Category Archives: Believing

Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead

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Part of my decision to get rid of most of my cable service grew out of my resolution these past few months to turn the TV off in the evening. I spend my working days plugged into two different computer screens, where I’m working, emailing, IMing and generally being bombarded by electronic communications. It’s insane.

Last summer was the beginning of my escape from the TV — I spent most evenings outside, in the backyard, with a fire in the firepit reading a book by the light of the Coleman lantern hanging from the apple tree. It was bliss. Now it’s winter, and the wind is blowing 40 miles an hour and I’m hunkered inside, but still trying to wean myself off the screens and remind myself that not only was I once a novelist, but that I love reading novels. I wanted to write because I love to read, love that feeling when you’re deep inside a book, inside another consciousness, inside another life. And so, a resolution for the new year, a book a week, and a review a week.

What I find alarming is how difficult it is to sit down to a book after spending my days all plugged in to the pulsing electronic world of the internet. It takes me a long time now to get  to the place where I can calm the jittery, jangly feeling of being “connected” all day on multiple electronic devices and begin to enter once again the quiet interior world of a book. It takes a long time for the interior voices to come forth. To allow one’s imagination to fire up again. (And if I feel this way, the girl who went through six different elementary schools with my nose always in a book, the girl who read The Second Sex on the New York subway one winter when I wanted something hard so I’d have to concentrate and wouldn’t have to fully experience the subway, well, then I hate to say it but no wonder the publishing industry is going under.)

At any rate, it’s been a joy to get back to reading again, especially since Marilynne Robinson has given us two new books in the last couple of years. It’s been 28 years since Robinson published her now-classic Housekeeping Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead and for most of that time it seemed that perhaps she was going to be one of those novelists who write one great book, and that’s it. Which was fine. If I had even one book as amazing as Housekeeping Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead in me I’d be more than happy. But then, suddenly, in the last two years, we have two new novels from her. Gilead Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead and Home Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead are bookends to one another — portraits of two elderly pastors in small-town Iowa, portraits of the spiritual challenges that parenthood brings to each of them. I’m sort of fascinated by the history of Protestant thought in American history right now — I think it’s the way Obama’s speeches are so full of allusions to Lincoln and Winthrop and King. I’m also a sucker for novels about how difficult it is to be a good person, and these fall squarely into that category.

These two books are deeply entwined with one another, just as the Ames and Boughton families have been entwined. While Gilead Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead is John Ames’s story, and Home Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead is the story of his oldest friend and fellow minister Robert Boughton, the two books magnify one another when read sequentially. Because it had been a while, I reread Gilead Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead before picking up Home Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead, and after reading Home Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead I wanted nothing more than to pick up Gilead Books of the Week: Home, and Gilead again and read it in light of the events of the second book. They are entwined the way memory is entwined, and they are mysterious to one another the way we are all mysterious to one another. The precipitating event of both books is the return of Boughton’s long-lost prodigal son, Jack. Jack, the boy who never seemed to fit in to his own family, the one they all adored, and who disappointed them again and again, fleeing for good after getting an illiterate farm girl pregnant, a girl and her baby who despite the ministrations of the remaining Boughtons come to a bad end and left them stained with an enduring shame. But then, after twenty years, Jack returns home, shaky and alcoholic and thin and wary and desperate in only the way that someone hoping to save his own life can be, and thus begins a story of one father’s enduring and tender love for the son he cannot seem to help. Both Boughton and Ames are Protestants of the Puritan strain — Boughton a Presbyterian and Ames a Congregationalist. I’m enough of a Catholic that all Protestants seem strange to me, and one of the enduring wonders of these two novels is the way they dramatize the lived experience of a Calvinist worldview. Jack’s struggle is, in many ways, with the doctrine of predestination itself — what if he is cast out, what if that is indeed, the source of his lifelong discomfort and self-consciousness? His father loves Jack with a deep and tender love: “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much,” he admits.  “I never got anywhere with it, but I tried.” And yet, Jack cannot seem to make a go of it: “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” he asks.

