It's been a week of long and important correspondence with friends. Among the topics: How do we manage lives built (in part) of original ideas? Stories that haven't been previously told. Characters that don't come pre-packaged. Books that don't fit the cross "this famous book" with "that famous book" and you have this new easily tagged and marketed and therefore soon to be famous book.
We talk, we ponder, we encourage. We look for signs.
I found one this morning, reading James Wood (oh, bless James Wood) in
The New Yorker, discussing, in an essay titled "Fly Away," the work of Samantha Harvey.
I'd like to share the opening paragraph:
The odds are powerfully stacked against Samantha Harvey's third novel, "Dear Thief" (Atavist): sometimes you feel that the author has enjoyed building a trembling wall of them. Her novel takes the form of a long letter, written by a woman in middle age, to her childhood friend, and so most of the narration languishes in the corridor of the second-person singular. The friend (the "thief" of the book's title) disappeared a decade and a half ago, and so the narrator does much reminiscing, with the danger that the novel drifts fairly often into the pressureless zones of retrospect. And the narrator's lost friend was a "character," a large personality remembered, with loathing and love, for her enigmatic singularity: so, most perilously, Harvey's novel must work to convince us that this vague "you" of the narrator's letter deserves her extravagant reputation and the time spent recalling her. The book is sometimes precious or whimsical, and can be frustratingly diaphonous. It has nerves of silk; it could probably do with more robustness, and a bit of comedy.
So it is odd, Wood tells us. So it veers. So it isn't what we "expect." And yet, the rest of this fantastic essay is devoted to the beauty and success of this novel "with no interest in conformity."
To which I say, Yes. Through which I decide, I am buying Samantha Harvey.
Thank goodness for James Wood and
The New Yorker (which also celebrates the poetry of
Olena Kalytiak Davis is in this issue). Thank goodness for publishers who believe that there are readers out here who are willing to venture into non-conformist territory. Thank goodness for editors who say, It's worth the risk.
You are.
And thank goodness for my friends who believe, with me, in the odd and the new.
I'm absolutely certain that Olena Kalytiak Davis would not have loved the idea of me sometimes looking for the ephemera of her when I visited Alaska this past summer.
But I did. I searched. Couldn't help it.
I'd met her at Bread Loaf. She'd haunted us all. Reading in the moted light about a wedding dress. Sitting on a stoop in the early morning, the smoke of a cigarette swirling. The things people say and the things she said, and the delicate and fierce in her, and later, riding a train from DC with a fellow National Endowment for the Arts juror, the talk between him and me was almost all Olena. Where she was. What she was doing. How much better mystery is, than fame.
She lives in Alaska. She's a single mom and an attorney. She has a new book out, a third, "The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems." And also: Dan Chiasson just gave her two amazing pages in this week's issue of
The New Yorker.I gasped when I saw it. Hadn't find her in Alaska. Found her here, in the dark, after a many-hour work day, when I needed a little actual poetry.
From the last paragraph in this exquisite bit of appreciation, lessons on poetry, thoughts on Davis:
The medium of poetry isn't language, really; it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively.... Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis's book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic.
You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time.
Among the many wonderful people I met at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (a conference I attended so that I could spend more time with the great Jayne Anne Phillips)—Brooks Hansen, Anne Lamott, Jane Satterfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Jay Kirk, Olena Kalytiak Davis, my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton), my second editor in chief, Janet Silver, Grace Paley, even—there was a young scholarship winner named Susan Tekulve, who hailed from the south and told intriguing tales. Through the years Susan and I remained in touch as she published short stories and built a reputation as a fine teacher at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She traveled to and taught in Italy. She spent time among the Appalachian hills, where my great grandfather had left a mark. She brokered fascinating details. She was always humble and she, like me, loved chocolate, cats, and gardens.
Not long ago, Susan won the South Carolina First Novel Prize for
In the Garden of Stone, which will be released in a beautifully designed package by Hub City Press in late April.
Kirkus gave it a huge star.
Library Journal named it as a Spring Break. None other than Robert Olmstead, Thomas E. Kennedy, and Josephine Humphreys have sung its praises, and I asked for an early copy.
This is the book I've been desperate to read, and my joy for Susan, my enthusiasm, my deep respect, I'll use the word "awe"�it overflows. I'm 100 pages in and now must leave it for a spell to do some corporate work. I'll write a full response in a few days. But for now let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you.
Here's just one. It's 1924, the first evening of a southern honeymoon.
Around the mountain pool, the butterflies flattened themselves against long, polished stones, drinking the water held in their dimpled surfaces. Emma took off her shoes and walked across the slippery rocks. Water sprayed her face and arms as she dodged the drinking butterflies and stood at the pool's edge, watching the giant trout swim around the pool. Dark blue and mottled, they skulled just below the surface, gulping up butterflies and water, their stomachs filling like empty buckets. She saw now why her husband had released them. She, too, was satisfied just to know that they were there.
Congratulations to Susan! I loved the imagery in this excerpt, especially the gulping trout buckets. It was a nice change to imagine butterflies and flowing water during a snowy week.
What a lovely passage.