Month: April 2007

5 year anniversary

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Today is the five year anniversary of when we moved to DC. I can tell you exactly where I was at this time five years ago: on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A few hours from now, I was pulling into a motel outside of Hagerstown, an hour or so away from DC. But before then, I was on the Turnpike and then I was on I-70. I have driven that stretch of the Turnpike many many times over the past 15 years. To and from college, and then to and from grad school. On that night, we’d been driving all day, and it was dark, and we’d been packing the truck until late the night before and we were tired; pretty much the same story as all the other moves from the Midwest to the East Coast or back in the other direction that we’d made before then.

I refer to that night, only half jokingly, as the time the Friends theme saved my life. I was listening to the radio, because I’d gotten tired of the tapes I had in the car, and I had the windows down (no air conditioning, since I was driving the Mustang), and it was a beautiful night. Coming over the mountains where I-70 drops down from the Turnpike to Maryland is my favorite part of the drive, the way the valley just opens up and you get this beautiful panoramic view of the area. That night, there was a bright moon, and after spending the whole evening with truckers, there was no one on the road but us. At one point, I caught a turn in the road just right and I was the only one there. I couldn’t see the headlights of the truck on the road behind me, there was no one coming in the other direction, and I turned off the car’s lights, just for a few seconds, just to see what it was like to be out there, in the mountains, with just the light of the moon. It was spectacular.

It was later, about a half hour down the road, when I had been lulled into a daze, driving out of habit. I don’t know if I was really asleep at the wheel, or just in a road coma, but I remember being jolted fully awake by the unmistakable sound of the intro to the Friends theme. I wasn’t really sure where we were, or how far I’d come from the earlier moment when I had been fully alert and convinced I could drive all night. But, clearly I couldn’t drive all night, and on a mountain in the dark is no place to be falling asleep at the wheel. So we stopped, and everything was fine. Well, as fine as they could be while staying in a $35/night motel, an experience that I won’t dwell on here.

I don’t think I’ve heard the Friends theme since then, but I can call it up and see the road appearing in front of me, the shock of having been drifting off, and the relief of realizing that nothing bad had happened.

So, happy moving-to-DC anniversary to us! And, thank you, Rembrandts, for making it all possible.

5 year anniversary

The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian

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I was disappointed by The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian. I have been awed by the strength of several of his past novels — Midwives, of course, but also Trans-Sister Radio and Buffalo Soldier — but I don’t find the quality of the stories to be consistent. I’m sure that’s more a reflection of me and which types of narratives I enjoy. Nonetheless, I have this sense with Bohjalian that when he’s on, he’s a narrative genius, and when he’s not, he’s Wally Lamb.

In this book, he wasn’t on. I’m going to veer from my general path of not spoiling books for future readers and talk about the plot. All of Bohjalian’s books hinge on tragedy, and frequently violence. In each, The Truth is contested, and in early books, this uncertainty is highlighted through the use of shifting first person narrative. It’s precisely because there is no single version of key events that the violence is usually not described in lurid detail, and this makes his books more readable for me. I probably should have put The Double Bind to the side when it became clear that the tragedy involved was a violent rape, which would have been when the jacket flap informed me that the main character rode her bike into the woods, had a terrible experience, and retreated from her friends and family, using photography as her only solace. Hmm, I wonder what the terrible experience could have been? Still, despite my distaste for violence against women as the hook on which to hang novels, I expected that Bohjalian was unlikely to treat the events in a graphic or voyeuristic fashion, and that aspect is true.

Nonetheless, I again should have stopped reading when Daisy Buchanan appeared in the narrative. Here I feel obligated to say: I don’t find The Great Gatsby to be the pinnacle of American literary achievement of the 20th century. I don’t even like the book very much. At all. I find the characterizations flat, the plot preposterous, and the ‘social commentary’ not witty or cutting or poignant or anything much at all. To revert 17 years in my analysis for a moment, the whole novel strikes me as boring and stupid. So, reading a novel that hinges inextricably on The Great Gatsby, was, for lack of a more sophisticated word, annoying. It’s true that The Double Bind is not a novel about The Great Gatsby: like Bohjalian’s other works, it’s a novel about loss, grief, dissociation, and healing. It just happens to use The Great Gatsby as the major lens through which these themes are explored.

So, what can I say? The novel is beautifully executed, as are all of his novels. I just wasn’t the audience, which I was too stubborn to accept as a reason to just take the book back to the library unread.

The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian

The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett

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I picked up The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett, at the library, as I’d enjoyed Bel Canto and not previously read any of her other stuff. I was a bit disappointed, truthfully. I know it’s a debut novel, and I tried to give it the tender consideration that such a thing deserves. Nonetheless, it fell flat for me. The changing viewpoints didn’t flow as well as in her later writing, which was a shame. Granted, there aren’t many writers who achieve excellence with a shifting first person narrative (several, but not all, of Chris Bohjalian‘s works do).