It is the glory of these two books that this question, that these big questions — how do we love one another, how does one live a life, how does one live a good life, what constitutes a good life? These questions take on the sort of desperate, if quiet, narrative tension that illuminates all great works — the stakes are high here, as high as they can be — will an elderly father’s heart at last be broken? will a life-long friendship survive? will a faithful sister’s love be forsaken? will a soul be irretreivably lost? In Marilynne Robinson’s hands, these novels shine with a quiet beauty, and will, despite the quietude of their setting, have you on the edge of your chair wondering, as one does with all the greatest books, what will become of these people?

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Around the World with Chris and Debi

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My lovely friends Chris and Debi Lorenc have gone off on an adventure worth reading about. Chris and I met in a workshop during the very first year of the Art of the Wild workshop at Squaw Valley. I was workshopping the very first chapter of Place Last Seen, and Chris was working on a luminous manuscript about the Santa Cruz mountains as an ancient spiritual site. He’s a beautiful writer, and he and his wife Debi are spiritual people in the deepest, sweetest sense — true seekers. I love them dearly and their dispatches make me kvell on a regular basis.
They posted a new entry this morning in their fabulous blog, Red Egg Gallery. They’re in the middle of reinventing their lives, on a pilgrimmage to find artists who practice with real heart and soul. It’s a beautiful story… one I think you all will like.

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Day of the Dead

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Day of the Dead Last week at work was just insane — hence the dearth of blogging — and I spent most of the weekend in recovery-mode. I was so knackered that I totally bailed on Halloween — went to bed at 8:30 that night.

But I did manage to pull together a Day of the Dead altar this year. I was in Chicago for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, and it’s been one of those years. My friend Jim lost his beloved Mari (and Isabella lost her mother), David Foster Wallace’s suicide hit me hard, there were two deaths on my dog walking route — Karen, who killed herself and Harold, who died of old age. And so, it felt like a year that needed an altar. I bought a lot of bright flowers (although I couldn’t find marigolds which are traditional) and set out some candles and pictures and lit some incense as an offering. Then Saturday night I just sort of hunkered down with my Beloved Dead, and watched Truly Madly Deeply Day of the Dead — my favorite  movie about grief (which come to think of it. Anthony Mingella is one of the people we lost this year). It’s such a wonderful movie — Alan Rickman is sexy and annoying, Juliet Stevenson is wonderful — and it’s so dead-on about the bittersweet joy that is moving out into the world again after a big loss.

It was actually quite a lovely evening. I was still exhausted — I think I might have made it up until 10 that night, and I slept in to the extent that the dogs were confused, but it was a good, sweet restorative weekend.

And now, if we can all just make it through the next 48 hours — please please please go vote for Obama. Call everyone you know and tell them to vote for Obama. Do what you can tomorrow — drive people to the polls, make GOTV calls, bake cookies for people waiting in line so they’ll stay there. We can do this. I know that as a nation we can do this. (It’s even looking like there’s a chance he could win Montana, which would be SO exciting.)

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September Mourning

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It’s been a weird week — starting with the outpouring of false sentiment over the 9/11 anniversary. I’ve come to dread it, that upwelling of sentiment, the appropriation of tragedy by those only tangenitally affected, the politicians and blowhards pontificating about how we are all changed forever. I’m not talking about the real grief of those who lost loved ones, I’m talking about the obscene way that the day has been spun and abused and turned into a sentimental touchstone. I hate it. Luckily I don’t watch much television, so I missed most of the worst of it.

