I'm not quite sure what it was that made me decide (spur of the moment, really) to buy
We the Animals, the slender debut novel by the widely acclaimed writer Justin Torres. I'd heard some humming about the book. I'd seen the ad. I'd read what Marilynne Robinson had to say: "Brilliant, poised and pure." I'd read the words of Paul Harding: "It is an indelible and essential work of art." It was an impulse purchase, a little easy finger work, and there it was, on my iPad, waiting to be read.
From start to finish, without once leaving the couch, I just read.
We the Animals is the third book that I've encountered in the space of a little more than a week that builds through plurals. There was the rhythmic
they, they, they of Colleen Mondor's remarkable debut memoir,
The Map of My Dead Pilots. There was the haunting, concentrating we of Julie Otsuka's
The Buddha in the Attic.And now here comes Torres with his story about brothers growing up within the chaotic fist of a poor, troubled family. "We wanted more," this book begins. "We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."
Truly, I am tempted to just keep on quoting. Because look at that.
Listen to it. Justin Torres is carving out the sound of a song.
These boys are wild. Their mom was a teen when all three were born. Their father is a big, muscular, knotted man—a charmer and a rogue, a man who can purple up his wife with his fists and, just as powerfully, bathe a son. The kids are bound to each other and they're plastering each other—with hands, with words, with wants. Each scene is a distillation, a moment. Time moves warily forward. The boys are in for hurt, and they do some hurting themselves, and sometimes it all grows so unbearably tense that I had to close my eyes and summon my psychic strength to keep on reading.
Readers can never change the fate of the characters they meet. They can only hope for them. They can only fear for them. In reading
We the Animals, I did both. I succumbed to Torres's tale. I honor his literary powers.
I was in Atlantic City a few years back when a friend sent a short note my way. There was a blogger, she said, whom I had to read—a smart one, a respected one, who was out there talking about something I'd written. When I followed the link,
Chasing Ray, the brainchild of blogger Colleen Mondor, came into mini focus on my Blackberry screen.
I already knew of Chasing Ray, of course I did; most anyone out here in the land of book blogging does. Colleen has always called it as she's seen it. She has waded in toward the important stuff, taken a stand, defended it. She has fought on behalf of books for boys, on behalf of nonfiction, on behalf of libraries, on behalf of greater transparency in cover art, on behalf of books she has believed in, on behalf of memory.
I have followed Colleen's blog for a long time now, and so I thought I knew her. But this morning I finished reading an advanced copy of Colleen's first book,
The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska (Lyons Press), and I find myself exhilarated by all that I didn't know, had not imagined. This is the story of the four years Colleen spent running Operations for a bush commuter in Fairbanks, Alaska. It's about the planes that rose and fell, the pilots that went missing, the cargo no one would believe. It's about defying the odds, the weather, the smash wall of mountains until those things rise up and speak and refuse to be defied. It's about vanishing, about vanishing's speed. It's about a daughter who loses her father too soon and who, in the end, writes stories down in search of some salvation.
It's a memoir, but it's a chorus. It's a we and a them on the rhythmic order of Tim O'Brien's
The Things They Carried, a book that brings us into itself (and keeps us there, utterly absorbed) with opening passages like this:
The things they had to know were endless. From their first day flying for the Company, they filled their heads with facts and figures of length and distance, knowledge of rivers and mountains, the locations of a hundred landmarks, or a thousand. They learned when it was safe to drop down through the clouds, when they might continue forward, when they must turn right or left, when they absolutely had to turn back. They made sure sled dogs were tied on short leases because one of them would jump on another and cause a fight at the worst possible time. They understood why they needed to strap down dead bodies extra tight after Frank Hamilton had one slip free on takeoff....
No one liked flying with bodies.
I said this was a memoir, and it is, but it's that
other kind of memoir—the kind in which the author is not the heroine, but the webber, the weaver, the voice for those who are no longer here to tell their own stories. That is not to suggest that there's any distance here, a single line that feels academic (though it has all been magnificently researched) or at emotive remove. Colleen's passion for those days and those people, her intimate knowing, is galvanizing. She's tough, and she's been toughened; she rarely puts her own self center stage. But when she appears, when she tells us something personal, the stories stick and matter.
So that this book has great affecting power and it also, I kept thinking, has all the stuff that would make for one heck of a great television series. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before—to set a series down in a place like Alaska, to cast a bunch of cra
I was stunned by the ending of this book.