The Lost 1941 Interview
Henri Matisse
with Pierre Courthion
translated by Chris Miller
edited by Serge Guilbaut
Getty Publications ($45)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Nearing what proved the last decade of his life Henri Matisse granted a series of interviews to Swiss art critic Pierre Courthion. At the time, as Matisse was recuperating from the latest of many surgeries, it seemed quite possibly to be the end of his life, so when approached by Courthion he embraced the opportunity to set down these breezy reflections. Matisse obviously wished his words to have an unstudied appearance yet also retain a sagely weight. He speaks freely of his life and times, focusing on his own personal artistic development with little to say regarding broader historical events of the period.

Though noted as "the lost 1941 interview," the manuscript has for years been located among Courthion's papers at the Getty Institute, readily available to Matisse scholars who have drawn upon it for their research. The manuscript’s backstory is as fascinating a tale as the interview itself. As is revealed in the introduction, critical essays, after-the-fact correspondence, and several pages of material cut from the manuscript, the critic and the artist were at odds when it came to their conception of the project and final product.

Courthion prioritizes the setting of the scene. He gives short introductions before each of the nine interviews. He interjects asides, describes Matisse's general outward disposition, and notes significant bodily adjustments made by Matisse during the conversation. He also preferred the idea of grouping the remarks according to common themes, rather than a strictly adhered transcript of what was said. Matisse, on the other hand, wished to exclude remarks which might personally offend acquaintances and sought to clarify any murky references and correct his mistaken recollections where needed. They ended up meeting each other somewhere in the middle.

Matisse's ultimate decision against publication seems mostly due to his sense of the interview simply having been dragged out longer than was necessary. The urgency with which he had at first accepted the project dissipated as his health continued to stabilize into his final years of life. Yet combined with the story of the manuscript going through multiple drafts as it travelled back and forth between Matisse and Courthion as they readied it for the ultimately stalled publication, the interview makes for a perfect art-house film melodrama. While the title of "Chatting" doesn't have the same abrupt elegance to the ear as the French "bavardages" (or the rough quality of Matisse's rejected descriptor "radotages," which would be rendered into English as "ramblings"), it does convey the casually embraced nature of these exchanges. This is Matisse on Matisse, from the hip.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

The Art and Performances of Ron Athey
Edited by Dominic Johnson
Intellect Books ($35.50)

by Spencer Dew

My first introduction to the work and life of Ron Athey—life as in saint’s life, a hagiography—was through Catherine Saalfield Gund’s documentary Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance at its debut in the 1998 Chicago Underground Film Festival. Here was a response to and from the Plague Years of an AIDS crisis that was already historical, something younger artists had read or heard about but had not personally experienced. Athey—even in two-dimensions, spread across the silver screen—changed that, forcing feelings onto the alternately enraptured and flinching audience, an audience that staggered out of the theater as, perhaps, ancients used to stagger out of the mists of the Delphic shrine: dazed and burdened with enlightenment.

In Athey’s Martyrs & Saints, the artist embodies the iconic, dragging Saint Sebastian into the modern world. As described in this new book edited by Dominic Johnson, “a mass of needles criss-cross the skin of his head, and are bound in acrylic thread to produce a brutal crown of thorns. Collaborators flog him with whips, insert arrows into the skin of his arms, legs and torsos, and bind his tortured body to a stake.” Blood flows, and while it is impossible not to associate blood, in the context of such an image, with redemption—with cleansing, as the church songs say—it is HIV-positive blood, coded by science and society as impure and infectious and polluting. The piece shares pain with us—offers us a broken body, blood—forces us, the audience, into a kind of communion. We are drenched in lament, shaken with prophetic rage, confronted with suffering and mortality in a concrete, quivering form, and shown something of society’s recently conditioned paranoia about bodies and body fluids via this channeling of an archetypal sacrifice—a body made porous, pierced, and dripping with that which is most intimate and essential.

In droplets and smears, used like ink for printing on paper, mixed with sweat and pouring down in sheets, Athey’s work gives us a babel of blood—that hyper-signifying symbol presence of which, outside the body, roils with visceral potential “meanings” in multiple registers—such as, to name recurring themes in Athey’s work, sex and religion, pain and intimacy, life and death. That could, of course, be a list of abstractions, clichéd terms for categories only half-acknowledged, experientially ignored. What Athey does is defy abstraction, using, as a tool, his own body. There’s an account in Pleading in the Blood of a performance from 2004 called Judas Cradle, named for a medieval torture device with a pyramid-shaped point, around which the rectum of the victim contracted and loosened, his own weight pushing him down and open. In the account here, someone swiped the specially prepared, polished, and waxed prop from backstage, forcing Athey to make do with “a splinter-ridden hatchet job.” What follows sounds like torture, to be sure, but in the telling—tellingly—becomes something else, transcending mere pain or witness of pain. Juliana Snapper describes the sounds in the space where the show took place:

Mewling sobs tightened around melodious wails, fuelled by long rattling pulls of snot and air. I have since thought of Ron’s impaled rectum as simply the lower portion of his glossolalic throat—a part that does not speak but rather pulls sounds up and out of witnesses to its breach.

This surely gets at something key to Athey’s art—the vulnerable presence of the body, which, via its opening (to use the organic language offered here), pulls the audience into a shared experience, into new and immediate perceptions of reality.

This collection is, remarkably, the first such set of essays devoted to Athey’s work, studded with, even more remarkably, photographs from across a career characterized by a resistance of the production of images and traces generally associated with the business of performance art. Early archival photos of Athey in the duo Premature Ejaculation, for instance, are coupled in this volume with reproductions of Catherine Opie’s large-scale studio shots of Athey and collaborators, images choreographed to capture some essence of the performances from which they come, as when Athey is cradled in the arms of Divinity Fudge, a reimagined pietà. The writers anthologized here offer contextualization as well as critical theorization, speaking as audience-members and friends, tattoo artists and collaborators. Bruce LaBruce describes Athey’s removal of objects, in performance, from his anal cavity as “like a magician pulling reams of knotted scarves out of his sleeve,” while Dominic Johnson considers Athey’s emphasis on the presence of the body in relation to that “shift in semantics of touch” that came in the wake of AIDS (“the implied horror of body fluids” that the focus on prophylactic protection implies, the widespread “anxieties around the body’s openings”), and Amelia Jones articulates an argument that “Athey’s work elicits a bodily response that is also always already an affective and aesthetic response.”

