certainly, and favoring subjects like hardscrabble farms and weather beaten people and dingy towns mourning the loss of great industry, mixed in among vistas of fog shrouded ridges and rusty fences stretching far into the distance. They told a story that I think needs to be told, without a doubt. But I wrote in my response that, even understanding perfectly why the story needed to be told, it also struck me that while I considered myself a child of the region as much as any of the people in the pictures, no one was coming to photograph me as I relaxed in my apartment after a day full of the grudging toil of discussing things like political economy at a private college. I was well-fed, generally well-groomed and well-provisioned and living also in Appalachia. What I was trying to say is that while the photographs were important in documenting the realities of a geographic region distinct in many ways, they did not give the full reality, nor did they do anything to show that the region was also a lot like most other places in America.

What I am getting at is that McGuane is showing me that both sides of the story are important. He has prompted me to consider that while I love and revere the writing of Berry and Doig to the point of even deriving a certain amount of emotional sustenance from it, maybe the idyllic and the pastoral are not the only ways to show respect for a place. While no expert, I have a fairly solid awareness of the literature that comes out of the Appalachian region and I know of no author currently writing out of it that does not do it in the way of old barns and foggy hollows. I do not know any Appalachian writer who is writing literary fiction that tells the story of human experience here without the semi-worship of ridge tops and wise, old Grandma in her rocker on the porch. Another hyperbolic statement, perhaps, but I hope you get my drift. What McGuane writes of the West, particularly in his more recent work, makes the place and the land central, but it is not necessarily the sweeping frontier peopled by proud and rugged immigrants. And it is not the bucolic landscape of Berry's Port William. But it is still brilliant. And just plain funny.

POLITICS

I hope you will first take the time to watch this interview with Wendell Berry. It will be worth it. If only to hear an old master's gravelly voice and to see his watery eyes as he reads aloud the words he has written.

I believe that nearly every decision we make each day is a political one. I waffle sometimes on this. Maybe it is an overstatement. Maybe not. The fact is, public policies affect everything about our lives whether we are aware of them or not. If we are not aware of such things, then this non-decision is still a political choice -- a choice to not be engaged. I am not just talking about overtly political things like bumper stickers and yard signs and Facebook posts. I am talking about the mundane decisions we make about where we shop, what we eat, what we wear, what we see and what we ignore, and even what we ask of our children. Realizing that each of our decisions are political is to acknowledge that everything we do each day is dependent upon other people and that each of our choices affects other real human beings and other real places in the world.

I can think of no other writer who lives this acknowledgement out through his art as much and as well as Wendell Berry. It begs a question, in fact. What exactly is the responsibility of the writer in the public sphere? Does the art alone speak for itself? Or does the creator of it bear some burden of using her craft and notoriety to further along a more public discourse?  I cannot answer these questions, but they are good thoughts on which to chew sometimes. There are other writers who produce far more overtly political work -- I am thinking here of Berry's fiction; his nonfiction is as straightforwardly political as can be done -- but who largely choose to retreat from the world and to disengage from discussion of the issues raised in their writing, much less to participate in any activism centered around them. I concede that a very large part of the creative process involves a retreat into oneself, a solitude that forces disengagement and that this is both necessary and important. Yet for Wendell Berry, there is no other choice than "to make common cause with [his] place." Which, for him, means that if he sees that something is happening to his place that should not be, he has to do something about it, not only through his words, but also through deliberate action. It is an obligation that stems from his faithfulness to the place and to his neighbors. It is this faithfulness that is expressed so beautifully and in all of its complexity in his stories about the fictional community of Port William. To make such a choice, to live in fidelity with a place, is to take up a certain obligation.

"We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, what's the right thing to do? What does the earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it."

The obligation comes also from something else for Berry. He connects clearly here his writing and his activism and the daily choices he makes with a belief in something larger than himself that drives him and drives his work.

"People of religious faith know that the world is maintained everyday by the same force that created it. It's an article of my faith and belief that all creatures live by breathing God's breath and participating in His spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy, the whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places."

He may speak gently and his fiction and poetry oftentimes follow a quiet and soothing rhythm, but as he expresses in this conversation and as his work and life show plainly, he is actually asking us to see the world in a radical way. He explains that he has tried through his writing to "map out the grounds of a legitimate and authentic hope." This is no easy thing. Berry speaks forcefully here of the sheer difficulty of it, the unknowing that comes with it, and the immense patience that is required.

A deliberate choice that Berry made long ago was to come back to a certain place, a rural place. And those of us who live in rural places know what it means to choose to stay in those places. What Wendell Berry says about this explains why that choice is also a political one.

"The fact that we in our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn't make a living there is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn't make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living, is preposterous. And it's the result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it's to have enough."

Follow that last sentence all the way to its philosophical endpoint, and it changes everything.

BACK

There is my endless backlog of books to be read. It lies in the piles by the chair, on the desk, on the bedside table, in the back seat, on the "official" reading list, and on the "unofficial" reading list that exists in a scattering of scratched out notes to myself that seem to follow me about. It does make me anxious at times, but it also brings some measure of comfort, a guarantee of sorts. There is always another book to be read.

Then there are the surprises. The titles and authors I jot down and keep bypassing for whatever inane reason or other. Every now and then, I come across a book in the library or in a store and remember that it is one that I meant to read. Years ago. And it will turn out to be a book of such merit that I begin to find it auspicious that I saved it for later without ever meaning to. As if there are certain books that come and go and then find their way back to me.

