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.
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