Athey, as several contributors here note, is a deeply literate artist, using and entering into and reworking and embodying texts in his performances but also, as evidenced by several fascinating pieces here, a creator of texts, many of which address his upbringing (the realm of hagiography) and the ongoing centrality (albeit, perhaps, ambiguous) of religion to his life and work. Raised by female relatives with prophetic pretensions and mental disorders—Christian spiritualists preparing for birthing the Second Coming and, after that, marrying Elvis Presley—Athey details both what he calls the “demented grandiosity” of such worldviews (and their theatricality) and his break from that world. He describes narrating his story to a friend, at fifteen, and coming, by that telling, to “a pathetic excuse for an awakening,” rushing home to beat his head against the floor, knocking free fantastic conceptions while reiterating the visceral truth that he was at least “a piece of animated meat.” Yet Athey is far more than meat, just as his performances are about far more than bodies. What he calls “spiritual feelings” remain central to his work, which, after all, follows a familiar Christian framework of bodily suffering as a path to transcendence. Enemas of glitter stars and double-headed dildos are, of course, not props mentioned in the gospels, but Athey’s passion is no less classical in pattern; the idiom shifts with context, his crown of thorns is hypodermic needles, but Athey represents one of the most compelling contemporary interpretations of the radical—scandalous, as some theologians say—notion that sovereignty can manifest as and be experienced via abjection.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

On the Needles of Days
Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker
Ashgate ($104.95)

by Paul McRandle

Photography has been unusually fruitful for Surrealist artists perhaps for an obvious reason—in denaturing sight it exposes the unconscious of vision. The image “Paris Afternoon” by writer/collagist/photographer Jindřich Štyrský provides a powerful example by the simplest of means. On first glance this black and white picture couldn’t be any clearer: a somewhat overexposed image of spider webs in a basement. But any time spent peering at the photograph, as co-author Ian Walker does in his sharp analysis, makes it only less obvious:

It seems to have been made in an interior; there are cobwebs and what looks like broken furniture. But even that is in doubt given the unformed amorphousness of the image, which takes Štyrský’s fascination with degradation and disintegration a stage further than in his more direct photographs. Perhaps it is a collage or maybe there is some solarisation. One may even suspect that part of the image’s effect is caused by damage to the negative . . .

Even when Walker reveals what Štyrský has actually done, the essential mystery remains intact. Taking a cropped image of the interior of a crypt, Štyrský rotated it ninety degrees clockwise. We know the technique, but the photograph is no less strange and now all the odder in its arbitrary twist. It is as concrete and irrational as Dalí could have wished.

Each of the photographers in this concise and pleasurable collection of essays explore sight in deep and subtle ways, taking us well beyond Lotar’s abattoirs or Boiffard’s big toe (which can seem a bit obvious in retrospect). Štyrský is among the most famous, and justly so, with his series On the Needles of These Days providing the book’s subtitle. That work presents his photographs of window displays, religious iconography, and peculiar objects to which Jindřich Heisler’s poetic text stands in “precarious” relation. In them we find the “entranced examination of the everyday” by which Petr Král characterized the approach of the Czech circle. It was and is a “daylight surrealism.”

Those who followed Štyrský offer much to explore: In a brief 182 pages the authors discuss the work of eighteen artists over a period of eight decades. Emila Medková is certainly the stand-out among those less well known here and her scratched walls, coal chutes, and cancelled signs deserve a full-scale exhibition in a major U.S. museum. Her work documents the blocked lives of Communist-era Prague by means of tightly cropped, straight-on photographs of street objects haunted by their own suggestiveness. Vilém Reichmann’s series Wounded City, which he completed after the end of World War II among the ruins of his hometown Brno, is a more immediate record of trauma and embodies André Bazin’s comment that photography is “a hallucination that is also a fact.”

The authors all have deep backgrounds in the study of Surrealism and photography and their contributions weave together in seamlessly in this short work. Unfortunately the book’s high price will prevent many from enjoying their contribution to the history of photography, but those who read it will find its pages “very rich for eyes.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

An American Family, A Ruined Maison,
and the Village that Restored Them All
Don Wallace
Sourcebooks ($14.99)

by Linda Lappin

Imagine an old house—a ruin, really—on an island across the ocean waiting for you to claim it. For many people such a proposition would be pure folly, but for others, an irresistible enticement. So it was for Don Wallace and his wife Mindy, two struggling writers from Honolulu who received a letter from a friend in the early 1980s, summoning them to a small island off the coast of Brittany where a bargain piece of real estate had just been put up for sale. Nearly thirty years would pass before their property becomes habitable, and in the process they make a family, lose a friend, and become fixtures of a foreign place, as Wallace recounts in The French House: An American Family, A Ruined Maison, and the Village that Restored Them All.

The couple had first visited the island while returning from a long stay in Paris, where, with portable typewriters in tow, they had failed to fulfill the writer’s dream of mingling fame and café life. Their novels remained unsold, but Mindy had passed her bar exam and it was time to decamp. Before flying home, they took the ferry out to Belle Île where Gwened, a former professor of Mindy’s, lent them her house for a few days. It was love at first sight for the Pacific-born couple. They respond viscerally to the island’s surfing potential and its rough magic, which Wallace celebrates in sinewy prose:

Cliffs crumble, dark masses of seaweed cover the beaches, rows of cypresses fall, ripping up the earth with their roots. Fishermen and tourists are washed away to become crab bait. Early in the morning after a storm, the island tries to convince you that its bruises mean nothing, calling your attention instead to the sun-kissed mists and drifts of spume, taller than a man, that collect in the coves and creeks. The shadow of violence in her eyes haunts you, however. Never turn your back on the sea.

Gwened leads them by the nose on an adventure spanning decades, not a moment of which they come to regret. “The village will be good for you, and you will be good for it,” she promises. The house needs them; the villagers have even taken a vote that they want the Wallaces and not anyone else to buy it. The argument convinces them and they soon sink their scanty savings into a 155-year-old hovel with treacherous floorboards, a dangerous roof, and the inside walls covered in black moss. Mindy throws up when she first sees the place—she’s pregnant—so they give instructions to a contractor and return to New York, where they start a family, slave away at their jobs, hang a map of the island by the bathroom door, and dream of their house by the sea.