So it was with Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I read Enger's first and only other novel, Peace Like a River, when it was still new and enjoyed it enough to be eager to read So Brave when it published, though it ended up relegated to my own remainder pile. Enger is from Minnesota and he writes with that straightforward Midwestern sensibility and with a sparse richness that might be called elegant in its own way. It is the kind of working in words that I particularly favor.

This novel reads like a song. The best reference I can offer as example that you might recognize is that of Charles Portis with True Grit. You likely remember the movie recently remade and originally starring John Wayne, but you may not know that it first found life as a book, one that you should read, of course. If you have read the book or seen the movie -- in which, thankfully, the original lines of dialogue are salvaged nearly word-for-word -- then you know of the peculiar use of language that sets it apart and makes it so enjoyable. The characters speak in a way that is poetic and earthy, almost Shakespearean. And while you quickly take note of its high-mindedness, it does not seem at all out of the ordinary. You find yourself wondering why we do not all speak this way, because it sure makes for a far more interesting discourse. It also builds a narrative that is tough and sharp and literary and still altogether believable.

And, like True Grit, Enger's book is a bit of a cowboy tale. You know I like those. Though it involves few horses, there is much traveling and outlawing and campfires and a bit of Spanish spoken. But, do not let that steer you away from it if you are not as inclined as I toward such things. There is much to love here -- the plain and the scrubby country that shines in the background always and the characters who are crafted as solidly as woodwork and the dialogue that dances. It is also a melodious story of true friendship and of finding the things we did not know we sought. And it is about writers.

Though I did not mean to save it for later, I am glad that I did. It was worth the wait.

ENCOUNTERS

There is this with which I shall begin. From an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri in the regular feature of the New York Times Sunday Book Review called By the Book:

"From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar."

Lahiri is a particular favorite of mine and I have been anticipating her forthcoming novel for most of this year. Put her novel The Namesake on your reading list now. I am grateful for her words in this interview about the "immigrant novel." Because, yes, are not they all immigrant novels in one way or another, as her quote above prompts us to consider? But, her own work as it explores the experience of immigrants to America from India is particularly poignant. She is able to capture as well as anyone else I have read the alienation, the loneliness of transience and, as it were, of being and becoming American -- the anxiety and disquiet of a life of fragile connections. There is also something about the way food figures into her writing, in especially The Namesake. We often ignore the importance of food to our identities and not just in a cultural way, though it is primary. I am thinking of how we may take our meals, gathered around a family table perhaps, and of the work of preparing it and of growing it and of what happens after the meal is done, what is said and what is not. Who does this or that chore. The sensory experience of it. The smells and tastes and sounds -- sizzling oil in a pan, the creak of an oven door, the clacking knock of the knife blade against the cutting board. These are the kinds of ordinary and small details that beat out the rhythms of our lives and give shape to our memory. And, they are the kinds of details that Lahiri shoves into the quiet spaces of her narrative so that it rings all the more true.

As much as I tend to revere authors and have also expressed my surprise here before about a similar answer to one of these interviews, I am taken by another quote from this piece. 

"The idea of meeting writers of the books I’ve read doesn’t interest me. That is to say, I wouldn’t go out of my way. If the book is alive to me, if the sentences speak to me, that’s enough. A reader’s relationship is with the book, with the words, not with the person who created it."

And, of course, we have also talked many times before about those encounters beyond the familiar -- what a way to put it, no? -- with which we are blessed when reading fiction. As my job plants me again behind the wheel of my car for long stretches of time, I am relishing the audio books once more. I never know what I am going to get with those things, so I walk out of the library with stacks of them, hoping for a treasure in the bunch. At least I generally know within a few minutes if I will be finishing one or not. The current offering is the memoir from Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World. Part of what makes Sotomayor's own story a compelling one is, of course, that classic American mythology of moving beyond the confines of race, class, and gender to reach a pinnacle of personal achievement; for her, of course, to be appointed to sit on the highest court in the land. What we might not think of most times is that the justices of our Supreme Court are first and foremost writers. Writing is what they spend the largest majority of their working life doing, after all. Nevertheless, I am surprised to find this one an audio book that has drawn me in. It is a story of growing up in America and it is a well-told one. What I have enjoyed most, though, is the thread that shows itself over and over, the vital importance of reading to her life. Though she does not ever say it directly, it is clear that those encounters beyond the familiar that she craved as a child and throughout the rest of her life had an immeasurable impact. It was through books that she first began to see what lay beyond her own known world. And, while it is difficult to say that if she had not been a reader she would not have attained such prominence and success, I think you and I both still know that a love of books can, without doubt, lend a certain boundless shape to a life and mind.  

MUCH

I have written often here of my love of Wendell Berry's fiction. I was pointed this week to an article written by his daughter, Mary Berry, in which she offers a stirring reflection upon who he is and what his life and work is about and in which she also writes so well of the kinds of meaningful gifts a father may offer his children. All that she writes here speaks to things that are continually spinning their way around my own mind. You can find the article here and I hope you will take a quick moment to read what is a relatively short piece because there is so much more than a mere three or four thoughts with which I am left. So much, in fact, that I hardly know where to begin, so I will just do what I can. First off, though, what is treasure enough are the pictures that Mary Berry has shared from her family's life. But then, there are these things, too:

"Daddy was encouraged to seek his fame and fortune elsewhere; in fact, he was told that coming home would ruin his career. I don't have to imagine, however, the great happiness that was his when he knew that he could come home because I experienced that . . . Coming home was not encouraged by any influential person in my life except my family."

