from Book Reviews

Familiar Spirits is Alison Lurie's 2001 memoir of two men with whom she was friends for nearly 40 years– celebrated poet James Merrill, and his partner David Jackson. According to Lurie, the young Jackson was as talented as the unpublished Merrill. As the years wear on, however, Merrill attains fame and the highest of literary honors while Jackson's novels are regularly rejected by publishers. Frustrated, Jackson retreats, ceasing his literary aspirations beyond the Ouija-board collaborations which result in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. As he slowly and then suddenly becomes a shell of his former self, Jackson seeks solace in impersonal sex and substances of abuse, earning Merrill's complaint: "...He doesn't realize, he doesn't think– he doesn't use his mind anymore. And you know, if you don't, it's like any muscle, it atrophies." Merrill, for his part, later falls in love with Peter Hooten, rendered by Lurie as a shallow clone of Merrill's younger self, selfishly intent on keeping Merrill from Jackson and the friends they share.

I was struck by much in this account– the utter destruction sown amongst a once-loving couple, the decades-long sacrifice of Merrill's creative energies to the Ouija board, Lurie's acute descriptions of the fabrics and colors of clothing worn by her subjects– and especially by the candor whereby Lurie paints a portrait that is both love letter and character assassination. Her tale is tender like a bruise, displays great affection and yawning disappointment, is as complicated as only old friends can be. One has the clear sense that the heartbreak of "Jimmy and David" was not only their own, but was felt by many. In the end, Lurie questions whether Merrill's estimable body of work is worth the price he and those close to him paid in life. This is the harshest of critiques, plausible and relevant only because of the obvious quality of Lurie's friendship, and the more damning therefore.

There's an excellent discussion of Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping (1980), going on right now at Reading Room, the New York Times blog which hosts two-week-long online panel discussions led by editors of its Book Review. Participants include Allen Gurganus, who, together with Robinson, will join us in January as we examine HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. I read Housekeeping for the first time last week. What follows is how I found it.

Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters growing up in the isolated western town of Fingerbone. Madness runs in their family, and men are mostly absent but for the memories adumbrated by fading photographs, dried flowers, and unread letters. Their mother's suicide has delivered young Ruth and Lucille to the care of her sister Sylvie, a drifter, whose "housekeeping" is a hodgepodge of inabilities to come to terms with domesticity. When the girls are still quite young, Sylvie's child-like capacity for make-believe makes her an excellent playmate; they become close friends and confidantes. As the girls grow older, however, they become more aware of Sylvie's aloofness from ordinary human society. They battle over an allegiance to Sylvie, on the one hand, and the pressures of societal norms, on the other. It's the story of sisters torn apart by adolescence, overwhelmed by the complexities of an adult world, handicapped by a family history riddled with unexplained absences. Here's Ruth, our narrator:

When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception.

This is a mysterious book, a fiction which feels as if it could be fact, a tale of a human family rendered exotic by tethers to an other-world. "All this is fact," Ruth tells us. "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary it is fact that requires explanation." Robinson was a poet before writing this novel, and it shows in lucid, elusive prose wedded to a story of life as apparition. It is a gem, and gem-like, reading like the spare and opulent product of considered elisions, yielding luminous glimpses.

Go to the Reading Room for the New York Times discussion of Housekeeping.
Buy the book.

Having been sufficiently wowed by Junot Díaz' appearances at the second session of this year's Seminar, I plunged in to his new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I am well-rewarded. Its fecund language is so shot through with Spanish-language slangs and arcane sci-fi references, that the experience of reading it resembles nothing so much as living in the strange real world, catching but what can be caught, and letting go what can't. One could pause to translate each phrase and unearth each reference, but that's hardly the point (as Díaz himself suggests in this podcast). Wao is a work about omission, and its power rests on the gaps in understanding central to the fukú which is the book's subject. Díaz' language takes as its primary target the person and reputation of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the notorious dictator of the Dominican Republic. It's not just the nicknames of "Fuckface" and "Failed Cattle Thief" which Díaz makes synonymous with Trujillo from the very beginning, but also the ways in which his actual name is tweaked that give the reader to understand that, no matter the horrors he perpetrated, Trujillo and the nation he bent to his singular will are no more. Referring to him as "T to the R to the U to the J to the illo" is not only a funny nod toward hip-hopper and cheerleader basics, toward the sort of free society that Trujillo feared, it also signifies that language is a realm eventually untouchable by even the most effective dictator. And that, even if "T—illo" succeeds in eradicating a character so completely as to leave behind not a single example of his handwriting, we know that he has by now failed in his fundamental quest to control the population and his own reputation. It's too late, alas, for too many of this novel's characters, and their omissions, in the end, are their heartbreaks: "Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, ... and I'd finally try to say the words that could have saved us." But those words aren't there; the text reads "——— ——— ———." Grasping, hoping, failing, our narrator is unable to find the words marking the path of escape from fukú, but Díaz, footnoting beyond him, and Oscar Wao too, in the otherworld he inhabits, have indeed transcended.