Circumstances are such that they can’t visit Belle Île very often to see how the restoration work is going; meanwhile, the dollar is falling. Friends at home object: Why have a house in France if you can’t go there? Gwened and the villagers complain: You’re taking too long to fix this eyesore up! And house-hunters from Paris accuse: You are depriving French citizens of their right to a house in their homeland. But the Wallaces hang on, and board by board, penny by penny, the house is made habitable; one month out of every year, it shelters their most cherished dream.

Village life vignettes, the sensual celebration of island pleasures, eccentric neighbors, cuisine, beach life, natural history—readers will find a smattering of all that in these pages, but it’s the story below, like the unshakeable foundations of the house itself, that makes this such a satisfying read. In the end it’s a story about how places and dreams of places take possession of us, teach us about them, and live through us—until it’s time to relinquish our stewardship and pass on the keys.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

“Berman’s Bag” Columns from The Unabashed Librarian, 2000-2013
Sanford Berman
McFarland ($35)

by Kelsey Irving Beson

The many laudatory blurbs on the back cover of Not in My Library! variously describe Sanford Berman as “a modern-day Diogenes,” “an advocate for the disadvantaged,” “fire for the mind,” and “the biggest mensch in librarianship.” Berman is a noted (some might say notorious) Twin Cities librarian, muckraker, activist, and all-around loudmouth; he agitates stridently for everything from rational cataloging practices to homeless rights, and has been a thorn in the side of the various authorities with which he has been clashing for over half a century. Not in My Library! collects Berman’s columns from the magazine The Unabashed Librarian from 2000-2013. These articles include excerpts from a multitude of sources, such as correspondence, editorials, newspaper articles, zines, freethought publications, and alternative and mainstream library magazines. The breadth of Berman’s interest is apparent here—he has a librarian’s curiosity, a trait informed by decades of subject cataloging.

One of the highlights of Berman’s career has been to revolutionize Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cataloging-related issues might not seem like such a big deal to non-librarians, but a bad bibliographic record can render a book impossible to find, even with keyword searching. For example, Berman agitated for years until the heading “Vietnamese Conflict” was finally updated to “Vietnam War” (in 2006!). Understandably, headings can become outdated, but some are so ossified that they seem deliberately obfuscatory, such as “Canada. Treaties, etc. 1992 Oct. 7” to refer to what any normal person would call “NAFTA.” Despite the fact that he is now eighty, Berman comes off as really hip: he pushes for new subject headings on everything from cyberchondria to mountaintop removal (and he’s the reason that there is a Library of Congress authority record for “strap-on sex”). These articles document his effort to make bibliographic records more humane in terms of both equitability and usability. Berman’s open letters to the Library of Congress push a breath of fresh air into the world of librarianship, which is often insular and slow to change.

The Library of Congress is not the only organization with which Berman has butted heads—Not in My Library! also documents disputes with entities such as the Hennepin County Library and the American Library Association. Points of contention include Banned Books Week (which Berman insists is a farce), rights for marginalized library patrons such as the homeless, and hierarchical library management, which he likens to a “medieval fiefdom.” The thread that ties these articles together is Berman’s deep commitment to activism, which borders on workaholism. A hardline reformer who doesn’t want to hear that things are better than they were, he only cares about the gold standard of how things should be. The only negative thing one could say about this book is that it can occasionally feel monotonous—a lot of the columns cover the same territory. However, if they are repetitive, it’s because the same issues keep popping up over and over. If anyone could single-handedly solve these problems, it would be Sanford Berman, whose incredible, lifelong commitment to people-oriented librarianship shines through every page of this book. Why do libraries maintain their relevance in a digital age? Berman best sums it up himself: “Is there anything more satisfying than making it possible for people—irrespective of class or appearance or age—to learn, to laugh, to reflect, and to relax in their own public space and without being exhorted to do this or buy that?”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Interviewed by Thomas Rain Crowe

Colum McCann was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1965 and now lives in New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hunter College. His work has been published in 35 languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Tin House, Bomb as well as in international publications such as New York Times, The Times, The Irish Times, la Repubblica, Die Zeit, Paris Match, The Guardian, and The Independent. He studied journalism at the Dublin Institute of Technology and became a reporter for The Irish Press Group, where he had his own column and byline in the Evening Press by the age of twenty-one.

McCann’s novels include Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, Dancer, Zoli, Let the Great World Spin, and TransAtlantic. His short story collections include Fishing the Sloe-Black River and Everything in This Country Must. His literary awards include the 2009 National Book Award, the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and several other major honors. He is a founding member of Narrative 4, a global organization headed up by some of the world’s most renowned and influential authors, artists, and community leaders that promotes empathy through the exchange of stories.

In early April of this year, McCann and I sat down and talked late one morning at Western Carolina University, where he was one of the featured speakers for the college’s annual LitFest. Late last fall I had bought a copy of his novel TransAtlantic (Random House, $16) for my wife, because she had recently returned from a trip to Newfoundland, where portions of the book are set. I ended up reading the book before she did.

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Thomas Rain Crowe: Maybe the best place to start is at the beginning. Talk a little about Ireland and even your early years there before you came to live in the U.S.

Colum McCann: I always felt that I belonged up in Northern Ireland in a certain way. I liked going up there. My mom was born on a small farm in Derry. It always amazed me that you’d go past the border and suddenly everything changed. The roads were different, the postboxes were red. Why would the postboxes be a different color? Why? And then a young soldier would get on the bus . . . it was like stepping into a new and rather frightening world. In those days growing up in Dublin no one in my group of friends really cared much about what was going on up north, as if it were a completely foreign and different country. But for some reason it was in my blood. As a teenager I could ride on my bicycle and get up there. Belfast was only a hundred miles from Dublin and only seventy miles to the border. I used to do it in a day and come back the next night. But it was always the same place to me—all of Ireland. Thankfully, now, all those borders are gradually dissolving since the peace accords.