This in particular is something that has been on my mind of late. As I daily grapple with the frustration brought by the intolerance and woeful ignorance that seemingly abound in the place where I live -- especially in what feels like such a politically divisive time in our country, I cannot help but wonder about a life elsewhere. I am old enough to know, of course, that intolerance and ignorance exist everywhere. But those of us who are born and raised in mountains and in the rural parts of the world never really cease to feel distinctly the struggle between an ambitious longing for something more and a need to remain anchored in the place that makes us who we are and that gives us a landscape and a voice felt deep within our bones. We are told from early on in so many direct and indirect ways that success is something that does not happen here. It happens away from here. It is made known to us over and over again that our place is bereft of jobs and opportunity and culture. These are all things that are to be found in other places. If we are lucky, like Mary Berry, we come to understand that things are maybe not quite so clear as that. There are deliberate choices to be made about the life we want to live and the kind of community of which we want to be a part. Happiness and success are the sorts of ethereal things that can be defined in a host of ways and in a host of places. Perhaps they can be dug out of grimy, fertile soil just as they may also be found among the glistening towers and hustling din of the urban. Either choice is both difficult and incomplete. This is not just the story of my place, though. It is the story of America -- the unyielding pull from both directions to either claim a destiny that lies always just over the next horizon or to hold tight to all that we know as everything we are. Wendell Berry's fiction, among other things, is an exploration of that choice and its effects on both the people and the place.

"My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me as a child that I thought, until I was pretty close to adulthood, that I could remember things that happened before I was born. This gave me the sense that I have never lost, of living partly in the past and of loving men and women that I did not know."

How well I also know such feelings. It might even be said by those who know me best that I live partly in the past. I grew up hearing stories of people who had gone on before me but who, nevertheless, I came to feel I knew as well as anyone living and walking beside me. They were stories that connected me to a place and to a people. I must credit my close friend, Tal Stanley, for bringing this article by Berry to my attention. Because it was also Tal who, over so many conversations through the years in his office, or over meals, or in cars as we wandered -- sometimes knowing exactly where we were and sometimes not -- over many a winding mountain road, first helped me to begin to see the importance of the stories that are our own. His book, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place, which you should seek out and read for yourself, actually calls us to leverage the power of our own stories to create a new paradigm of education and of citizenship. Likewise, Wendell Berry's fiction helps us ask important questions about what it means to be a citizen of a place, something he calls membership, which includes, as Mary Berry so beautifully puts it, that "unbroken line of stories." 

I found surprising Berry's confession that she had read next to nothing of her father's writing until going off to college. Then again, being a father myself, maybe this makes complete sense. Imagine, though, discovering in this way that the man about whose existence you know the most mundane and ordinary details is of such prominence in certain circles. The book she writes of reading as a student, The Memory of Old Jack, is a favorite book of my own. In fact, I wrote about it in my very first post here, even quoting some of the same portions Mary Berry does. What she says the book did for her in terms of providing clarity helps me further sort through what I have also written about, that what we are given by Wendell Berry through his stories about a world that is fading utterly from our view is, in the end, hope. As his daughter says,

". . . that if we actively choose it over and over everyday, we can indeed live in the world of affection and membership that he honors in his life and in his stories."

Even after all this, though, what strikes me most each time I read her article is what Mary Berry has to say about Wendell Berry as a father. 

"The gift that my father gave me so many years ago was the knowledge that I live in his love, and if forgiveness is needed it has already been given. What greater gift could a parent give a child?"

Indeed.

PILES

Every now and again I get a bit overzealous in my reading life and bite off a little more than I can chew. I had thus far been successful in avoiding such a situation since the calendar turned, but I fear I have allowed it to happen once again. There is a giant stack of big books piled high on my bedside table. There are enough that as I lug them about the house to grab a few minutes here and there for chipping away at one or another, I sometimes lose track of one or forget which it was that I was last enjoying. I suppose it speaks to some sort of compulsion I carry, this gathering of books, but I am not qualified nor am I inclined to  try and sort that out. No one ever said a reading life was an easy one.

The pile -- to which I swear I have stopped adding -- currently includes Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity and Community, edited by Amy Clark and Nancy Hayward, Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a collection of stories called Fire and Forget (more on that one below), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and the novel I have not yet started but could not bring myself to abandon to the wilds of the library's new book shelf, Dina Nayeri's A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Then, of course, there are the magazines, the newspapers, the most recent issue of Ploughshares that came in the mail and seems to be teeming with really good stories, and even mentioning that pile over there in the corner of books that I would like to read makes me anxious. I am surrounded by piles. You can imagine it makes my wife happy.

Anyhow, I have managed of late to actually complete one book and it was a dandy. Just when I felt like I had slipped into a bit of a reading slump, I picked up one of the better stories I have read in a long time, a novel by Liz Moore called Heft. Liz Moore is a new discovery for me and someone whose work I feel I should get to know. It also happens that I am especially fond of her publisher. This is her second book and her first, The Words of Every Song, is, of course, now on the reading list. Once again, I am amazed at the skill and artistry of a very young writer. Heft is a novel about a lot of things and brings together two characters seemingly from opposite poles who allow us to explore those all too human feelings of emptiness and loneliness. The immense tragedies of the two lives Moore has rendered here end up giving us a deep sense of hope and a clearer understanding of the power of choosing to be a part of a community.  She reminds us of the good in the world. As is said often here at ToFGT in one form or another, one of the most important things good fiction does is give us room to process and think through realities that are nearly impossible to make sense of. Sometimes the only way to see clearly through the messiness that life gives us is to share the story.

