Arcadia by Lauren Groff

The first half of Lauren Groff's novel Arcadia places itself, and its protagonist, Bit Stone, firmly in the traditions of the American novel, as Bit, like Huckleberry Finn and Jim Burden and so many other American children before him, lives under the vastness of the sky, in the arms of the natural world, and with the promise of  a better life of real equality ever just before his grasp:

For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit's human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that's in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together.

The second half of the novel loses Bit to modern life, and as he wanders his way back towards this connection to the land and to his childhood, loses itself a bit, too. Like Bit himself, apart from Arcadia itself, Groff's novel becomes just a bit ordinary:

On the days that he swings through the city on his walks, he can almost grasp what they lost...It was the story they had told themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships onto the oyster-strewn island and traded land for guilders: that this place filled with water and wildlife was special, rare, equitable...That this equality of purpose would keep them safe.

Arcadia is a commune in the forest and fields of New York in the 1970's. It is peopled with mythic hippies, included Bit's compelling and fully-realized parents, Hannah and Abe. Born three month premature, tiny Bit grows up in the womb of this not-untroubled, yet gorgeously idyllic world where through his wide and transcendental eyes Groff's reader is brought fully into Arcadia's spell. These years of Bit's life are a reading experience I will not soon forget.

But as utopias must, Arcadia falls, and Bit is sent out into the real world. In the same way that Bit never finds himself quite at home in New York City's streets, the novel itself never regains its purity and focus, wandering as Bit does through modern life without much sense of larger purpose.

Groff's prose gets distracted by a 2018 flu epidemic that has the world on quarantine and that pushes Bit back into the arms of Arcadia. But in a fiction landscape where it seems almost every protagonist finds himself with a similar crisis on his hands, I find myself wishing that Groff, like Arcadia's inhabitants themselves, had kept things more simple.

I wholeheartedly recommend that you read Arcadia. Its spell is powerful. But it will be broken sooner than you wish.

Which I guess might be exactly the point.

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller

Upon hearing a synopsis of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, you might think it has much more in common with The Road by Cormac McCarthy than it actually does: lone man, accompanied only by trusted companion (dog/young son, respectively) navigates terrifying world decimated (is there a word for 1/100? centimated?) by global plague, searching for humanity in a kill-or-be-killed landscape of violence and fear.

But I assure you that The Road is so much unlike The Dog Stars that you should not allow your feelings about that text to impact whether or not you pick up this one. Which is to say: read this if you liked The Road. But especially read it if you didn't.

First of all, can I just say, Peter Heller is a badass. His blog touts him as the "award-winning adventure writer," and, I mean, this guy rode with Whale Wars. And wrote a book about it. He's the real deal.

But it is precisely Heller's hard-won credentials that make the tenderness of his narrator so startling and so authentic.

Our noble and humble hero Hig, accompanied by his noble and humble man's-best-friend Jasper, live in Colorado after a flu wipes out basically the entire human race. Hig's only form of back-up is a solid one: Bruce Bangley, ex-military with an extremely impressive arsenal. Hig flies a 1956 Cessna 182, "really a beaut" he boasts on page 4, scouting the beautiful and empty landscape for signs of humanity. Not just humans. Humanity.

Hig also likes to fish, and he and Bangley get into a bunch of fire-fights, which I pretty much skimmed (like all fight scenes I read, generally) but if you're a boy, you'll probably like them. And during the fight things he says stuff like this:

Heart thumping, but it was the almost happy anxious thump I remembered from playing soccer in high school. I was a goalie, the last stop, the last resort...Once it started it was all action, no thought, and the joy pushed up through the fear.

I've never played goalie, but I know that happy anxious thump. We all do.

And I'm no expert, but I don't really think it's the fight scenes that make this book. Though, if you love fight scenes, please weigh in. Instead, it's the beautifully clipped emotion of Heller's voice. A lot of reviews compare him to Hemingway, but as I see it, Jake Barnes is way more repressed, thwarted, and, you know, impotent, than this guy.

Heller's narrative exemplifies the kind of male voice I want my students to read. It's authentic, honest, emotional, moving, and not ashamed to be attached to things, people, dogs, feelings. Hig needs connection in his life, and he seeks it without compromising even the tiniest fragment of his manhood.

And, amazingly, he finds what's he's looking for, which is more than a little bit unbelievable. But I accepted it, because I liked him so darn much, that I thought, gosh-darn-it, he deserves the sexy beautiful soulmate he happens to find on his quest. (And it really isn't exactly that simple.)

I am interested in our persistent infatuation with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and I feel that because of the ubiquity of the genre, a review of this type of book may get lost in the shuffle.

But I recommend this story not because it feels like one of those stories, but exactly because it doesn't. Hig's connections, with Jasper, with the land, are real, and so is his desire to preserve, and not only preserve, but actively seek those links even when things seem hopeless.

A worthy goal.

Next Reads

I've been a terrible reader, lately. The truth is, I more often am (a terrible reader) than not. But it's spring break, and here are two books at the top of my list.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

I'll admit. I didn't love Swamplandia! And I rarely pick up short story collections, so I wrote this one off pretty quickly. But the always-wise Maureen Corrigan loved it. When she described "Proving Up" as "Willa Cather crossed with Emily Dickinson in her Gothic mood" and argued that it "is a stark tale about the American Frontier and the payment — in sanity and mortality — that the land demanded from the settlers," I was completely won over. Book Riot also loved it, giving "Proving Up" the admittedly unattainable A-triple-plus.