Also, I loved the West of Ireland. I worked for a newspaper in County Mayo when I was seventeen. That was a great experience. There are some beautiful places there along the coast—I loved walking the strand in Louisburgh. It was called a “famine beach” by the locals. Sometimes the waves would unearth bones. That eerie poetry of place.

TRC: Have you ever been to the pub The George there along the coast in County Mayo? I was there on my first trip to Ireland and had a great night of drinking Guinness and singing and reciting Robert Service poems.

CM: Oh God, yes, there are some great pubs out there. I lost my head in a few of those places! But, you know, the Irish pubs are dying now. First of all, the Irish economy has collapsed. Then, the huge taxes on the beverages. A pint sometimes costs $8 (five pounds) now over the counter at the pubs. So the whole tradition is changing and the nature of conversation is shrinking and people are not going out like they used to and are staying at home and drawing the curtains. And when people draw the curtains, they are drawing the curtains on the imagination, too. Maybe something new will take its place, but that’s all happened in the last five years.

TRC: That’s very sad. The pubs, the socializing and the music are what attracted me to Ireland in the first place and then brought me back again.

CM: When were you last there?

TRC: In the late 1990s—for the launch in Dublin for the contemporary Celtic language anthology that I edited and published with the press I run, New Native Press.

CM: A few years later, in the early 2000s—2003, 2004—Ireland became kind of decadent. Everyone was talking about their upscale apartments and their new BMWs. It seemed kind of vulgar to me. I would go home and a lot of people I knew were getting caught up in all of that. Quite frankly, Ireland was not the nicest place to be. And there was an arrogance about it, too. It seemed very adolescent—as if you were young again, and the parents were gone for the weekend, and you were having a big party. People are jumping from the stairways onto the chandeliers and all that carrying on. And then, about five o’clock in the morning, someone shouts, “the parents are coming!” And the parents happened to be German bankers. And the party was over, which is what happened to Ireland. The German and the Swiss bankers—they owned us. We had mortgaged ourselves and mortgaged our future. And our government had sold us out. It was really, really bad. The people got sold down the river.

TRC: Sounds a lot like what happened here in the U.S.

CM: It was ten times worse in Ireland. And nobody got busted. They had enough money to get away with it. I tried to write a little bit about that in TransAtlantic—when Hannah loses her house. I think that the two big Irish stories for the last twenty-five years have been the collapse of the economy and then the peace process. One good, one bad.

TRC: Maybe the English will finally give up their hold on Northern Ireland. I thought that maybe Blair would come to that conclusion and do something about it. But he didn’t.

CM: Well, you know, the Queen, she came and bowed her head in the Garden of Remembrance. And for Irish people that was a big deal. But . . . there is still a lot of work to do in Ireland. There is still a sectarianism in Nothern Ireland—still a lot of kids going to separate Catholic and Protestant schools. The peace accords are now sixteen years old. George Mitchell can look at his son, now, and know the length of the peace process by knowing the age of his boy. I think that the peace process is one of our greatest accomplishments.

TRC: I was reading somewhere recently where someone who was interviewing you asked you why you didn’t write more about Ireland. I was puzzled by that, as I had just read all of your novels and short stories and found that a lot of what you have written is about Ireland.

CM: Yes, this all depends . . . If they read Zoli or Dancer, there is no mention of Ireland in those two books. But in the other ones there’s always something. My take on this is that even when you’re writing a book that has no particular physical Ireland in it, it’s still there. Which is part of the process of expanding one’s own consciousness and maybe even the national consciousness in a certain way. We’re saying that every story belongs to us. And if we’re really going to be healthy, proper, empathetic people, we need to understand the stories of others. Yes, we need to understand ourselves, but first we need to understand the stories of others. So, you see, in books like Zoli and Dancer it’s still an Irish story even though none of it takes place in Ireland.

TRC: After reading Zoli I was wondering who that character may have been based on, as you had brought her to life for me. So much so that I was sure that you had modeled her after some specific literary character in history. Your portrayal of the diversity of cultures and the strata of lifestyles in your characters and what someone called “your attraction to ‘small people’” has fascinated me. I’m wondering what your attraction is to these so-called ‘small people’ and why you like to write about them.

CM: Yes, but there are a few characters such as Frederick Douglass and Senator Mitchell in TransAtlantic who aren’t your everyday people. But I do tend to write about characters who are more anonymous. Anonymous is a good word for these characters. I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you’re going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

I’ll tell you where it actually all came from for me. After I finished my collection of stories about Northern Ireland, Everything in This Country Must, I was casting around for a novel that would be truly an international novel. I started with this singular idea that I was going to write a novel that would have in it every country in the world, somehow. Naïve, right? But, I’m sitting one night in a pub in New York and talking with an Irish guy named Jimmy who was the same age as me, but who had grown up completely different from me. I grew up middle class, suburban. He, by contrast, had grown up totally working class—in a small flat in Dublin. And he was telling me how his dad would come home at night and beat the living daylights out of him, almost every single day. So, he tells me this story, that one night in 1974 his dad came home carrying a large television set. So, long story short, his dad sets up the TV in the house and the first image that comes on and that this fellow Jimmy sees—is the image of Rudolf Nureyev dancing. What an amazing thing! I was fascinated by this story and the origin of my novel Dancer stems from that.

I remember giving an interview about six months before that incident in the pub to Atlantic Monthly magazine, where I said that writing about real people showed a failure of the writer’s imagination. Talk about eating your own words—six months later I started writing a fictional account of the life of Rudolf Nureyev. Now that story that Jimmy told me about himself in the pub in New York would never make it into any official biography of Rudolf Nureyev. But it’s such a beautiful story—a nine-year-old working-class Dublin boy carrying the world’s greatest dancer in his arms and sort of falls in love with him. This supposedly anonymous story coupled with all the other possible anonymous stories that are similar might make up an alternative official biography. Rather than telling the biography of Rudolf Nureyev through the viewpoint of the official legislators, the official historians, the “big people” who are in charge of the Paris Ballet or the Royal Ballet, telling the story on the ground, close to the ground. That’s where the real action is. It’s a kind of poetic notion in a way. God, I often wished I could be a poet.