Now and then I pick up a book that I want to savor and so I do not feel nearly as bad for taking my time to finish an anthology edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher called Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. I owe my discovery of this one to Bob Edwards, on whose radio show I heard an interview with Scranton and Gallagher and one or two of the authors in the collection. The book is the product of a writing workshop sponsored by New York University for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot begin to adequately convey the quality and power of these pieces, so I will not try. They are quite simply gut punches of reality. I have a penchant for war stories for a number of  different reasons. Colum McCann, in his introduction to Fire and Forget that is in itself compelling enough for you to seek out this book, expresses some of the more important ones.

"All stories are war stories somehow. Every one of us has stepped from one war or another. Our grandfathers were there when the stench of Dresden hung over the world, and our fathers were there when Vietnam sent its children running napalmed down the dirt road. Our grandmothers were there when Belfast fell into rubble, and our mothers were there when Cambodia became a crucible of bones. Our sisters in South Africa, our brothers in Gaza. And, God forbid, our sons and daughters will have stories to tell too. We are scripted by war."

 "We are drawn to war because we are, in the words of William Faulkner, drawn to 'the human heart in conflict with itself.' We all know that happiness throws white ink against a white page. What we need is darkness for the meaning to come clear. We discover ourselves through our battles -- our awful revelations, our highest dreams, our basest instincts are all on display." 

 

National Teacher Day

As the saying goes, if you are reading this, you can thank a teacher. And I, of course, can thank one for being able to write it. We owe much to the teachers in our lives for our abilities to do these things. It is fitting to have a National Teacher Day and a Teacher Appreciation Week. We fail to consider fully the power of our own literacy and of the startling halt our lives would come to on a daily basis without it. Of course, it is more than just reading and writing for which we are grateful. Somewhere along the way someone taught us something that remains a part of who we are today. And we are better for it.

It seems particularly important here on a blog devoted to the reading life to mark the occasion. To do so, I direct you to this post from last year.  

STORIES

I am a runner. As a runner, I know other runners, whether I have ever met them or not. We who run are part of a community of like-minded souls. We understand one another. I stand with the runners of Boston in defiance of the attack on an event that has long shown the world all the very best things about running. If ever a wrong event was chosen to terrorize, however, it was a marathon. We runners are a gritty, never-say-die lot. We are determined. We persevere. We endure. Our spirit can be bruised, but it will never be broken. We know what it means to travel to the outer limits of pain and then to return. Again and again. If weather and aches and pains and blisters and heat and cold and sweat and all the people who are always asking if we are crazy and who flip us off and play chicken with us in their cars will not stop us, then neither will your careless violence or anything else. So, just understand. This is the way it is.

As we try and process yet another horrific and senseless and violent tragedy that has seized our attention and our collective grief, I am taken by the fact that as these kinds of events unfold we are drawn, with seeming helplessness, to the unceasing coverage of them. Whether it be through social media or online news or television news, we find ourselves transfixed for a time as the same few facts and images are presented over and over. We become immobilized. We stand with open mouths and shaking heads and muttered curses while the business of our daily lives comes to a quick halt.

Part of it, I might suppose, is our need to feel some sense of the immense grief of our fellow humans, to act upon our basic connection to them in the only way we can -- by paying attention -- and perhaps also, in a small way, to be reminded that our own lives were spared from something that cannot be predicted. In our sorrow for those we do not know, we are a little more grateful for our own lives and the people in it.

I might suggest that what we are also drawn to the stories. Stories of survivors, of heroism, of those who faced the unimaginable, and of tragic and needless carnage. I think often of how important stories are to us, even the stories of true horror. It seems to me such a basic human thing to tell stories, and I cannot help but be amazed at how long we have been doing it. Imagine how telling stories has shaped us as a species, how it has moved us along and civilized us, how telling stories has taught us elemental things like where the food is or how we will catch it or how to heat it up. And think, too, of how telling stories has given meaning to the things we cannot fathom or explain, how it has spread ideas and questions and how it has bound cultures and nations. The stories we have told and will tell to one another help us to see the beauty in the world and also all that makes it ugly and nasty and that makes living in it wondrous and glorious and so difficult that we must make up other realities sometimes to try and understand our own.

I have been wanting to share with you for a while now a piece by Bruce Feiler published in the New York Times last month. In The Stories That Bind Us, Feiler discusses psychological research that showed that the biggest predictor of the emotional health and happiness of children was a clear and strong family narrative. A story of us, in other words. Imagine it, time around the dinner table or simply a few minutes here and there spent talking and sharing stories of how we came to be might just, as Feiler contends, be "the single most important thing you can do for your family." Children who had the most self-confidence and who were most resilient were the ones who heard and came to know a family narrative along the lines of we have had ups and downs, there have been good times and tough times, but we have hung in there and we have seen one another through. Such a story allows children to see that they belong to something larger than themselves, just like stories do for each of us. They help us make sense of things that otherwise we cannot.