September 13 was my brother Patrick’s birthday, and he was killed on the 27th,  so September is always a tricky month around here. But so far, it’s been okay this year. I have a dear friend who just lost his love after a valiant fight with pancreatic cancer and watching him go through this makes it clear to me how far I’ve come. I’m out of that tunnel, the one where all you can hear is the thrum of your own pain and disbelief, like a loud heartbeat whooshing in your ears. One of my oldest friends lost her two older sisters and her father in a plane wreck when she was thirteen — it took her decades to come to terms with it and I remember last summer, she said she was on a pack trip with a bunch of girlfriends and realized it was her sister’s birthday. She told me how nice it was to remember the day without being torn apart by it, and that’s how I felt this year. I miss him every day, but it is an enormous relief to have arrived at the 13th this year and find that it was okay. It was a day. I missed my brother as always, but it wasn’t the icicle to the heart that it’s been in years past.

And then David Foster Wallace killed himself. I’ve found myself the past few days surfing Google reader, looking for anything I could find about this. I feel a little weird writing about it because I didn’t study with him, I didn’t know him personally, and I didn’t love his work the way many did. In a way, being as sad as I have been about this the last few days feels like the false sentiment that so upsets me each year about the blort of 9/11 commemoration. Throughout those years in graduate school when I was writing my novel, my relationship with David Foster Wallace’s work was one of false opposition. I found myself in a writing program that was obsessed with literary fashion, one where everyone was chasing David Foster Wallace’s tail. Although I didn’t want to write like David Foster Wallace, I admired the way he seemed to be doggedly creating his own aesthetic, writing as if digging a tunnel through language and grammar itself toward that chimera of postmodernism, the Truth — truth he sought even as, it seemed, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it existed. For all the surface pyrotechnics of his work, there was always a big tender heart there, it was postmodernism with soul.

And yet, it ends with a rope around the neck, his wife coming home to that terrible sight, the outpouring of tributes to his artistic genius and personal sweetness. It ends with a lot of bewilderment, and his brokenhearted father telling the New York times that the meds had stopped working, he’d been in and out of the hospital for the last year or so, they’d tried ECT and it hadn’t worked. I lived with a lot of depressives in my life, including my beloved Patrick, and it’s a terrible disease. It turns the minute-by-minute experience of living into an ongoing, relentless crisis. I think of all the things I’ve learned in these last few days about David Foster Wallace that’s the one that really breaks my heart. That he lived for as long as he did in that kind of pain. That he created the astonishingly inventive books that he did. Like Virginia Woolf, the point is not that they were both mentally ill, but that despite their struggles with mental illness they managed to create books that changed the landscape in which the rest of us write.

While I’ve managed to get through this month of anniversaries in reasonably good shape, I think the reason I’ve been so obsessed with David Foster Wallace’s death, aside from the general sorrow when someone dies who has changed the landscape of the medium in which you’re trying to work, is that the most difficult thing for me to get through about Patrick’s death was the role depression played. Patrick had been fighting a fierce battle in the months before he died, a battle that was waged minute by minute. I’d been doing what I could, but as anyone who has lived with someone who is stuck in that hole will tell you, there is very little you can do.  Whether Patrick’s death was an accident or an act of impulse, it was depression that led to him driving his truck off that embankment that night. Sweet, big-hearted, talented people can be hollowed out — I suppose that’s why I’ve been so obsessed with Wallace’s death. It’s not just that death itself is incomprehensible on a personal level — that the people we love can just disappear — but then there’s this other thing — this dark cloud that can steal the people we love away from us right before our eyes. That nothing we do can help. That we can’t help someone we love who is in terrible pain.

Add to that the general terror of the times — we’re at war, our financial markets are collapsing, and our artists are losing their will to live — it all feels very ominous. And so I do what I always do when I get the existential wobbles. I go outside and work in the garden. I pick tomatoes. I make sauce and boil jars and put up pints of tomato sauce for winter. I make something (even if it’s not a new novel). All we can do, as the Dalai Lama tells us, is to make positive effort for the good. Sometimes that feels like a very small effort, but if it can push back the darkness, then I suppose that’s the best we can hope for.