TRC: Be careful what you ask for! It’s not all that romantic “on the ground,” as you say. But, you know, your fiction writing is poetic in many ways. Which reminds me of another question I wanted to ask you—about a comment you made in a conversation with Michael Ondaatje some time ago where you said that you almost always start writing a story with an image, and then move toward sound and rhythm. This is a very poetic idea in terms of process. Can you expound on what you mean by this statement and this process as it applies to writing prose?

CM: Well, like any poet, I love the sound and the rhythm and the music. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas were two of my early heroes. The whole notion of the sound of the landscape and the rhythm in the poem captivated me. I certainly liked listening to the recordings of Dylan Thomas that my dad would play on the stereo. Especially at Christmas time when we’d listen to A Child’s Christmas in Wales and his poetry. And also in school we were very much taught by learning songs and poems. This was very important to me. To find the inherent music. But you must have an image first. Something in which to plant the language. Something from which the language will sprout. To develop the branches and split the sky.

I think so much of the original growth comes from music, the way the words touch each other on the page, that orchestra of language. And this is why I say that I love poetry so much. It means a lot to me. I feel like I’m down in the well of the orchestra. And all that original poetry returns to me. In fact, I have three kids now, and the only thing that I ask for for Christmas and for my birthday is that each one of them memorize and recite a poem. Which they do and seem to enjoy. By the age of fourteen, my oldest boy had memorized all of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—the whole thing. Pretty amazing, huh?

Of course the importance of poetry and the importance of someone like Seamus Heaney looms large in the Irish culture.

TRC: I remember on my first visit to Ireland, the Irish friends we were staying with in Dublin drove us by Seamus Heaney’s home and we could see the light on in the second floor window and you could see the book cases and I imagined him up there writing his poems. A very vivid memory for me.

CM: That’s a very interesting story, as a friend of mine described him as being our national lighthouse. So, I love that you had the experience of seeing that image for yourself. Seamus was quite a character and so generous. And his generosity tortured him, too, in a way. Now, perhaps, it doesn’t seem like he may have given too much of himself away. But there were times when all he wanted was a little silence, a little solitude. All he wanted to do was to pull away from the world and to get back into the poem. By the time that he was in his forties he was already established and part of the literary establishment, as it were, and with all the awards and the accolades his time wasn’t really his own, and I think all that wore on him a bit and all that he wanted to do was to hide away.

TRC: I think the same fate was visited upon Dylan Thomas. All the attention drove him to drink when he was out in public. At home, he would saunter up to the Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne after an afternoon of writing in his shed and sip on a single pint of ale for a couple of hours while he talked to the locals and wrote down notes. I think, he, too, kind of craved the simple quiet life, but was driven to success by his need to make money to support his family. And so he would go to London or the U.S. and give readings or do reading tours and would be wined and dined, which led to his ultimate demise.

CM: Yeah, seventeen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern is not a good idea for a diabetic!

TRC: I think that of all your books, my favorite characters are in This Side of Brightness. I was fascinated by Treefrog and Nathan. And by the setting—of the underground “tunnel culture” in the subways and river tunnels under New York City. How did you come by this subject? Do you enjoy creating these real/imaginary worlds using the building blocks of factual research?

CM: Yes, Treefrog and Clarence Nathan Walker. I have a fondness for that story, too. I don’t know why, perhaps because I wrote it so long ago and can no longer recognize its flaws.

On a purely logistical level, I’d been living in Japan and then back in Ireland and I’d just moved to New York and got a contract to write something for the magazine Grant Street. And I was talking to this sociologist there named Terry Williams, and he was telling me about the homeless people who were living in the subway tunnels. “A couple thousand people are living down there,” he said. I’d been in New York about four or five months at that time and hadn’t even heard of this. As it turned out hardly anyone knew about this at all. It was kind of a myth that was floating around the city, but no one knew about any of the reality of it. So, I went down to the tunnels the very next day and started hanging out. Standing outside the tunnels. Having a cigarette. I’d stand there and have a smoke and after a while people would ask me for a cigarette. When you light a person’s cigarette, you look them right in their eyes and cup their hands, and touch them, and then give them fire. There’s something Promethean, something primal about this. You make up your mind about someone in this situation very quickly. And, so, I was invited to go inside the tunnel by these people and they would show me where they lived. For the next year and a half I got to know them. And then I wrote the book and it was one of those books that sort of came out of nowhere, or at least out of a small coincidence.

TRC: I’ve noticed in this book, as well as in Songdogs, Let the Great World Spin, and TransAtlantic, you’ll dovetail multiple story lines, multiple characters, and even play with time. This would seem to be something of a stylistic pattern of yours.

CM: Yes, there are two different stories in This Side of Brightness—one taking place at the beginning of the 20th century and one taking place at the end of the 20th century. But they’re like train tracks and they eventually meet.

TRC: All your stories, long and short, visit other cultures, interesting characters and other centuries, but that one was almost like visiting another planet.

CM: Well, it was crazy down there. It was really, really crazy there. When you see people living in those situations it is like a brother from another planet. But I learned so much—just in learning how to talk to and get along with them. And the fact that I was Irish, that really helped. These guys were mostly African Americans and being Irish they identified me, rightly or wrongly, as not being part of the oppressive regime that had forced them to live underground. And so there was an ease when they would talk to me. They were very interesting people. There was a woman down there whose name was Denise. One time I went down there and I had with me one of those airplane sachets—you know, the moist towels that you clean your hands with that they give you on the planes. Turns out she loved these things. And so every time I’d go into the tunnels I’d bring her a couple of these sachet towels. These little towels made her so happy. And she’d carry these around in her pocketbook and she’d clean her hands. So, one day I decided I was going to be really nice to her and so I bought a big box of these towels. Not in sachets, but just a big box. And her immediate reaction was to cry. I was surprised and saddened by this. And what it was was that she loved the dignity of carrying around these little sachets and using them in a dignified way. And for me to bring her down a big box of towels somehow was insulting or too pointed, if you see what I mean. And it’s little interactions like that that help you to see and understand the world and how it works. The bottom line is: we have to listen to other people’s stories. That’s the thing. And that’s the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves. So, it’s a bit ironic for me to be here in this situation today, at this moment, as I like to listen and here I am blabbing away. (Laughs).

