Portico d’Ottavia in Rome  (Photo by Sean O’Neill@oneillsdc5)

Those of you who follow this blog know that I’m teaching an online memoir course.  I’m captivated by watching my students grapple with and write about the past.  Here are two passages for writers and anyone else who muses about the nature of memory, one from a novel and one from an essay, both beautiful and thought-provoking.

The first is from the narrator of the novel A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can’t bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

And this from “Intimacy,” an essay by Andre Aciman in his collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.

In this passage, Aciman revisits after many decades the street in Rome where he lived for three years as a boy, having emigrated there from Egypt with his family, while they waited to get visas to America.

One more block and scarcely five minutes after arriving, our visit was over.  This always happens when I go back to places. Either buildings shrink over time, or the time it takes to revisit them shrinks to less than five minutes. We had walked from one end of the street to the Read More

This week in the online memoir course I’m teaching, the students are working on characterization, both their own and that of others. We’re reading a chapter in Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington called “Writing about Living People,” in which she talks about how writers must come to their own decisions about their responsibilities to those whose lives are entwined with their own, and how one must balance the reasons for writing a story using real names against the harm that might be done to someone else.  I had thought this matter of what we owe people we write about was settled in my mind. I always counseled and taught that when writing about other people, one must try to arrive at the largest understanding and perspective, and while I didn’t think that was always easy, it seemed to me obvious and relatively simple.  Then last week I read a memoir by Darin Strauss called Half a Life, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and my complacency on the issue was given a good shake.

Half a Life is the story of how, when he was a senior in high school, Strauss was driving his dad’s Oldsmobile when a girl he barely knew, a junior at the same school, inexplicably swerved her bike across two lanes, collided with his car, and was killed.  Even though he was not responsible for the girl’s death, Strauss struggled with guilt that haunted him for decades.

I felt riveted by the writing and the story when I first started the memoir.  But I became troubled by Strauss’s writing about the girl’s family.  It has surprised and puzzled me how much this has bothered me. I won’t say it’s keeping me awake at night (other things do that), but I found myself thinking about it a good deal and feeling troubled by it. It has made me revisit the issue of the writer’s responsibility to other people.

Strauss first met the Zilkes when he attended Celine’s funeral, which was excruciating for him.  He acknowledges that his presence complicated Celine’s parents’ grief with the question of how they should treat him at the funeral.  “A possibly brave act for me, but awful for them.”

He describes the initial meeting with Mr. Zilke:

In the long moment before he found words, and as he took my hand, Mr. Zilke settled on an expression, a hard-won glint of: I will be friendlier than you have any right to expect me to be.

It occurred to me in reading this difficult scene that it was being filtered through a tremendously subjective narrator, which I suppose is true of everything in memoir. But I didn’t completely trust Strauss’s recounting of Read More

The cover of Minnesota writer Rachael Hanel’s memoir, We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, recently published by the University of Minnesota Press, is curiously upbeat, practically gay, with its jokey title in bright white, yellow, aqua, and salmon letterings. A better cover to my mind would have been a skull, for truly this book is a memento mori. Maybe the cover designer was a Minnesotan who, like the folks from rural Minnesota whom Hanel captures so knowingly, was afraid to face the real subject, death and its bride, grief. Maybe the cover designer thought it would put readers off to sense how dark this book is.  But to me that’s its great strength.  Death was the school of Hanel’s childhood, and she tried to learn its lessons. But when it struck suddenly and close to home, she was brought to her knees, finding nothing in her education had truly prepared her for what personal loss and grief really feel like.

Hanel grew up in Waseca, the daughter of Digger O’Dell, who had a grave digging monopoly in that area of south-central Minnesota, digging more than 100 graves a year. Her father, Paul Hager, took the name from a character on the Life of Riley.  He loved the outdoor work, having spent the prior 14 years from right after high school slopping pigs and cleaning manure off concrete floors with noxious chemicals. He and his wife also mowed and tended the cemeteries, often accompanied by their three children. Rachael was three when her father became a gravedigger, so she grew up playing around headstones, learning math by subtracting birthdates from end dates, seeing toys and balloons people left on babies’ graves, and studying the mystery of death, captured in the photograph of a young girl in a locket on one of the gravestones.

It didn’t strike her as anything special or unusual to have a gravedigger for a dad, and she says, at least in the beginning, that spending so much time around graves and being exposed to so much mortality didn’t bother her.  Her parents were modest, practical, hard-working people with a secure and respected place in the community. Death and burial were just part of life, just what they did, and it didn’t occur to them that their impressionable daughter might be affected by so much exposure to death, nor would they have known what to do about it.

But at least as this memoir is shaped, Hanel was affected by all the death, to the point of being somewhat obsessed with it.  She was certainly on her own in processing it; death wasn’t discussed and people in that area, “stoic Germans and Scandinavians, reserved northern Europeans who wore stony faces for the world while they withered inside” taught her nothing about how to deal with her own grief, when it came to her as a staggering blow.   She was fifteen and her father forty-six when he died in great pain within three days of being diagnosed with cancer. At the real heart of this memoir is the story of a daughter’s love and loss, and the aftermath.

