The Wave of Fiction I've Been A'ridin' Pt. II

After reading Schappell's great work of fiction, I immediately began looking for a new memoir to read.  I was telling Jeff about a book I'd heard about that was written by an ex-gypsy (now a man, reflecting on gypsy boyhood, which sounded like it was full of horrors), when he kindly suggested I continue on the fiction road and read one of his favorite new-ish novels, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.  This sounded good to me for a couple of reasons: I had just seen a Facebook post by a writer who I greatly admire raving about her belated love of the book, and also it was on a bookshelf in our house already, whereas the gypsy boy book's author, title and other essential info were as enigmatic as a gypsy band itself (awful simile, I know!).

Aside! I heard Jennifer Egan speak at a literary conference shortly after her novel began receiving accolades. She seemed nice enough, but her talk was just this weird thing w/ PowerPoint, where each slide was on an automatic timer for like 1 minute or something, and she had to speak in a very orchestrated, paced way to make sure her words lined up with her slides.  It was an incredibly anxious experience for me as a listener. I only bought three books that conference, and they were all based on how I felt I connected to the writers through their talks.  I did not buy Egan's.

When I was in grad school, this book kind of caused a rift among my peers: people either loathed it or loved it and both sides felt pretty bitter about how the other side could possibly feel another way about it. So, I didn't know what to expect.  Spoiler. I'm on Team Love It.

Reading this right after reading Schappell's short story cycle was such a smooth transition.  Egan does the same sort of cyclical thing in her "novel," and I actually would feel comfortable calling it a short story cycle/novel hybrid.  A minor character in the first chapter circles around to round out the end of the novel by becoming the central character in the last chapter.  There's a lot of time-traveling, and if I'm being honest, there's this one chapter in the book that I can't quite map out on the person's lifetime, but the book really is just snapshots of lifetimes (best evidenced by Egan's symbolic use of windows throughout the novel: people seeing and reflecting on different moments of day seen from the same window) and not a linear view of any one character's life (it's like the antithesis to John Williams' Stoner). 

 

Her writing in this novel was effing mindblowing.  Jeff and I often read in bed before going to sleep, and we're usually pretty good at agreeing on when to turn out the lights.  When I was reading this book though, I made him go to sleep with the lights on to finish reading a chapter.  It ended up being my favorite chapter of all, and after I read it and turned out the light, I curled up under the covers, eyes wide open, heart pounding, and kept repeating under my breath, "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit."

The chapter I read that night is called "Out of Body," and it's almost entirely written in the 2nd person pronoun and sticks out like a sore thumb among the other 3rd person- and 1st person-narrated chapters.  It's meant to.  It reminded me of a series of chapters in this memoir called The Suicide Index entitled "numbness and..." where the narrator uses the 2nd person pronoun to express her feelings of numbness to her continued existence after someone close to her commits suicide.  It's a smart move: the reader instantly senses the narrator's sense of detachment, the literal distance they impose on the story by rejecting their own authority in it.  The thing that made me feel painfully aware of my heart's swells and recesses that night I first read it, though, is what Egan does in the very last sentence of this story.  It blew my mind.  (ETA: someone pointed out to me that all I say about the writing here is that "it blew my mind" or "it is ___ mindblowing," and I guess I should be more articulate/specific about what this writing did to me and why I responded this way.  The narrator is incredibly intelligent, clever, and sensitive.  He's a guy struggling to come to terms with his homosexual desires in ways that are troubling, scary, and all too relevant [LGBT suicides are much higher than other demographics], and in the last moments of the chapter, just when I got really close to this narrator, was fighting for him, and felt his heart as a little piece of my own heart, Egan rips that narrative from us, and it becomes this transcendent, strangely beautiful thing.  And I felt unsettled, lost, and wanting more of the narrative I'd gotten so attached to. Egan's masterful and precise shift in this chapter made me stay awake that night, reflecting on the craft of that narrative shift, of how the syntax was upended, while the rhythm of her prose remained steady, in control, and how the effect of that combo was jarring).   I can't remember the last time writing made me feel so beautifully, miserably, terribly alive.

The next day, I remained acutely in tune to the beats of my heart.  I went out with my friends after playing a volleyball game and laughed myself hoarse and told embarrassing stories and stayed up way too late and felt loved and loving and overwhelming compassion for every living thing.  The day after that, I was driving to work and almost cried while listening to Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball." I imagined it as an ode to her father ("All I wanted was to break  your walls/ All you ever did was wreh eh eck me" and "I will always want you...") After I got to work, I looked up the lyrics and realized it would be a real stretch to make that analogy work, but it didn't matter. After reading this book, I felt opened up in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time. 

My friend Laura once asked me if I had ever just cried because I was struck by how beautiful life was, and I remember scoffing at the thought.  But I can no longer scoff, because I had that moment, too.  Where I felt everything, but the one thing that resounded in me and couldn't be shaken was total joy at being alive. Even when I was on the verge of crying or imagining what a tender moment the last beat of the heart must be, I felt such joy and passion for living.

I felt the way literature is supposed to make you feel.

The Wave of Fiction I've Been A'ridin'

I go through little periods of what I choose to read for pleasure these days.  It's usually something like this: nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, nonfiction, fiction, poetry... you get the picture.  I almost always will choose a memoir or collection of personal essays over anything else. I just enjoy thinking about the craft of creative nonfiction, because it's the sort of niche I feel closest to: I enjoy writing it the most, so I also enjoy reading it the most, I suppose.

I found this book at our local Hastings though:

I instantly gravitated toward the clever title, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, and was not disappointed by Elissa Schappell's work, here.  It is a gem and completely revitalized my love of fiction.  The book is a short story cycle with characters who are on the periphery in earlier chapters appearing later and telling their own stories (there is a lot of flipping back through the pages to try and remember how you know so-and-so, which has to be symbolic of something great, although I haven't thought it through fully).  The book revolves entirely around central female characters, all of whom are complex and struggling with various issues like: a cool teenager being wrongly labeled a high school slut, a mother watching her daughter suffer w/ an eating disorder, a pair of moms in NY desperately trying not to let their identities be subsumed by motherhood, and so on. 

 

The real standout in this collection for me was about a college girl who returns home to stay with her family after getting into a possibly suicidal car accident; she is despondent, and you instantly want to get to the heart of her depression. You want to help her. Her mother is the typical worrying kind, struggling to take care of everyone in the family at once: accompanying her husband on a weekend-work thing, trying to communicate with her troubled daughter, and making daily trips to see her rapidly debilitating father in a nearby nursing home.  The meat of this story is the college girl's mom leaving town and requesting that her daughter tend to her dementia-suffering grandfather, so that he isn't alone that weekend.  Through the girl interacting with her grandfather, we learn that she is suffering from PTSD after she is raped at a party.  What struck me most about this story was thinking about who the girl could open up to.  She rejects phone calls from her friends, hardly speaks to her mother, but finds herself revealing her dark secret to her grandfather. The fact that the only person to whom she can communicate her trauma is also a person two generations removed from her and has trouble remembering who he is and how to perform everyday functions is absolutely heartbreaking; the pairing of these two individuals as central characters in a story--genius. I mean, a young girl trying to recover those sacred pieces of herself after being violated and an old man who is full of pride and who also falls in bathrooms and wavers in and out of reality represent two starkly different ways of dealing with the same thing: trying to hold yourself up and be normal when everything you know is crumbling, fleeting, and trying to make you fall.  I found it a stunning story, extraordinarily important.

 

Okay, so that's my little blurb on this book.  Up next will be Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, because that's the order I read these books in.