TRC: In terms of stories and listening, you’re in the right place here in the Southern Appalachian mountains, as this region is rich with its history of storytelling and the oral tradition. The Scots and the Irish who migrated and settled here generations ago have left their legacy in these hills. My mother, who is of Scottish descent, used to read, recite and sing to me at night when I was young. Mostly Scottish fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bobby Burns’s poems and nursery songs. So, like you, I grew up listening to stories and songs. Now, I still listen, but also love to read. There’s nothing better than a good story.

CM: How do you feel about the “Southern writer” tag?

TRC: Generally, I don’t like labels. The South and Southern writing, and particularly Southern fiction, have changed over the years. Previously you’d hear about writers like Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams, but now there’s a “Southern Appalachian” renaissance going on with Charles Frazier, Ron Rash, Pam Duncan, Wayne Caldwell, and others, most of them coming out of the Blue Ridge Mountains—from right here—which was not the case fifty years ago.

Getting back to your writing and the development of characters, I was reading somewhere that the character of Corrigan in Let the Great World Spin comes from the real life person of Daniel Berrigan, the legendary social-activist priest in New York City.

CM: Yes, that’s true. He is still alive and lives down in the Village now and is not well, I hear. I must get down to see him when I get back. I will do this, as I think he is one of the most extraordinary human beings I’ve ever come across. He inspired the character of Corrigan. And in fact, when I first started writing the character of Corrigan, I called him “Berrigan.” I really wanted to get the texture of the real man to penetrate the character on the page. And then I changed the name from Berrigan to Corrigan later. In truth, the character of Corrigan is an amalgam of an Italian man that I knew—my wife’s cousin, in fact, and was a monk in one of the Catholic orders—and Daniel Berrigan.

TRC: I have to tell you that I was heartbroken when he was killed off early on in Let the Great World Spin.

CM: Well, you know, that’s exactly how I felt, as well. I was writing away with this Corrigan character, and I was enjoying it and all of a sudden this strange thing happened. And it was almost like this car crash happened to me. And I’m saying to myself “you can’t do this, you can’t do this. You can’t kill off your main character in the first third of the book.” But . . . I believe that the characters in one’s writing should have a life of their own. I could have put Corrigan on a life-support system in the local hospital and had him end up okay. But in this particular case it was as if the character of Corrigan insisted that he must die. And I couldn’t understand this. Really couldn’t understand this for a long time, because this was not the way that I wanted it to happen. But the only way that really felt true and authentic and proper and right was that he would die. But it took me a long time to come to terms with this. Not like Nabakov who felt that his characters were his galley slaves.

TRC: And then there’s the “common thread,” if you will, in Let the Great World Spin—of the side story of the Frenchman who walked a tightrope wire between the World Trade Center buildings, which was an international news story when it happened.

CM: Yes, when I found the picture—that I’ve put in the book—of Philippe Petit crossing the wire between the World Trade towers and with the plane in the background, I said to myself “that’s it!” which is what inspired the writing of Let the Great World Spin. And you’re right, that event, that character is what all the characters in the book have in common—a touchstone, a common thread.

TRC: Given everything we’ve been talking about here, I’m wondering what you think about the way that publishing and all the current technology is going. Has that affected how you write and how you see the future of literature and books?

CM: Would you believe fifty years ago we’d even have thought that we’d all be walking around with our lives all in one little machine? I’m not overly concerned with all the technology that we’re having to deal with now. I think people will be looking back nostalgically on the way things are today saying, “Ah, back in my grandfather’s day in 2014 they didn’t have any chips inside their brains.” So, we’ll be nostalgic and romantic for these days, just as we now are beginning to be nostalgic and romantic for paper books, telephones and television.

While it’s true that we are experiencing a kind of technological revolution at the present moment, I think that one of the great revolutions of the future will be how we perceive the imagination. Right now we tend to perceive our imagination as being not a physical thing. We think of the imagination as being kind of airy, that kind of floats and is non-corporeal. But I think that as time goes on and as technology keeps progressing that we’ll eventually come to see our imagination as a physical thing. And in keeping with how things usually go, the powers that be will eventually try to monetize our imagination. To put a monetary value on it. By then our imaginations will be as important to us as are our hands and our fingers.

TRC: Your ideas, here, about the imagination remind me of what the great ecologian Thomas Berry said back when there was a lot of talk during the W. Bush administration of people going and living on the moon after we’d depleted the resources on planet Earth. Berry’s response was that living in such a desolate and barren place as the moon, which is devoid of diversity of atmosphere, plant and animal life, etc., would compromise our imagination, which is dependent upon a universe of diversity. He was very confident that in such an environment the imagination would dry up and wither away, which would precede the demise of the rest of the human body, which would eventually dry up and wither away, as well. His premise was that we need our imaginations in order to exist and function fully as human beings.

CM: Absolutely. And speaking of Berrys, do you know Wendell Berry? I think he, too, is one of the great souls in our midst these days. A great writer and someone who reminds us of how we should be walking on the earth, consciously, and with reverence and respect.

TRC: Good words to end on. And may our great world continue to spin and your great writing, as well.

CM: Thank you. That’s very kind.

 

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essay by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Last November, a pirated publication of three uncollected stories by J. D. Salinger, entitled Three Stories, appeared on torrent and file-sharing sites. The origins of the edition are murky—assembled and printed by someone in 1999, sold sometime later to someone else on eBay—but it appears to be the genuine thing, offering three stories that will be brand new to most readers: “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” “Birthday Boy,” and “Paula.” While Three Stories has been expunged from much of the Internet (one can only assume by Salinger's literary trust), and the PDF is now more difficult to obtain, this pirated collection offers a fascinating look into the much-discussed, little-seen fiction work that sustained Salinger financially before the runaway success of The Catcher in the Rye crashed into his life.

The real story of interest here is “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” which is vintage Salinger. It describes the last day of young Kenneth Caulfield’s life, a day in which he travels around his home in Cape Cod, touching the lives of those around him with his preternatural wisdom. Narrated by the eldest Caulfield, Vincent, the story throws us into a world that is unmistakably Salinger’s, where wise, young siblings try to save our souls as a quirky voice pulls us breathlessly through the pages. But Kenneth is the centerpiece of this story. A lover of baseball who copies lines from his favorite poems on his catcher’s mitt (famously evoked in The Catcher in the Rye), Kenneth is an almost mystically pure-hearted boy who dispenses sage advice to his older brother Vincent. Vincent is a writer, or at least trying to be one, and comes up with a rather mean-spirited story about a man whose wife only allows him to go bowling once a week. After he dies, she discovers another woman leaving flowers on his grave, and the story ends with her throwing the bowling ball through a window. Kenneth says:

But if you’re just making stuff up, why don’t you make up something that’s good. See? If you just made up something good, is what I mean. Good stuff happens. Lots of times. Boy, Vincent! You could be writing about good stuff. You could write about good stuff, I mean about good guys and all. Boy, Vincent!