GOSPEL

It was not purposeful, but maybe appropriate somehow, that I finished on Sunday Naomi Alderman's exceptional novel, The Liars' Gospel. It is not a book I had known about, but one of those treasures I happened to have noticed on a shelf in the library and ended up enjoying immensely. Her first novel, Disobedience, also one with which I was not familiar, was recognized with an Orange Award for New Writers in 2006 and now finds the latest spot on the to-be-read list. Gospel is told from the imagined perspectives of four individuals who share their story of knowing or having met a man called Yehoshuah who raised a small ruckus in Roman-occupied Judea some seven decades before the great siege of Jerusalem and the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple: Miryam, his mother, Iehuda of Qeriot, a favorite among his followers, Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and Bar-Avo, a leader of fighters against the Romans whose own life was spared in exchange for the execution of Yehoshuah.

What this book is not is a retelling of the story you know from the four canonical gospels of the Christian Bible. It is, on the other hand, a book that might engage you in a deeper conversation about your thoughts on that story. So often, people forget that the Bible did not fall from the sky one day, fully complete in the form and structure that we recognize. (Leather-bound, of course, King James Version. But, pardon my cheekiness.) The definitive Bible as we know it, in fact, only really came into being as late as the sixteenth century. Ignoring this not only fails to recognize the humanity of the decisions that resulted in the Bible we know today, but it also comes dangerously close to idolatry in my opinion. More importantly, though, it negates the full complexity of all the stories told within, and thus, their full effect.

I have thought for a very long time that the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Romanized name more familiar to us than the Hebrew Yehoshuah that Alderman rightfully uses in her novel, would be a far more powerful one if readers and believers kept sight of its historical and social and political contexts. And, it is a political story, like it or not. Judea, in the time of this man Jesus, was a place near bursting with political tension. Jerusalem in particular threatened to boil over each day with a simmering rage and the country was rife with preachers and teachers and healers and rebels bent on shucking off the heavy rule of Rome and proclaiming a new kingdom for the chosen people of Yahaveh. The savior and messiah for whom the Jewish people were waiting was especially central to their collective story at a time when they felt most neglected by God. If you are a believer that Jesus existed and walked the earth, then you cannot ignore him as an historical figure whose message was a direct response to this crisis. To do so would be to deny the essential tenet of his humanity, a very necessary component of Christian doctrine.

Forgotten as well is that over the centuries the Jesus story was, and is still today, co-opted and used for all manner of agendas, both the well-intentioned and the dangerous. Even the four gospel writers that we know of had their own specific audiences. They used deliberate language and intentional imagery and they tweaked their version of the story to drive home their own individual points of view. They were storytellers, after all. Even the most unsophisticated reading of the New Testament gospels cannot avoid noticing the clear differences and distinctions between them.

Alderman's imagining of these characters and their roles in the story reminds us that it is a human story. And what sets this man Yehoshuah of Natzaret apart in her story, what made him different and unique from all others claiming to be the messiah, the savior of the Jewish people, and what made his message truly profound was this particular notion: Love your enemy. This teaching was not only new and dynamic, it was a provocative and radical kind of worldview for a people long-suffering under a brutal and tyrannical enemy.

"It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently . . . But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed . . . Easier to prefer one's friend to one's enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing . . . This was how it ended. And all the sorrow that came after followed from this."

WORDS

If you are not reading Marilynne Robinson, I truly believe you are missing out on one of the preeminent American writers and thinkers of our time. Robinson teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has produced for over 75 years writers of the absolute highest caliber. Their alumni and faculty dominate the list of Pulitzer Prize winners and include, among other notables, the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stegner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Paul Harding. This is but a small sampling. If you see on a book jacket that an author is connected to the Iowa program, read the book. You cannot go wrong. (Of recent note is first time novelist Ayana Mathis' book, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.)

Robinson herself won the Pulitzer in 2005 for her novel, Gilead, a work of such moving power and beauty that I consider it an example of all that a novel should be. Woven into her narratives are powerfully brought forth questions on the very nature of the Divine and of our relationships with it and with one another. At the same time, it is just a damn good story. Her nonfiction work will challenge you, so much so that I tend to reserve it for those rare stretches of time when I feel up to paying it the full attention it deserves.

A small treat was to be had this week in a New York Times interview of Robinson, which can be found here. It is not necessarily an in-depth piece, but it is interesting nevertheless for her responses to questions about books and literature in general. What I found most compelling, though, was her response to the question of which writer, either living or dead, she would like most to meet.

"A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them are frustrated by the thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language, of ordinary contact even with the people they know best and love best. They turn to writing for this reason. I think many of them are magnanimous in a degree their lives cannot otherwise express. To meet Emily Dickinson or Henry James would be, from their side, to intrude on them, maybe even to make them feel inadequate to expectation. I can’t imagine being a sufficient reason for the disruption. We do have their books."
 

What truth. I understand completely what she means by frustration with the "thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language." I find myself befuddled oftentimes in weightier conversations by an inability to express all that I am thinking. It is not that I lack a thoroughly thought through opinion on a thing, but that I seem to somehow not be able to force the words shifting around in my head out through my lips. Give me a moment to consider and to speak them slowly and I can generally make my point clearly. Especially, though, give me paper and pen and time to erase and rearrange and I can offer a marriage of words that says all that I truly mean to say.

This is what I admire about Marilynne Robinson. She is willing to cut to the chase, so to speak, and not gloss over matters with romantic notions. I suppose you could call it a thoroughly Midwestern sensibility. Or something like that. Of course, it is tantalizing to imagine a conversation with a great writer or anyone, for that matter, whom we hold up as a hero or an inspiration, but in imagining such a thing we neglect to recognize the humanity of that person, the very thing that makes them someone whose work we so respect. As an example, a particular course I took in college was afforded the opportunity of a visit from a writer of note whose work we had read and confronted intensley as a group. I had found the book extraordinary and one that I loved and I anticipated the visit for weeks, imagining a deeply inspiring conversation that offered insight and wisdom of the sort that I thought only an artist of this ilk might convey. Long story short: it was a bit awkward. And it was a good lesson for me. Part of what made this person a brilliant writer was also the same thing that made her not so much a brilliant conversationalist.

