Last night, having finished the book of poems I was reading, I went to the bookshelf looking for something new. I have a lot of books, but most of them are still boxed up because my stay in the apartment was supposed to be temporary. The plan was move down here, get the lay of the land, save a little bit of money and within half a year or so, get a house somewhere along with a trusty four-legged companion. Life throws curve balls, and in consideration of the current state of the world, losing my job is a minor bump and not settling in a small inconvenience.
I’ve stayed away from novels. I simply don’t have the attention span for them, but also…. really good writing makes me pause. With a good poem, I can go back and isolate lines that really hit. Billy Collins says in his master class (something I’m thinking of taking) that he tries to write one good line and then another and then another. A lot of the poetry that I like seems to tell a story, and very few of the poems are good line after good line… they tend to employ a subtle line after subtle line approach so that the really good lines pack a wallop. When I read what I think to be good writing in a novel, I come across entire paragraphs that seem to build good line after good line. For me, the writing tends to overwhelm. I felt this way reading Veronica, I found the language to be dazzling… not overly descriptive or flowery or complicated… it’s evocative, sometimes long, and everything seems to fit.
Last night, I started, and didn’t get far in, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. I have no idea how I came in to possession of this book or how long I’ve had it. If it had been marked as a remainder and sold on the cheap, it’s something I might have bought for myself. That doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s possible that my dad or stepmom gave it to me one Christmas, but my dad usually gives me things that are stuffier than this – a history of hiking in the south or a novel that deals with racial inequality and has garnered glowing reviews in The New York Review of Books. This book isn’t without acclaim. It won the National Book Award, so it might have been on his radar. It’s possible that my ex-wife gave it to me (or left it behind), though I can’t really remember the books we exchanged or the last time we got each other books. It’s also possible that B gave it to me, though I think she would have written something in it. I’m kinda hoping B gave it to me, because as I started to read a bit more this morning, I’m seeing the prose as a pure gift. Looking at the back cover, the review quote from Dave Eggers says “There’s so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.” Sixteen pages in, and I had to stop, to come and write about it and quote a few lines from it. This book is going to take me a while. I hope I have the willpower to stick with it (I can be easily distracted). Early on, the sentiment in the way the narrator describes his brother, is almost exactly how I would describe B:
My brother was light-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. He was the type of child everyone smiled at. He could look at you and draw you out. People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearnings–he just plowed along oblivious.
He has great lines like, “Corrigan liked those places where light was drained” or great short passages like:
The only sign of our father was a wardrobe full of his old suits and trousers in our mother’s bedroom. Corrigan drew the door open. In the darkness we sat with our backs against the rough wooden panels and slipped our feet in our father’s shoes, let his sleeves touch our ears, felt the cold of his cuff buttons. Our mother found us one afternoon, dressed in his gray suits, the sleeves rolled up and the trousers held in place with elastic bands. We were marching around in his oversized brogues when she came and froze in the doorway, the room so quiet we could hear the radiator tick.
And maybe it’s my short attention span that puts me in a state of awe, but I sometimes marvel at a writer’s ability to sustain this type of detail and language over the course of 300 pages. All I know is that I already want to steal some of the ideas, sentiments, and language. This is a happy little discovery.