Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Night Circus


For a while now I've been writing at thinking a lot about the life of the imagination and its role in the adult world. So when I found this quotation in an NPR review of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, well, I figured I better add it to my list:

But don't ask adults who grew up on Harry Potter to give up magic, says Salon reviewer Laura Miller:

"That generation has grown up to say: 'Yeah, I may want to read Jane Austen. I may want to read Jonathan Franzen. But I also want to read this intoxicating imaginative narrative as well. I don't want to have to leave that behind just because I'm a grown-up.' And really there is no reason that they should."

On a side note, when I read that phrase "adults who grew up on Harry Potter," I thought, what?

Oh, right, that's me.

Read Miller's review.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai

As a rule, I dislike epilogues. Everyone already knew that Hermione married Ron and having to watch them put their kids on the train and then shuffle off to their lives of quiet incantation was just a little bit depressing. Surely they fought dragons and Death Eaters for all the rest of their days.

Perhaps part of the problem with epilogues is that they often give a narrative self-awareness, a grounding, the avoidance of which I feel may be vital to fiction itself. And, as the heroine of The Borrower puts it, an epilogue often “[gives] me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points are fiction, that all my narratives are lies.”

But for me, the epilogue of Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel The Borrower may be the best part, which is fitting for a book as much about books and readers as this one.

Lucy Hull, the 26-year-old children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, haplessly runs away with ten-year-old Ian Drake, in a mock-heroic attempt to rescue him from his evangelical parents.

As the narrative grows, it becomes in and of itself a reading list of familiar titles, all the way from Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Oz and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, speaking to those texts, and to a shared love between writer and reader, openly and with a fair amount of glee.
Lucy and Ian form a friendship where it’s not entirely clear who the adult is, and in the end, I might argue that Lucy’s life is changed more than Ian’s. And maybe that relates to the idea that before a real story, before a true book, we are all equalized in the profound world of imagination.

In the final scenes, a clever ploy on Lucy’s part (probably the smartest thing she does in the whole book) and the epilogue leave us Ian on the precipice of discovering and creating meaning in his life on his own. She leaves for him, appropriately subversively stashed in the folds of an evangelical magazine for children, lists of titles Ian should read each year as he grows up. (“‘Books to Read When You’re 12’ started with The Giver and The Golden Compass and ended with Lord of the Flies.” Be still my heart.)

This gesture, those lists of familiar titles, evoked the community of children-now-adults who, like Lucy and like Ian, found such a real world in the lives of Jonas, Lyra, Ralph, that we find those universes still, real and alive.

This is a novel about what we might build with books, what shelter we might find from those bricks of ideas. And our heroine Lucy urges her reader in the end:

Imagine his heaven, where he can float through characters and books at will. Imagine him already there, under his covers with the flashlight. For a blissful eternity, such a world should suffice. For now, it should save him.
Let’s say that it does.

This novel is a paean to books themselves. It made me proud to be a reader, and reminded me that such a safe place “under the covers with the flashlight” is still available to me, and to all of us who seek it.

Friday, April 8, 2011

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving


After his mother’s death, Johnny Wheelwright finds his best friend Owen Meany’s entire baseball card collection on his front porch.

The boys are only ten or so. And when Johnny asks his chronically-drunk yet perpetually-wise step-father Dan what Owen was thinking, Dan has the insight to know that Owen wants Johnny to return the cards exactly as Owen gave them away.

And Johnny does. Then he reciprocates, giving Owen his favorite stuffed animal, a terrifyingly, thrillingly realistic toy armadillo.

The boys mourn their tragedy through their simple yet precious possessions. And Johnny reflects:

Owen and I couldn’t have talked about those things – at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that’s not so silly.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Johnny Wheelwright tells the story of Owen Meany, diminutive in stature and epic in persona, who from the age of eleven believes himself to be GOD’S INSTRUMENT. As they hurtle through their adolescence towards what Owen believes to be his predestined end, they encounter the armless American Indian totem Watahantowet, Johnny’s sexy older cousin Hester the Molester, an enthusiastically fornicating teacher -couple the Brinker-Smiths, the dolorous and eternally doubtful Reverend Mr. Merrill, Johnny’s formidable grandmother and matriarch of Gravesend Harriet Wheelwright, and a supplicating statue of Mary Magdalene affectionately known as “the Holy Goalie.”

Owen, in turn, unwittingly murders Johnny’s mother, plays the role of not only the Ghost of Christmas Future but also the Christ Child Himself in several amateur theater productions, and ensures that Johnny is not drafted to go to Vietnam with the aid of a granite saw and a lot of rubbing alcohol, but not all in that order.

In high school, Owen becomes The VOICE, a columnist and tastemaker in the Gravesend Academy newspaper. A legend in his own time (at least in Gravesend), Owen takes his small celebrity for granted, yet remains deeply loyal to Johnny. And Johnny watches everything, Joseph to Owen’s Jesus, but secure in the knowledge that Owen will lead him through anything they face.

Many years after the death of Johnny’s mom, he and Owen find themselves at another turning point. And Owen tells his best friend,

“I LOVE YOU,” Owen told me. “NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU – TRUST ME.”

And Johnny does.

In the end of the story, Owen and Johnny spend a day drunk out of their minds in a swimming pool in Arizona, playing what Owen calls THE REMEMBER GAME. As they tell themselves the stories of their own lives, the boys-now-men build a temple of friendship and a shelter against the separate challenges they are each about to face.

Owen, as he foresaw, dies the next day.

Johnny, you may or may not be surprised to hear, goes on to be an English teacher.

But his life, and faith, rest on his friendship with Owen and with the stories of his memory and of their friendship.

This book changed me when I read it as a teenager. But it has always stood somewhere beyond my ability to articulate just why I found it so transformative. I think I worried that, like the boys exchanging toys in their time of grief, if I tried to say what it really meant to me, it might destroy something.

But when I read it again, as an adult, in discussing this moment in the story with a friend, he told me what I had been trying to say. As children, at the same time that they express their grief without speaking of it, Owen and Johnny hit the truest aim of friendship:

“We want to be able to offer all of ourselves to someone, trust them with it, and lose nothing.”

This is a novel about a million things, all important: it is about friendship, friendship of the purest, most transformative kind. It is about faith in something – a person, a goal, a destiny.And it is about stories: the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, the forces that drive them, and the ways they let us build meaning and thereby keep faith itself whole.

We must have faith in our own stories. We devise the heroes of our own mythologies; we worship at the altar of those rare relationships where we give each other our best-loved, most secretly guarded wants and needs and get them back, not only as we gave them, but with the reassurance that they are real and valuable, as are we.

When you think of it, that’s not so silly.