But, "we do have their books" and that, of course, is really all we need.

 

LUCKY

One of the gifts my running life gives me is the ability to see the places I visit in a different way. And one of the gifts my job gives me is the perk of traveling to some great places. Last week I zig-zagged for five miles through the French Quarter just as the sun was coming up. Running at dawn allows me to see places, I think, as they really are--when the day is just beginning and the streets are clear of tourists and the real people who scrape out their livings in the shadows are going about their business. New Orleans was a particular treat at that time of day as I ran down Rue Bourbon, literally kicking my way through the flotsam of the previous night's revelry. A few frat boys were still upright here and there and staggering down the street, but mostly it was quiet. I caught sight of more than one stripper finishing her shift, leaving by the side door, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt now, a weary look in her eyes somehow giving her away. I finished my loop at the Cafe' Du Monde and walked back to my hotel as the sun rose over the river, a bag of beignets clutched tight to my chest and a big cup of strong, chicory coffee warming me up. This is how you see a city when you are a runner.

I have learned to tune out the irritation of air travel by using the time to read. A lot. A plane ride is more often than not an opportunity to consume most of a book, if not all of it. The flight to New Orleans was the perfect amount of time to finish Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It is a small book, created from a journal Murakami kept as he trained for one of the many New York City Marathons he has run. I opened the cover to the first page ready to be inspired as a runner, but most of what I read about running I already fully understand and appreciate. This is not a book to spur on someone considering taking up running. After so many years, Murakami is one of those runners who have been running long enough that it is altogether a part of his very being. This I get.

What surprised me and knocked me upside the head a bit was realizing that Marukami was talking as much about writing as he was about running. And what he showed me is how very closely related the two things are.

I became a runner by not allowing myself an alternative. My alarm went off, my feet hit the ground, I was out the door. No matter what. It is still that way, but now it is very much like breathing. I hardly think of it at all. I long ago came to a point where I simply could not imagine my life any other way. My first run may have lasted ten minutes, but I was back the next day for another ten minutes. I began to steadily add to my time on the runs until one day, I looked up, and it was no big deal to run for forty minutes. This is a lesson we seemingly must learn more than once, that the only way to succeed at anything is sheer and dogged determination. We may be lucky sometimes or we may be blessed with innate ability and talent, but these are things that can only carry us so far. Always, it comes down to simply putting in the time, saying to yourself, I am going to do this.

I do not tolerate the making of excuses for not running. I simply do it. And, after reading Murakami's book, I realize that so should it be with writing. For too long I have allowed myself alternatives and excuses when what it really comes to is that I simply must do it. Sweat it out each day. No excuses. I should begin as I did with my running. Ten minutes today. Again tomorrow. With the goal of one day looking up to find that it is no big thing to write for forty minutes. Like the running, it matters only that I do it and that I do it without fail. There is a phrase that pushes me along when I am training for an event or to reach a new running goal. It comes from the consummate book about running, John Parker Wilson's cult classic, Once A Runner. The hero of that book, Quenton Cassidy, speaks of miles of trials, trials of miles. It is a reminder to me of what it means to grind. Marukami's book let me know that running is not the only thing to which it applies.


A quick postscript: Do not forget the reading list if you are looking for book suggestions. I do not blog about every book I read, but you can find a list of all that I have been reading here.

FUN

I realize, of course, that things can get overly serious around here at ToFGT from time to time. Ok. Most of the time. In spite of that knowledge, I was proud of my last post, in which I was as direct as I ever have been about an issue of great social and political weight. It was difficult to do such a thing, but it was a relief, in the end, to express publicly those particular thoughts.

With that behind us, though, I was reminded this week of the pure fun, the sheer pleasure in hearing or reading a good story. Storytelling speaks to something particular about our humanity, something primal and definitive. To think of how much we have and continue to communicate to one another about our deepest and most elemental feelings, about the questions we ask ourselves in the quiet and alone moments just by telling one another tales. To think how much pleasure can be found in hearing a story told. And to think of how long we have been doing it. 

I finished last week one of the classics, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which I had been prompted to read after mentioning it in my post about Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds. About halfway through it the thought crossed my mind of the timelessness of the great, old books, the ones whose titles we have all heard, whose words we will even sometimes pretend to have read in order to flash our literary credentials. These are the stories that so fully capture the human condition that we at some point came to an unspoken agreement that they would be the books that lasted. One can read them and it is as if all the history of us, all that has happened since the tale was first told has not happened at all, even though, at the same time, it has ever been going on and on. When reading them we enter a moment in time that is unmoving, but that nevertheless reflects all of what we are always. We are able to simply pick right up where things were and drop ourselves into that moment that may not be our age, but that is still a time and a place we fully recognize.  

This is why I like to read. To be transported, to look up on a snowy Saturday and to have devoured half a novel, to have been in that other country. I have become a big fan of The Brilliant Blog by Annie Murphy Paul and she hit on some of this in a recent post  of her own. In it, she referenced an article about a study that looked at the effect good fiction can have on our ability to feel and express empathy. It is an amazing thing, reading. Like running, it is something so simple, so basic, requiring so little in the way of expertise or equipment, yet it can literally reshape our lives.

