** I started this post before the queen died, and then thought I should compose some thoughts about this moment in history, when another chapter closed, not just in the life of the Royal Family, but in the life of Great Britain and in the perpetuation of the monarchy as it has been. So many firsts for the second Queen Elizabeth, but also many lasts, I am sure. While her loss does not seem tragic, it does seem momentous and heavy. I don't have anything remarkable to add to the tributes that have already been made, other than to add my admiration for her and my prayers for her soul to those of her many mourners, ***
I just finished rereading Alice McDermott's After This. I'm supposed to be preparing for class, not writing book reviews, but her writing is so clean, so analytical, and yet it cuts so close to the heart. One minute I'm wondering how she gets her reader to care for these characters, and then I'm wondering how could we not?
When I first read this book, I remember staying up till 2 or 3 in the morning, standing in the bathroom. I couldn't put it down. This time, I started it a couple days ago and read the first couple of chapters, but today I threw it in my bag when I left to substitute teach. While the students did their times tables flash cards online and Quizzizz and shouted all through their Blookit competition, I found myself forgetting where I was - I'd occasionally have to wrench myself out of the book so that I could walk around the room and make sure no one was surfing the internet. (Side note: Can I tell you how much students do online these days? I'd say 75% of the older students' days are occupied with online work - so much for fearing that home schooled kids won't be socialized. It's the school kids who are online all day that you might worry about...)
Anyway, what McDermott does well is write about the sorrows of life, the fallen sinners, the broken hearted, the dashed dreams, the deaths, the drugs, the mistakes, the loneliness and isolation and disappointments and cruelties that life inflicts and that worse, people inflict on each other, and then she makes life seem worth living after all. The small putty hands of a child, the gratitude of a old musty virgin for friendship, the shared tears. She makes the big events and the small events - a son's death, a trip to the beach, seem equally momentous, equally graced with beauty piercing through.
Her stories are peopled with clueless nuns and ambitious priests and parishioners who light candles and say prayers while they have unwed sex or say heartless things to each other. But that same nun reveals her knowledge of her father's infidelities, the priest says a wedding on a weekday evening for a couple of teenagers, and a young couple imagining a life of sweetness starts off their marriage by sacrificing their dreams. Will their vision see them through? Will they find comfort and happiness in their marriage and children 25 years later? McDermott's novel makes it clear that no life escapes bruises and disappointments, but sticking around to see what happens next may just prove that the heartaches were what made the joys sweeter. Even poor Pauline, the spinster office friend, is given the gift of affection, from her young friend who wants her around. That then is incarnational love.
Also just finished Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty for the second time. Here again is a story of brokenness, but also of moments of joy in shared friendship. The book is redolent with grief, and while it is clear that Patchett loved her friend Lucy Grealey, the poet who won fame with The Story of a Face, but later died of a heroin overdose, perhaps accidental, Lucy seems like a difficult person to love. While I was doing a little research on Grealey's book and poetry, I came across a letter Lucy's sister had published in The Guardian that disparages Patchett's book for profiteering from grief and for oversharing about Lucy's flaws. Perhaps Patchett's fidelity to her friend finds more sympathy once readers have finished Autobiography of a Face, because that book made people fall in love with Lucy Grealey. More than once Patchett mentions that she wished she had stayed with friend rather than leave to live with boyfriends in doomed love affairs. And maybe Patchett feels that by telling the truth about Lucy's neediness, and her inability to finish writing projects, her inability to let go of the desire to be beautiful by having one more surgery. on top of her need for reassurance, her audience will know Lucy better and forgive her more, or understand her more. Was the way she threw herself into relationships a thing of beauty? Surely her friends saw her as a beautiful person.
I've been doing a lot of short story and poetry reading for my new classes. I'm really enjoying the new Norton Anthology - lots of new poets and poems arranged thematically, which is the way I like to read them. I have mixed feelings about some of the stories - I almost wish some were shorter, so I could assign more for a better understanding of literature and culture. As it is, I am only assigning 2 a week, and about 4-6 poems. It's not a lot, but not everyone is doing the reading as it is.
Don't they know the truth and beauty they are missing out on when they forget to read?
