Lit: almost larger than life

Posted on July 29, 2010 by doradueck

Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr, moved on to my “must read” list mainly through the high esteem in which blogging colleague Shirley Showalter over at 100 Memoirs holds both the book and its author. (Here, her review, and warm letter to Karr after they’d met.)

I reserved the book at the library, but when I arrived to pick it up, I realized I’d made a mistake in my order. It was the large print edition. I still manage just fine with regular print, so reading it this way wasn’t that comfortable, physically. I had to hold the book somewhere near my knees to get a decent distance from the big type, and sometimes after an extended period of reading, my eyes felt curiously maladjusted. I found myself rubbing them to get the familiar proportions of my environment back.

None of which is important, except that this seemed a kind of metaphor for the experience of the story as well. Lit is powerfully absorbing. Mesmerizing. The life it describes is about as large — in its intensity and visceral impact — as it gets without beginning to feel unreal. But it’s real enough; Karr is known to be scrupulous about writing fairly and accurately.

This book picks up where two earlier memoirs — The Liars’ Club (about her childhood) and Cherry (about her teen years) — leave off, with Karr’s education, marriage, becoming a drunk, getting sober, writing a bestseller, finding God. Karr has a lot to work through because of the damage her dysfunctional parents inflicted, and the damage she’s inflicting on her husband and beloved son Dev.

The plot may sound maudlin, like one of those too common grovel-to-glory accounts, but there’s something different about how Karr handles her material (and I don’t mean just her rather earthy language). I think it’s that she took the advice her friend Tobias Wolff (of This Boy’s Life) gave her:

Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity.

Such writing follows much the same path an alcoholic has to take to sobriety — facing, listing, confessing “my sinfulness in all its ugliness.” It’s a stance Karr maintains throughout. Interestingly, by taking no regard for cautionary fruit, she ends up being instructive — an example — anyway. She’s very good at describing growth, conversion, transformation, call it what you will, those small moments (that eventually add up) in which the soul opens a little, or shifts perhaps. Such as when she kneels in front of a toilet in the hospital, after checking herself in following a near suicide attempt:

If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink.

The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny…. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from… from smiting people?

I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is–strangely–the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense.

My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them.

I feel the stillness around me widen a notch.

Karr’s writing reminds me of Anne Lamott’s, another writer who seems larger than life, raw and revealing, yet not diminished for all her carelessness of personal dignity. It’s an art perhaps, such honesty, and certainly the poetic language is, but it seems a gift as well. At any rate, I recommend the book. Unless you really need large print, read it in regular, however; Lit is quite strong enough without the additional shout of those great big words.

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured”

Posted on July 19, 2010 by doradueck

I’d like to draw attention to – and recommend — “Living with the Enemy,” an essay by Susie Linfield, which applies the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to the current challenge of reconciliation in Rwanda. (It appeared in today’s Arts and Letters Daily, my Safari homepage.)

She begins,

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light…

Linfield discusses Améry’s writings, then draws on the trilogy of Jean Hatzfeld (which I reviewed here and in three subsequent posts last March), as well as the work of Primo Levi and photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to remind that “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”

There’s much that could be said about forgiveness and reconciliation that’s not the least bit glib, but of course Linfield is right. The way we inevitably go at it, in our hopes for — and advice to — others whose torments we have not shared, never mind understood, is too quick. We like happy endings, and the sooner the happier. Linfield’s essay slows our expectations. It challenges our minds about what’s really at stake in a lasting reconciliation.

Wolf Hall

Posted on July 6, 2010 by doradueck

The book I read on our recent vacation was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This book, big enough to double as a door stop, is set in 1520s and 30s, the time of England’s King Henry VIII– he of the many wives — and tells the story of the English Reformation most particularly through the life of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The book is beautifully written, and so rich in detail about characters, land and cityscapes, daily life and life at the court, and the unfolding events of Henry’s divorce of Katherine to marry Anne Boleyn, defying and then breaking with Rome to inaugurate the Church of England, you feel you’ve been taken back in time to be part of it. Mantel effectively establishes a world, a historical fictional world, and well deserves the 2009 Man Booker Prize she won for her efforts.

I was struck by two paradoxical things. One is how large — in their complexity — the changes that we can later call a Reformation are, and how slowly they happen. We study histories of the church (or other institutions) and give dates for beginnings, usually linked to some piece of paper like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses or in the case of my little denomination, the Document of Secession, but there is much more going on than that, before and after, personalities intertwined in long and interesting ways, convergences of all sorts, and misses too, which make up what we later name and date in our history books.

(I would have liked a stronger sense, in Wolf Hall, of the religious issues at stake, although they are certainly alluded to often: arguments over the sacraments, vernacular translations of Scripture, spiritual authority, and over on the Continent, religious ferment of all kinds, including those extreme Anabaptists at Muenster. The English Reformation has been described as more political than theological. But perhaps shifts in belief or religious practice are never as purely “contesting for the faith”as we’d like to imagine, but collide and congress within individuals with their varying strengths and weaknesses and needs and agendas. So when we thank God for whatever reformation we’re particularly pleased about, we’ll probably have to recognize and thank for it in forms more human than holy.)

At the same time, I was struck by how small a wheel can make a change. Mantel puts it best herself, in this passage from the book:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtains, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.