Thus, I found myself this week behind the wheel of my car cheering and talking quite out loud to no one but myself as I listened to the audio version of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. The climactic scene in the novel takes place at a baseball game, and I realized at the height of the tension that my hands were white-knuckled with their grip on the steering wheel. The characters and what they were experiencing at that very moment had become so real to me, that I was there, too. I was feeling it as they were. And I had to laugh at myself. After all, I was in my car. Driving to work. And these people at whom I was yelling were not actually real. In the midst of something as ordinary as it gets, I had somehow slipped off into another world, another life.

A good book draws you in, makes you ask questions of yourself that can be difficult. It can make you experience pain and sorrow and also moments of elation. It can make you beg and weep and laugh out loud. You can experience the full weight of an entire lifetime in one book. And, in the end, it is a great and simple pleasure.  

ARMS

We know how tedious the work of the United States Supreme Court can be, to the point that we mostly ignore it--at least until the importance of the great ideological battles waged there rise once again to a level that warrants widespread media coverage.  Nevertheless, in my wonkiness, I find what happens there and the history of the place fascinating. I have always been one to appreciate things like tradition, precedent, arcane rules and lofty symbols. The books I have enjoyed most about the court are by Jeffrey Toobin and I read quickly this week his latest, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. Toobin has long covered the Supreme Court and his books, for all their detailed study of the history of constitutional law, are fast-paced accounts of the drudging matters of parsing through the complex legalese that shapes the cases that come before the court. He sorts through it all to show clearly the real drama and significance of the decisions handed down and in the way he goes about his work is able to offer glimpses behind the scenes of the inner workings of the branch of our government that we probably know the least about.

Among the things that struck me about this latest book was its in-depth discussion of the Second Amendment. The massacre at the elementary school in Connecticut had not yet occurred when Toobin's book was published, but the chapters related to debates surrounding the interpretation of the amendment are suddenly and particularly poignant. The two full chapters that Toobin devotes to the evolution of the court's interpretation of the Second Amendment should be required reading for anyone currently weighing in on the subject. This portion of the book frames Toobin's larger discussion of the changing shape of the Supreme Court and the ascendancy of originalism in the last two decades, marked, of course, by the tenures of Justices Scalia and Thomas. On this topic Toobin's premises are clear and he repeatedly illustrates the inadequacy of that sort of reading of our Constitution. In particular, the selective way the idea of originalism has been used to advance an ideological agenda, thus, with a level of irony that pales next to all others in my opinion, rewriting decades of constitutional interpretation and Supreme Court precedent, is the clearest refutation Toobin provides. (I am certainly no expert, but for me it comes down to this: If the founders had not expected the Constitution to be the kind of framework for governing ourselves that is both adaptable and flexible in the face of history, why did they write in very clear instructions for changing it?) The way the Second Amendment has been completely co-opted by the National Rifle Association in the last three decades in order to unapologetically support its absolutist viewpoint is a microcosm of the larger issues Toobin's book covers. 

Before I go further, let me say this right away. I own guns. There are multiple guns in my home as I write. The guns I own happen to be under lock and key and only I know the location of that key. Most of the time, I forget that they are even there, as I guess the rest of our family also does. I have never purchased a gun. I likely never will. Every gun I own was given to me by my father. I grew up hunting with him and shooting guns with him. He taught me from an early age how extraordinarily dangerous guns are and was adamantly clear about the serious business of handling one. I do confess, especially in my younger years, that I did not particularly relish hunting with my dad, but I did it. Mostly for him. I also will say, though, that as I got older I came very much to appreciate the time outdoors with him, watching woods come to life on many cold and clear and frosty mornings, noticing things about the world that I would not have seen or known about if he had not taken me hunting with him. I rarely killed anything, but had an appreciation for the sport of it when I did. That was another thing my father was always insistent about, the significance of taking the life of an animal and the respect and care with which it should be done.

All that said, in no way do I believe that the Second Amendment can be interpreted in a way that gives citizens the right to complete and unfettered access to any and all kinds of guns. I want, especially, to make this particular point. You do not need a thirty or fifty round magazine to hunt or to even protect yourself and your family--both of which I strongly believe you have the undeniable right to do. You do not need a firearm that can be fired hundreds of times in a matter of seconds. You do not need these things in the same way that you do not need missiles, bazookas, grenades or tanks. And risking arrogance, I also wish to say that if you truly believe you need your own personal arsenal to protect yourself from some tyrannical takeover of our democracy by the government, then I am not convinced that you are mentally or emotionally fit enough to own any type of firearm. In the unlikely event that such a scenario ever did arise, then good luck with your collection of semi-automatic rifles and handguns against the mighty force that is the United States military.

This is the question I have: if it is perfectly and unquestionably reasonable to, in the interest of the safety of every one of us, regulate the ownership and operation of things like vehicles or the purchase and consumption of prescription drugs, alcohol, and tobacco or what can be carried with you onto an airplane, why is it so unreasonable to regulate the purchase of something as lethal as a gun? If you have to take a class and pass a test and reach a certain age in order to drive a car, why then is it so far-fetched to say that you have to pass a background check to purchase a gun? If we do not question the perfectly reasonable assumptions behind why you cannot personally own your own missiles or other large-scale weapons of war, how then is it unreasonable to say, no, there is no reason for you to own something that exists for the sole purpose of killing a whole lot of people very quickly? Are not some things just simple, common sense?

