Anmiryam Budner of Main Point Books (Bryn Mawr, PA) has a way about her. A stealth
please, try that wins me over every time.
I think you will like this book, you will appreciate this writer, this reminds me of something you might have done or might some day do, she'll say. And there's no walking away from that.
Most recently I left Main Point Books with
The World Before Us, a novel of great complexity and intrigue by Aislinn Hunter. It is a story told in part by remembrancers—ghosts, if you like—who have gathered around a British archivist named Jane. Jane works in a small museum of vast collections—and that museum is about to close. Jane also endlessly works through a childhood trauma—the day the little girl left in her charge (Jane was fifteen at the time and slightly (secretly) in love with the child's father) disappeared on the estate of a Victorian asylum. Obsessed with the disappearance of little Lily, Jane is also obsessed with other mysteries of the asylum's late 19th century heyday. She ponders, researches, loses herself in the vortex of time.
Those remembrancers listen in. They remember their own pasts. They move the story forward.
Hunter is an author of many gifts. Her ability to conjure colliding periods, a musty museum, multiple distant lives, garden ruins is, I think, uncanny—she does it all so very well. Then there's the shape of her sentences, the sly inventiveness bent into even the most quiet of scenes:
... she reached a large glass case on thick oak feet. It contained a series of criss-crossed branches upon which Nathanial Hartford, Esquire, had supervised the wire mounting of two hundred and four hummingbirds in an attempt to display all the colours and designs of the species. The birds were caught in various stages of rest or flight, their wings closed or spread out like the slats of a fan. Most people paused here briefly, if they stopped at all, but Jane studied each bird in turn, the dark beads of their eyes, their long bills, flamboyant gorgets. Those of us who had followed her into the museum studied the birds too, and watched her, the care she gave each individual thing.
"When is a bird no longer a bird?" one of us asked.
This is a story that takes its time, that introduces large casts of alive and dead characters, that hinges around the questions that an archivist has about a character that appears to have gone missing from the history books, a character named N. The suspense is a researcher's suspense. The plot is not nearly as important as the themes—time, memory, regret, the cloister of the dead around the turbulence of the living. I was reminded, as I read, of Nova Ren Suma's
The Walls Around Us (about which I wrote
here)—another book told, at times, with the Choral We, another book in which the language is careful, inventive, and haunted.
It took me a while to finish
World. I've been lost inside a thicket of Too Many things. And even if, at times, I wished for a few less direct intrusions by those remembrancers, even if I wondered if the story might have succeeded with fewer characters, I always wanted to get back to this story. I wanted to see how this incredibly talented Hunter would pull her complex machinery off. I wanted to appreciate the particularity of this novelist, in passages like this:
And in the dark, in drifts of memory, we recall some of the people and things we have happened pon, moments that aroused us from the stupor of our lives—the plumes of a peacock unfolding under an elm, the bright platter of a sky coroneted by trees, a list retrieved from between an armoire and the wall of a house by the sea:
Flat of palm on abdomen
Shift of sheets
Hard shelf of his hips against the soft of mine
Curve of water glass against my lips—his hand trembling
Coarse planking of the wood floor
The hitch of a sliver
I bought Nova Ren Suma's
The Walls Around Us strictly on the power of the word-of-mouth roar this writer has accumulated over the years. Didn't read a single review. Didn't read the jacket copy. Did (confession) read the persuasive
Publishers Weekly interview, but that was just for edifying fun, for my mind had already been made up.
What kind of writer is the kind of writer that other writers gush about?
What kind of writer reminds other writers of the need (importance, glory) of writing away from commercial expectations and toward one's own heart? Saying,
The Walls Around Us was a book written solely and unapologetically for me. I allowed myself to be as weird and wild as I wanted. I did not hold back. I stopped trying to write to what I thought an audience or a publisher might want from me. It was freeing and exhilarating. And the outcome – what this book has become, and the reaction it’s gotten out in the world so far – completely surprised me. I learned a lot from this process: I should probably stop worrying so much about what everyone else thinks of me more often.
What kind of writer? Nova Ren Suma. (Words above from the PW interview)
I opened the book. I read the first page. What the bleeping heck, I thought. What the wondrous heck. This Suma is a writer, just like everybody said.
First sentences.
We went wild that hot night. We howled, we raged, we screamed. We were girls—some of us fourteen and fifteen; some sixteen, seventeen—but when the locks came undone, the doors of our cells gaping open and no one to shove us back in, we made the noise of savage animals, of men.
Sometimes a writer will take her foot of the gas after the first stellar page or two, then just lay out, in ordinary fashion, the plot, the themes, the (I am sorry to have to use this word) message. Not Suma. Her exaltation of and in language can be found on this book's every page. Her willingness to risk. Here she is, for example, describing an attempted escape from the juvenile detention center where much of this supernatural story takes place. There's a storm going on out there. There's a girl trying to get away.
I caught the rest in flashes. It wasn't that I couldn't focus; it was the lightning, the summer storm raging through the window. She'd be dark, and then she'd go bright. Her yellow hair black, her yellow hair white. I caught her, foot kicking out and the perfect hit in the center of the glass that caved in. Then came the second and third kicks that made it shatter. She'd gouged open the window into the night.
I'm going to call that urgent pattering. I'm going to say I felt the night blow through.
And how about this:
I have this distant memory, hanging on a ratty clothesline in the backyard of my mind, and in this memory, I am running. There I am, running fast and hard for that window as if it's a set of doors that will soon be slamming closed to passengers and I'll lose my chance. I will lose at all chances forever. That feels real enough.
The ratty clothesline in the backyard of my mind. Damn, Suma. Damn.
I am not in the habit of reading supernatural paranormal whatever it is that critics might be calling
The Walls Around Us. I cannot tell you where this book falls within the canon. I can only say please count me in to the rapidly growing Nova Ren Suma fan club. She tossed conventional expectations aside. She wrote for herself. She had fun. She was not locked into The Ideas Others Have About What Makes for YA Fame and Glory. And look at what she made—and how the world is responding.
We need, we want, we celebrate the new. Think less of what others think of you.