The book didn’t grab me. I kept waiting for the plot to become compelling, and it didn’t. As when I read Three Junes, I found myself treating each section of the book as a short story, strung together by shared characters. Perhaps that’s how Patchett meant the novel to be read, in which case, bravo! I don’t enjoy that narrative structure much; more when the vignettes are shorter, as with The House on Mango Street or The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Still, I mention those books as examples only; I didn’t love either of them, and I much prefer a short story collection with a theme such as Interpreter of Maladies or Strange Pilgrims, both of which are excellent reads.

In a nutshell, the novel is well-written and the prose flows. However, the plot didn’t engage me and the structure is one I find off-putting. So there you have it.

The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett

Virginia Tech shootings & my friend Jay

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These past few days, I’ve been touched in many ways by what’s happened at Virginia Tech. I keep thinking about my years in college classrooms, as a student and as a professor. The image of a 76 year old man blocking entry to his classroom stays with me, and I try not to dwell on wondering what I would have done, what my students would have tried to do.

Mostly, this week, I am thinking about the kid himself. I am thinking of all of the faces in all of the classes I’ve taught, and how no matter how old or serious or bereft they are, they all seem like kids to me, even when they are younger than I am by only a few years. In thinking about him, I am feeling awful for his parents. What a terrible way to lose a child.

When I was 18, my friend Jay shot himself. He’s not the only person I know who’s killed themselves, but he was the first. He was a couple of years older, and I hadn’t seen him since he’d graduated from high school three years before. But we’d been close, that year that I was a sophomore and he was a senior. Jay had a pickup truck, with a speaker on the top of the cab. We’d pile into the bed of the truck, and drive around town startling people by belting things out through the speaker, as you could without getting stopped or arrested in 1990 in a small town in Indiana. I was one of only a couple of friends who went to Jay’s house after his high school graduation; I remember his mother being so happy to meet us, and Jay being slightly sheepish. Jay’s younger brother had a developmental disability; I’m not sure if we even knew Jay had a younger brother before that day, but it was clear that he had learned to be protective of his family’s privacy. Later that summer, when I was staying with my grandparents for three weeks, I talked to Jay on the phone every few days. Not about anything in particular: the nothing he was doing in Indiana, the nothing I was doing in Ontario.

What I didn’t know about Jay back then was that he owned guns. The word ‘suicide’ was never spoken at his closed-casket funeral. His obituary says only that he died alone in his apartment, and that he was a member of the NRA. As in Virginia, it’s not hard to buy guns in Indiana, and owning several of them does not automatically trigger concern; at least, it didn’t back then. I should say, it doesn’t trigger concern for most people. I didn’t know that Jay owned guns. I did know that he thought more about death than the rest of us, even with our posturing and our various life challenges. He was the only one of us who wanted to sit through all of Faces of Death; the rest of us talked a big talk about being hardcore and disillusioned, but it freaked us out nonetheless.

I say all this because I’ve been thinking about Jay a lot these past couple of days. Jay didn’t kill anyone else, but I see him in the kid from Virginia Tech. This isn’t about guilt or blame or what might have been. For me, it’s about holding the weight of the reality of their experiences; it’s about the deep sadness that comes with knowing that whatever it is in us that allows us to face that choice and go a different way, they didn’t have it. If they ever had it, they lost it at some point and couldn’t get it back, the ‘it’ that keeps that path on the other side of unimaginable. I do know, though, that it’s not the kind of thing that returns with a phone call from a friend, or a ride in a pickup truck on a summer day, or because you realize, finally, how very much your family loves you.

In the end, I find myself wanting to say to the Cho family: I am so very sorry for your loss. Please know that you don’t have to face this alone.

Virginia Tech shootings & my friend Jay

Caspian Tern

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Yesterday I returned to the pond for the first time in a couple of weeks. In a stroke of luck, I timed my arrival to coincide with the presence of a single Caspian Tern, a bird I’d never seen before. Although I don’t always, this time I had my binoculars and Peterson’s with me. The time it took the tern to catch something to eat—about four or five dives, with some circling in between—was just long enough for me to positively identify it. Once it had the fish, it circled to eat it and then left, flying higher until I couldn’t see which direction it was heading.

It had barely gone when I noticed something odd swimming around out in the middle of the pond. At first I thought it was a small duck, but the trusty binoculars revealed it to be the head of a mammal. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t an otter—the head was too large and square for what I remembered of otters from my many early-childhood visits to Shedd. It seemed unlikely that it was a beaver, and peering at photos once I got home led to the conclusion that it was a muskrat. I don’t know if it’ll stick around; I hadn’t seen it before this weekend.

In addition to those two unusual sightings, I saw several regular favorites: red-winged blackbirds (both male and female), ducks, song sparrows, and a downy woodpecker. I also saw the pair of Canada geese that I saw on my most recent prior visit, and it looks like they’re nesting (one was in the same spot on the island as last time; the other was keeping a pretty close eye on the muskrat). I look forward to seeing the goslings later in the year.

Ever since the years when Trumpet of the Swan was one of my favorite books, I’ve hoped to be able to see birds actually hatching. I’ve never wanted to get too close to their nests, though. Maybe this year—with the nest visible, but not accessible—the timing will be right and I’ll get lucky.

Caspian Tern