I do not believe that having common sense regulations when it comes to gun ownership means that before long someone will be coming after your guns or my guns. You have every right to feel my viewpoint on that is naive. But, of course, I also have every right to find naive the idea that in order to be safe we must live in a society that resembles the fabled Old West, all of us--from teachers to clergy--openly brandishing our sidearms in every public and private space so that we may somehow deter a madman bent upon orchestrating a bloodbath or even a common criminal who wants to steal our television. We can--and must--do better than that.

WAR

It is not often that we are gifted in modern fiction with an opening paragraph like this one:

"The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Ninevah and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

This is from Kevin Powers' first and newly published novel, The Yellow Birds. It is a small book as size and length go, but it takes neither of those to build good--no, make that excellent--writing. Powers' book is decidedly of another era, I think, and I cannot help but be reminded of my old friend Ernest Hemingway as I read the prose here. The language is sparse but cutting, elegant but understated, and I have read no other work about our latest wars that speak with the power that this one does. I cannot quite put my finger on it. There is something intangible in his language and at the same time it is altogether ancient and timeless and real. The novel is moving in a way that makes you think on things you would not otherwise.

We are at war and have been for a long time. We forget this. That is understandable, but perhaps not forgivable. War, too, is ancient and timeless and real and more, of course. Perhaps the very nature of the subject lends itself to the strength of Powers' narrative, but I think it is more a product of the artist here. We who have never been to a war cannot understand all that it does to the people who do go, people who we mostly know of, but who are more and more apart from us, left to do our fighting and killing while we daily reap the benefits. Our wars do not engage the full conscience of our citizenry any longer. And that is one reason why a book of this magnitude is important and necessary.

I think a lot, though, about what war asks of those who come back from it and that is really what this book is about. The most striking part of The Yellow Birds is a masterfully constructed pages-long sentence that gets to the core of one of the primary questions in this novel. How do you go away to a war to spend months and years in a confined theater of violence and destruction, thinking hourly of death, how to bring death to others and to keep it from yourself, only to come back home from that to try and live an ordinary life where bills must be paid and children raised and the lawn mowed?

" . . . because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever . . ." 

I rarely say it as directly to my own readers, but I really do hope you will read this book. Because I truly believe that one day soon people will be required to read it in the same way that so many have been required to read The Things They Carried or All Quiet on the Western Front. It will stun you and make you flinch, but you will recognize immediately its quality and the human truths from our own wars that it so perfectly conveys.

SOCIAL

Thank goodness for the new world of social media. How did we get by for so long without knowing that every issue boils down to viewpoints of a singular dimension? It seems more and more that opinions can be summed up in a status update of a few words or, more likely, in a picture or story from afar that is shared and spread and in which everything is taken completely out of context or born of an unyielding hatred. From behind our screens, big and small, we can so easily direct blame and deny the humanity of others and spread vitriol and say, without a doubt, this and only this is who I am. Should not our thoughts and opinions have more value to us than that? Can we ever again take time to think through a thing, to mull a little bit, to consider and converse and ask good questions, to see perspectives of which we were not aware?

These thoughts have been troubling me for some time, especially as the most recent election wrapped up and more so in the wake of the school shootings in Connecticut, each a situation in which claims to a side were so easily staked and others so readily dismissed. Many times I have been hampered in my ability to post here because my mind is turning over such things, unsure of what it is I want to say or if even I should be saying anything at all. I do not mean to imply that I do not feel strongly about certain issues and problems we face as a gathering of human beings. I absolutely do, though I more often than not keep them to myself. It is a weakness, I confess. And, certainly I have my own penchant sometimes for bumper sticker sorts of philosophies. Do we not mostly prefer things delivered neatly in small and uncomplicated packages, around which we can more easily wrap our minds? But, when I see what we can unleash upon one another with hastily typed words, I cannot help but wonder if we are not capable of a more civil and thoughtful discourse. Should not such a thing be among the highest ideals of a self-governing people?

These same thoughts have been further ground down in my mind of late as I finished my first book of this new year, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. If there is one thing I believe Kingsolver does better than any other writer I have read, it is the way she frames the insurmountable complexities of an issue within a compelling, believable story about people and places and things we can all easily imagine. Her novels lay out for us a pathway through a dialogue and show us that the water can be awfully muddy when it comes to most things. Through characters we recognize and with whom we can identify, she allows us to ask questions that maybe we had not thought of before and she gives us room, especially, to listen.

This her latest novel is a story of a rural community confronting a phenomenon of nature unseen before in its midst and that is at once both inordinately beautiful and a marker of something altogether wrong in the world. Its occurrence draws outsiders and opinions of every kind. Kingsolver's book is dead solid in its presentation of the many and subtle layers that thread themselves through the dichotomies that exist between the rural and the urban. But, what it really comes down to and what she reminds me of over and over again is that nearly everything we confront as a society must eventually be viewed through the lens of class. We have a difficult time talking about it in direct terms, but class shapes more than anything else, I believe, our way of seeing the world.

There are a lot of strongly felt opinions about the central question in this book, and we see many of them everyday written and voiced in terms far too uncomplicated for a problem of such enormity. But, like good fiction should, Kingsolver's novel asks us to work a little harder to see into the mass of tangled answers, to at least arrive at our own conclusions with empathy and understanding and a bit of sweat on our brow, perhaps, from thinking them through. We may not always be able to find the answers, but we can at least acknowledge the shared humanity between ourselves and other people while we are at it.