Vincent notes: “He looked at me with his eyes shining—yes, shining. The boy’s eyes could shine.” One can’t help but be reminded of another sage young character of Salinger’s: Seymour Glass, the voice of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” whose mystical rhapsodizing was attacked after the story’s publication as a form of self-indulgent, literary waywardness on the part of the author. We think too of young Teddy, the other Vedanta-inspired Glass brother, whose precocious enlightenment extends even to a knowledge of his past reincarnations—paralleling Kenneth’s confident promise that he will “stick around a while” when he dies.

“The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” finds Salinger’s prose spare, lean, and engaging, allowing his larger ideas about youth and morality to shine unimpeded. A review by Jay Parini in The Guardian says the story “would not have seemed out of place next to ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ or ‘Teddy’,” and that is no exaggeration. A thoroughly enjoyable read for long-time fans and non-initiates alike, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” also provides one of the keener assessments of Holden Caulfield in print, coming from Wise Kenneth: “He’s just a little old kid and he can’t make any compromises.”

It is certainly strange to think that now—four years after Salinger’s death in 2010 and five decades since the publication of his last book—is perhaps the most exciting time to be a fan of the author. Most of his uncollected stories, printed in the literary magazines of his day, are easily found nowadays on such labor-of-love resources as Dead Caulfields. And the recent book/documentary film Salinger promises that five new books are forthcoming, further expanding the Glass and Caulfield family sagas, as well as shedding light on Salinger’s experiences with war and the Upanishads.

The other two stories in the collection—“Birthday Boy” and “Paula”—are more like drafts, underwhelming at times yet offering fascinating insights into Salinger’s writing and editing process. But should they have been made public against his wishes? The pirated collection does give readers access to these stories, locked away as they are at the Princeton University Library and Harry Ransom Center—and, in the case of “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” not legally available for publication until 2060. But here’s another perspective: these stories show a formidable writer learning his craft, exploring new narrative angles, making mistakes, failing. Perhaps Salinger did not want them out in the world because a finished piece of fiction is something like a magic trick—the more effortless it appears, and the less we know about the long work that went into creating it, the more we appreciate its effects. With these “new” stories from Salinger, as well as all the promised forthcoming material, the problem we are faced with is how to remain fans without ruining the magic.

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An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone
Scott Samuelson
University of Chicago Press ($22.50)

by Scott F. Parker

With The Deepest Human Life, Scott Samuelson adds to the steady output of philosophy books aiming to return philosophy to its core motivations: “This book is my attempt to bring philosophy down from its ethereal theorizing and put it back on the earth where it belongs, among wrestlers and chiropractors, preschool music teachers and undertakers, soldiers and moms, chefs and divorcées, Huck and Jim—you and me, in fact.” A passage such as this risks making philosophers out as having absconded with the “love of wisdom” for deviant purposes (publication, tenure, elitism, etc.), but we needn’t disparage professional philosophers to say that much of their work is not relevant to what the democratic “we” are looking for—namely, sound advice on how to live.

The primary reason there are so many books like The Deepest Human Life—just in the past few years we have James Miller’s Examined Lives and Astra Taylor’s Examined Life (not to mention, going back to 1990, Robert Nozick’s The Examined Life), as well as Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? and Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, to name only a few of the most well-known titles—is not that we’re still awaiting the knock-down argument that will win philosophy back from “them”; it’s that in each iteration of this sub-genre we as readers are presented with models for how we might philosophize for ourselves, assuming as these books rightly do that to do philosophy is part of what it means to be human. Not philosophizing, after all, is merely to philosophize badly.

The approach Samuelson takes to make his introductions is to overlay a history of philosophy with a series of questions central to the era (e.g., “What is philosophy?” “What is happiness?”) that he colors with anecdotes from the classroom (he is a Ph.D. and a professor of philosophy at a community college). About half of The Deepest Human Life is devoted to the Greeks. Samuelson, like many democratizers before him, begins with Socrates and uses a healthy share of his ink on the Hellenistic philosophers the Epicureans and the Stoics, who tended to orient their philosophies explicitly around issues of human flourishing, and who are frequently neglected in the academy.

A common next move in such a history is to jump to Descartes alone in his bedroom utilizing a method that is still available to each of us today to interrogate everything he knows. Samuelson does get there, but only after making an unexpected and pleasant deviation to consider the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, a Persian Sufi philosopher of the 11th century. The discussion of al-Ghazali occurs in the context of the question “Is knowledge of God possible?” As a mystic, al-Ghazali answers in the affirmative, pointing to a direct experience of the divine. Of all the philosophers in the book, it’s probably al-Ghazali who is the best example of what Samuelson calls “real philosophy”:

. . . an odyssey with distinct stages. It begins in a wondrous and often problematic relationship to common life. It goes through a stage of questioning that leads to a blinding skepticism. Insofar as it continues, there’s a moment of illumination, which leads to a form of critical theorizing (this is where professional philosophers often take up residence). But its final destiny is to return to common life and “know the place for the first time.”

From here it is back to our familiar Western philosophers, including Descartes and Pascal and the moral philosophy of Kant. At times, the choices seem arbitrary, as if their function is to teach readers about philosophy rather than to lead them back to their own philosophizing, which is otherwise the book’s aim. Even so, the text remains lively and is greatly bolstered by the discussions Samuelson has with his students, many of whose plainly spoken insights appear as profound as what many of the canonized philosophers have on offer. Simon Zealot, for example, who takes his name from a little-known apostle of Jesus and is a.k.a Martin Kessler, asks,

Do you find that most of life’s problems can be solved with a little creative shopping? Is television your primary form of entertainment? . . . Do you find that there’s just not enough time in the day, especially for things like exercise? Are you tired right now? Despite this constant lack of energy, do you believe that everything will work out in the end? . . . If you answered “yes” to most or all of these questions then you might be suffering from an illness called phobosophitis, or, as it’s known by its more common name, the zombie disease.