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Whole Foods, Whole Lives …

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I’ve been thinking for days about Michael Ruhlman’s tribute to his dad — it’s just a tiny note in a really beautiful piece, but Ruhlman points out that his father died in his house, among family, and with his ex-wife by his side. We should all be so lucky, or perhaps, we should all aspire to lead the kinds of lives and build the kinds of relationships where our family and loved ones will want to be there with us for that last mile. Another dear friend just buried his beloved, last week, an incandescent woman who went far too soon, who fought to stay with her daughter with a ferocity that left us all awestruck, and who died at home, with her beautiful daughter and my friend and her sisters and brothers and her mother at her side. It is unbearably sad, but there is something real and comforting in the fact that she died like a real person, surrounded by love, and not in some sterile hospital bed hooked up to things that beeped and shrieked, that she died surrounded by people who were heartbroken, but who helped her make that crossing.

And while it might sound glib at first, I can’t help wondering whether when we all write and talk about food in the way that many of us have been these past few years, what we’re really writing about is our relationships with one another and our deep desire to connect with what is real, and elemental and whole in the world. Our primary relationship with the physical world is through what we eat and what we feed one another — do we want that to be products so mediated that they are unrecognizable, or do we want to eat and feed our loved ones food that is whole, food that comes from known sources, food that was grown and harvested by people with whom we have a relationship, even if it’s as slight as a smile across a Farmer’s Market table once a week?

For much of the late 20th century, the impulse was to outsource all unpleasantness — we removed butchers from supermarkets and hence, removed any evidence that meat came from actual animals. We removed our old people to “homes” where they are cared for by strangers. We removed our sick and ill and dying to hospitals filled with florescent lighting and beeping machinery all designed to preserve the illusion that no one need ever die. We divorced our eating habits from the seasons to the point where we’re flying grapes and oranges and flowers from Chile and Australia and Columbia and we think this is perfectly normal.

I think these things are connected. I think that a growing awareness that natural limitations are not simply challenges to be overcome by technology might be a good thing. And I can’t help but think that there is a connection between chefs like Michael Symon and Chris Cosentino insisting that we learn to honor those animals we eat by not wasting any of their parts, by reviving the old habits of husbandry and thrift, habits which are delicious when done with care — and the movement to bring our dying loved ones home, where with the help of those dedicated hospice workers we can help them through this last transition. When my youngest brother died it was in a hospital, a hospital to which in the 1970s we weren’t even allowed to visit him. He went away, we were sent to our aunt’s house, and then he was gone. It was very sanitized. It still seems unreal. I grew up in a cancer cluster so this happened over and over — and I can’t help but think that while there is nothing more traumatic than losing your mother, that my friend’s daughter will be stronger from actually having been there instead of having her mother whisked away for her “protection.”

The whole/local/SOLE food movement gets a lot of flack for being elitist, for being a yuppie affectation, for being out of touch with “real” people — in this it reminds me of the environmental and adventure sports movements in which I spent so much of my teens and 20s — but there is a deep human need to connect with the unmediated realness of the world — whether that comes by putting on boots and a waterproof jacket and getting up at five in the morning to climb a mountain peak or by building a relationship with an actual person who raises animals or grows produce for you to eat. To seek out ways to connect with the elemental forces of the physical world is a powerful drive in a culture in which we are swaddled in layer after layer of corporate mediation, and perhaps simply deciding to find out where your food comes from is a first step in reconnecting with the world.

Feeding ourselves and our loved ones is our most basic act of love. Michael Ruhlman says his father was a man who loved to be the host, who wouldn’t sit down until everyone had everything they needed, a man who took care of his family. Jim and Mari and Isabella welcomed me into their French idyll that fall when I was so heartbroken over Patrick’s death. I was still very raggedy around the edges and it was generous of them to welcome me to their little green metal table outside that farmhouse near Aix, a green table where we sat and talked and drank wine and ate delicious veal chops we bought from the local butcher (who proudly displayed a photo of the steer who now resided in the case). If what we feed ourselves and our loved ones is the most basic building block for the relationships we build, then it’s not elitist to take more care, to build a food system that relies on actual relationships between people, between people and the land, between people and the animals they raise. Because when it comes right down to it, these relationships are all we really have in this world.

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