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I have never met Lilian Nattel, but I feel I know her.  The rink where she skates.  The sound of her kids' laughter.  The way she sees the world in which she lives.  The photographs that thrill her.  I read and loved her international sensation, The River Midnight.  I celebrated when her new book, Web of Angels, was bought by Knopf Canada.  I was honored, a few short weeks ago, when a copy showed up in my mailbox.  I opened to the first page.  I was stunned by the opening lines.  I thought I knew Lilian Nattel.  But new books teach us new things about a writer's powers.

I have never read a book like this one.  You haven't either.  It's brave, unblinking, categorically generous despite a most heartbreaking subject matter.  With Web of Angels, Lilian isn't just exploring dissociative identity disorder—a condition that affects far more "ordinary" human beings than I had previously known.  Lilian is inhabiting the mind of a woman in whom multiples live, which is to say that she is teaching us what it is like when several personalities—male and female, young and middle aged—argue for space inside the same body. 

Sharon Lewis lives in a pleasant Canadian community called Seaton Grove.  She is a mother of three, a loved wife, a friend.  For years she has battled back the divisions in her own mind, but when a pregnant neighborhood teen kills herself and secrets begin to unravel, Sharon Lewis unravels, too.  She blacks in and out of the familiar and strange.  She struggles to save the dead girl's sister from a terrible and too-familiar haunting.  To save the girl, she'll have to reveal her true selves.  She'll have to rely on them to help her piece together truth.

There are big themes in this book.  Big ideas.  But what makes the whole so spectacular is how Lilian cushions the ugly things inside a beautiful, resilient domestic world.  As awful as the secrets are, Web of Angels thrives because of the way that Lilian tells the tale.  Those searing household details.  Those absolutely true snatches of conversation that happen among kids, between adults, inside the quiet of a therapist's room.  It's not just the first page of this book that is so beautifully written.  It's every page. 

For example:

The baby's eyes were unfocused, her gaze not following theirs but open, large, taking in the light around objects as much as the objects themselves, for she was still closer to the source of life than the material world.

I know you want more.  I will satisfy your craving:

Pipes rattled upstairs as water flushed down, flowing into larger pipes laid underground a hundred years ago when Seaton Grove's bylaws stipulated that no whole sheep or hogs or geese were allowed to run free in the streets on pain of a ten-cent fine.  Before that the roots of a forest intertwined and Garrison Creek flowed between ferns.  Now pipes connected the houses on either side, across the street, around the corner, their sewage led far away.  That was how civilized people handled sh*t: pipe it; bury it. And they sacrificed the creeks, the streams, the living waters in order to do it, their land dry and quiet except for the sound of the sprinklers.

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It's possible that we don't know how tired we are until we stop.  I have needed to keep going. Today, after fighting a week's war with a wicked allergic reaction, I couldn't.  For a few hours I did nothing at all.  Then I picked up Lilian Nattel's new novel, Web of Angels, which I have been stealing my way into every chance I could get.  It's such a compelling book, such an important one, and the deeper I read into this novel the more convinced I am that Lilian has, with Web, the book of a lifetime.

My mind has to be clearer before I put my reflections here, on the blog.  But Lilian, between now and then, thank you for persevering with Web, a book that took you many years and multiple drafts.  The best books often do.

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Whenever I see a sewing machine, I take a picture for my dear friend, Lilian Nattel, a Canadian author and blogger who delights me with her wide-ranging world view, astute critical mind, and literary talents.  She makes things, this Lilian.  Seams stories together and fabrics, too.  Lives the broad, bright life. 

I've been saving this photograph, then, (snapped in November on Portobello Road in London) for a long while, for I knew that someday soon I'd have a chance to celebrate Lilian's new book on my blog.

That day is today.  Or, I should say, the celebration begins today, for galleys of Web of Angels, Lilian's novel about, among other things, dissociative identity disorder, have just arrived on my doorstep.

All I had to do was read the first two sentences to know that I was about to enter a compelling, well-drawn world.  I'll leave you with those and return in a few days with a full report:

On a narrow street in the grey of dawn, in a row house with stained glass, a sixteen-year-old girl lay motionless.  Her hair was blone, short, gelled in spikes, her legs unshaven, her pink nightgown straining over a nine-month belly.

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This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Elizabeth Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" �

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Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when she sang the praises of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later.  And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd reviewed it for the Washington Post), I said, All right, Liz.  I will.

Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth.  We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves.  I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit. 

This afternoon, I board a plane.  Smith's coming with me.  So is Foulds.

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