The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Erdrich is one of my absolute favorite authors. If you haven't discovered her, start with Tracks, and then pick up The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. (With a title like that, how can you go wrong?) I had The Round House in the back of my mind, but Love Medicine didn't totally win me over, so I wasn't convinced.

But then, when Dead White Guys called it "an unexpected whodunit page turner!" I decided it was definitely time to revisit Erdrich. After an admittedly slow reading season, it sounds like exactly the thing to help me start back up.

Stuff I'm Reading...on the Internet

My friend and fellow Bread Loafer Rebecca Makkai tells us all why it's okay watch TV in Poughshares. (Assuming we are all kick-ass published writers, of course.)

My favorite yoga teacher Camille Moses-Allen blogs about yoga and poetry (Yes!) at CamieKarma with The Awesome Road.

My favorite fellow book-blogger (and first blogger friend!) Andi pans Gone Girl and I remove it from my pile. Don't wait for a review from me -- just check out Estella's Revenge.

My two favorite book blogs these days are Dead White Guys & Baby Got Books.  Friday Links at Baby Got Books is pretty much always amazing. Thanks to them, I learned that there's a new edition of Anne of Green Gables with this cover:

(I KNOW. I just hope my friend Kristen C. never reads this blog post because this picture will kill her.)









Meanwhile, I read My Antonia. Can anybody (besides Sparknotes) tell me what the deal is with Peter and Pavel?

Finally, I did this to my Gmail In-box and I feel great.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt

There is nothing like a book that can be so sad, and yet make you believe again in how fundamentally good and beautiful everything really is.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a book like that.

So affirming, so sad, youthful and yet wise. It's all the best things about being a teenager and experiencing the intensity of real love and real loss.

Or being anyone and experiencing the intensity of real love and real loss.

It's not a perfect novel -- but it was that novel that was perfectly what I needed to read right now. Tell the Wolves I'm Home was like getting a letter from a really good friend who wrote to tell you how much you matter.

June Elbus loses her beloved uncle Finn to AIDS in 1986, when the particular cruelties of that diseases were just beginning to stoke fear and ravage lives without mercy.

June is awkward. Incredibly so. She's that kid who dresses like she believes she lives in the Middle Ages. And who, in fact, does like to pretend that she lives in the Middle Ages.

Only her beloved Uncle Finn (the remarkably financially successful artist) sees her. Only he knows her heart. And when she confesses to him one afternoon that she goes to the woods after school to pretend she's in another world:

He laughed and bumped his should against mine...We both knew we were the biggest nerds in the whole world.

When she loses him, she fears total invisibility:

Now that Finn's gone, nobody knows that I go to the woods after school. Sometimes I think nobody even remembers those woods exist at all.

But a few weeks after his death, a visit from a suspiciously unofficial postman starts June on her journey towards discovering that we are all invisible, and that we all need someone to see us. June herself, her seemingly-perfect older sister Greta, her complicated mother, and Finn's partner and love-of-his-life, Toby.

Almost implausibly self-aware June is, at times, also implausibly blind to her sister Greta's jealousy, heartache, and cries for help, but it is her relationship with Toby, a connection so outside the boundaries of what any normal person might expect out of a friendship, that is the driving emotional force of this novel. In losing Finn, they find each other, and together they create that sacred liminal space that all storybook friends know.

In one moment, after spending a magical day with Toby, June sits beside him and muses:

I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

Faithful readers of this blog will know that this is one of my most cherished beliefs.

It is difficult, at times nearly impossible, to find those worlds, particularly in moments of grief or loss. But a novel like Tell the Wolves I'm Home can be a very strong start.

Towards the end of the story, Toby tells June about his relationship with Finn. And he asks her:

"He saved me, you know?"

Toby means literally. But he also means in the ways that we are always saving each other -- by seeing one another for our best selves and helping one another to find worlds on top of and within worlds. And so, Dear Reader, does June save Toby; Toby saves June, and they saved me a little bit. Right when I needed it.

If you're not much of a YA fan, this might not be the novel for you. But if, like me, you still believe the best moments are those when you can pretend to be part of some secret, separate world, well, this novel will make your nerd-heart feel it is home.

I am the Only Chance I Have

My mother always sings,

Let there be peace on Earth
And let it begin with me.

One of the great pleasures of teaching English is that I get to spend my days talking about meaning. The question in books and literature is always why? And I tell my students that through asking these questions, through articulating this meaning, we might make, do, or become something good. We might understand ourselves better, we might connect to others better, we might change.

But sometimes I wonder if this is real. Does the study of literature make me a better person? Do I live the reality that literature can change us?

The older I get, the more I am convinced that we always have choices. No matter how inexorable the forces in our lives may seem, we always have a choice. Just like David Foster Wallace says.

As a student at my school said in her senior speech earlier this fall, "You can always change."

Literature can only change us if we deliberately change ourselves. But it's the best way I know to remember how and why I want to change.

Consider the following words from W.S. Merwin:

How It Happens

The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

the sky said ...
I am giving you a chance...

I am the only chance I have

The idea here that we might have a conversation with some force larger than ourselves, that we might realize that even in the face of that force's nameless power, we have an inherent chance to make something out of nothing, to chose, to change, to be.

I seek to choose to let the literature I teach be real to me. To change me.

As we face, as a Nation, once again, the darker forces of evil, let us remember the words of Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

We are here as on a darkling plain, so let us be true to one another, and let us chose to become the only chance we have for Peace.

Ah, love, let us be true to one another!

In Chambers this morning we heard these lines, and they seemed fitting for this grey morning, and I thought that you might want to hear them too.

DOVER BEACH

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight, 
The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light 
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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