Reductivity notwithstanding, Simon demonstrates the eternal truth that to earn its name philosophy must engage contemporary obstacles to the “good life.” What to do about Internet addiction, for example, is a serious problem for today’s philosophers, just as Pascal might remind us when he writes, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room.”

The Deepest Human Life offers us the kinds of tools we have always needed to face Pascal’s implicit challenge to face ourselves, difficult though the task may be. As Samuelson writes, “We go on the journey of philosophy, the search for wisdom, despite what is comfortable, despite what is sensible, often into the depths of our loneliness—impelled by the force of a truth we don’t even know, but that somehow we know we must know."

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Alden Jones
New American Press ($14.95)

by RT Both

Alden Jones is a wanderer. In her travel memoir The Blind Masseuse (University of Wisconsin, 2013) she writes about her journeys from Costa Rica to Cambodia. In Unaccompanied Minors, her first short story collection, Jones’s characters can be found spending the night at a homeless shelter or minding children at a country club pool, hiking mountain trails or lingering on the litter-strewn streets of a down-at-heels tropical paradise. As the book’s title suggests, the characters here are mostly young, though not all are minors. Some of these stories are about women who love women; one is about a man who loves a young male prostitute. For all of these stories one thing seems true: the characters’ wants and needs are utterly peculiar to themselves. There’s something bracing—even slightly shocking—about the honesty of their desires.

As a traveling companion, Jones is full of surprises. The first sentence of the collection’s lead story boldly announces, “We’re in a homeless shelter in Asheville, NC.” It’s tempting to continue quoting, because you don’t expect a couple of broke girls who’ve been spending their nights on an Appalachian mountain with stolen camping equipment to be quite so brash about their choices. The story is short on plot but long on arresting detail, on the spasmodic, hyper rhythms of its language, and on its absolute disavowal of anything resembling victimhood.

In fact, one of the things that’s most refreshing, even heartening, about Jones’s characters is their refusal to be shut down by experience. The teen mom who gave up her baby and now takes care of a little girl the same age and the babysitter who bears witness to a family’s grief following a tragic accident play familiar female roles in unstereotypical ways. And this collection is perfectly ordered; by the time we get to the next story, “Freaks,” we are almost prepared for how disarmed we are going to be. It’s not completely clear what the narrator of “Heathens” is up to, because by the end of the story she’s willing to throw in the towel and admit she’s not going to get whatever it is she wanted. But the mere fact of her desire, and the bold and rather twisted way she pursues it, makes this story a rare glimpse into a do-gooder mission trip to a small Latin American town. The collection’s final story takes us back to the mountains, this time on one of those character-building wilderness rehabs that turns out to be a long slog through miserable terrain (as character-building so often is); one of the remarkable things about this trek is that, in the end, some character actually gets built.

Expect the unexpected from Alden Jones. Expect her characters to be up to no good, as unaccompanied minors often are. But be prepared for good to come of the rigorous honesty of her prose.

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Amy Schutzer
Arktoi Books ($16.95)

by Laura Maylene Walter

A pregnant pot-bellied pig, a life-sized Elvis cutout, and a garage sale hoedown might share space in Amy Schutzer’s novel Spheres of Disturbance, but quirkiness aside, the novel also grapples with far more solemn subjects: the inevitability of death, the renewal of life, and how characters either confront or avoid mortality.

Spheres of Disturbance is structured in short chapters that alternate points of view. While the cast of characters is large and, at times, a bit unwieldy, the heart of the novel’s action surrounds the poet Avery, her girlfriend Sammy, and Sammy’s dying mother, Helen. As Avery prepares to host a garage sale that morphs into a full-blown neighborhood hoedown, Helen, a terminal cancer patient, makes plans to end her life on her own terms. Sammy, meanwhile, is willfully oblivious of the fact that her mother is dying and does all she can to distract herself from this reality.

The novel’s other myriad plot lines trickle into new territory like so many tributaries: Helen’s estranged family members, who long ago cast her from their home, seek her out in her last days; Avery struggles to maintain her relationship with Sammy while facing tension with an ex-girlfriend; and fifteen-year-old Darla comes of age to discover she, too, might be a lesbian.

That Spheres of Disturbance is consumed with life as much as death can also be observed in the surprising form of Charlotta, Avery’s Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. As the only non-human character granted a point of view in the novel, this pig and her gentle charm nearly steal the show. Charlotta is heavily pregnant and waits for the birth of her piglets with quiet resignation as the party carries on around her:

     She drifts, her eyes soft, staring out the door’s window; dusk settles in. The red light bulb is on outside and casts a rosy blush. The snow falls through the light like powdered sugar. The scent of wood smoke swirls with the wind that enters each time the front door is opened and closed. Wind and wood smoke, snow-tinged, brisk, and merry as the river. Curly patterns, lovely smells. Her eyes close as if something—the snow, the wind—has closed them for her, and the pinky light from the bulb outside has taken up residence inside her. What sweetness to roll in crackly red maple leaves and scout the woods for odorous morsels? There is more mud and fungi and the loot of decay, and Charlotta is drooling when the two girls find her napping.

Set in late autumn, the novel skillfully mirrors death through the changing seasons: as the book progresses, the temperature drops and the first snowfall drapes the world in white. These natural details call attention to Schutzer’s luminous prose: “The maple and linden leaves continue to pour down and scurry in circles. The river carries them like streamers. Many rise, like flames, off the water, then settle down for a long drift.” And Helen’s serene moment of viewing the newly fallen snow creates a moment of both peace and surrender: “She looks outside at the snow, and all of a sudden she is in tears, joyful. This is a last bit of good fortune, to witness the grace of snow, as nature surrenders to it, to be buried beneath its beauty without resistance.”

If the novel’s momentum feels a bit stagnant at times, or the ever-rotating point-of-view characters overwhelming, it is the persistence of the novel’s inevitabilities—birth, death, community, life, love, anger, and forgiveness—that come together to create the striking and beautifully ambiguous ending that lays to rest the complexities of the characters’ struggles and pleasures.

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