Hanel recounts an incident when she was five years old, standing at the grave of her uncle, being horrified that his daughter Michelle was actually sobbing in public. This raw emotion frightened the young Rachael, who “felt as embarrassed for her as I would have felt had she been physically naked.” This is her first glimpse of the real pain that accompanies death, the first time she grasps what losing a loved one can mean to someone:

The cemetery took on a different meaning. It became more than an expanse of lawn marked with jutting granite and marble teeth, more than just a place where Dad and Mom worked. It was no longer the place where I sat in the pickup with my books until I could go home and play with my Barbies. Instead, the places where I watered flowers or picked up sticks were the same places families like Michelle’s had stood. Holes were opened to receive their bounty, then closed forever. Bodies rested below me, invisible tenants.

But it is only when she experiences the death of her father that the enormity and confusion of death is truly brought home to her.

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All she knows about creative writing, that is . . .

Whether you’re writing memoir or fiction, advanced or beginner, this workshop on beautiful Madeline Island will help boost your writing to the next level!

August 19 – 23, at the Madeline Island School of the Arts — 715- 7474- 2054

For more information and to register, go to http://tinyurl.com/ce9uz8c

Hope to see you there –

Best,

Paulette

P.S.  Please forward this to anyone you know who might be interested. THANKS!

Andre Aciman

On Monday I started teaching an online course on writing the book-length memoir for Stanford University Continuing Studies.  For the next 10 weeks my students and I will be thinking and talking (or I should say e-mailing) about writing memoir, including the question that the Watergate hearings posed so beautifully: “Where does the truth lie?” I’ve always enjoyed the double entendre of “lie” in that line.  How do the facts of the past and the truth get along? It’s clear that the facts do not produce the truth, not the emotional, psychological truth that the modern memoir demands.  But how important are the facts, and what exactly are they? Are details facts? Are they a form of truth? And if so, which ones and to what degree?  Anyone writing out of memory, out of the past, quickly encounters subtle and difficult encounters with facts and truth.

This was brought home to me when I read a fascinating opinion piece called “How Memoirists Mold the Truth” in this past Sunday’s New York Times, by the memoirist and novelist Andre Aciman.  Aciman was born in 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt.  He grew up in a French-speaking multinational Jewish family which had settled in Alexandria in 1905.  He moved with his family to Italy when he was 15 and then to New York at 19.  He’s currently a professor at the graduate center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He’s the author of the Whiting award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995) as well as a number of other books, and he has a new novel coming out in April called Harvard Square.

He opens his essay with the story of his mother furiously rearranging the living room furniture whenever she was enraged and fed up with her life. This was her attempt to try to take control and put a new face on things, in light of not being able to change much else about her situation. It taught him, Aciman says, “that if changing the layout of your problems doesn’t necessarily solve them, it does make living with them easier.”  He extends this lesson to the work of memoirists, who, “unable to erase the ugliest moments of their past or unwilling to make new ones, can shift them around.  They don’t distort the truth, they nudge it.”

I’m not sure what he means by “nudge” here.

He says that everyone has reasons for altering the past.  But isn’t the work of memoirists the exact opposite—to be true to the past to the best of one’s ability?  It’s the word “altered” that gives me trouble here.  He continues in the same paragraph, “We may want to embellish or gloss over the past, or we may want to repress it, or to shift it just enough so as to be able to live with it. Some, in an effort to give their lives a narrative, a shape, a logic, end up altering not the facts they’ve known but their layout – exactly what my mother was doing.”

I accept that memoirists give their lives a narrative shape by rearranging the material to some extent.  In my memoir Crossing the Moon, for example, I had my mother say a line to me (“People who don’t have children are the most selfish people in the world.”) in a scene in which she did not actually say that line. She did say those exact words to me, only I’m not sure when or where – I think over the phone. So I altered not the facts but the layout, to make for a better read.

But Aciman loses me when he says we may want to embellish, gloss over, repress or shift the past so as to be able to live with it. That seems to me quite different from rearranging material that actually occurred.

But Aciman is right when he says, “Writing alters, reshuffles, intrudes on everything.  As small a thing as a shifty adverb, or an adjective with attitude, or just a trivial little comma is enough to reconfigure the past [I think he’s inflating that comma a bit but never mind  . . .].”  Anyone who writes memoir knows it’s not the simple, straightforward act some people imagine it to be to write about the past.

Aciman recounts how in 1990 he published an account of a walk with his brother on their last night in Alexandria. Four years later, when he published his memoir, Out of Egypt, he described that walk as one he took alone. He took that same walk when he returned to Egypt in 1995, to see whether he remembered walking there alone or with his brother. A third option presented itself: it occurred to him that he might’ve made the whole thing up. The written version or I should say versions had taken the place of what actually happened.

Today I remember the walk I took alone, but only because I spent more time writing it. Ask me which of the two is truer, I’d say, ‘Probably the walk with my brother.’ Ask me again and I might admit making the whole thing up. Ask me yet again, and I won’t remember.

I found this confession totally candid. Certainly once you try to write the past, what you’ve written tends to become the memory, rather than the other way around.  As Annie Dillard advised in her essay “To Fashion a Text”:

Don’t hope in a memoir to preserve your memories.  If you prize your memories as they are, by all means avoid—eschew—writing a memoir.  Because it is a certain way to lose them.  You can’t put together a memoir without cannibalizing your own life for parts.  The work battens on your memories.  And it replaces them.

Aciman says a similar thing when he relates how within a few weeks after his mother had rearranged the furniture, it was no longer possible to recall the previous living room configuration.

Words radiate something that is more luminous, more credible, and more durable than real facts, because under their stewardship, it is not truth we’re after; what we want instead is something that was always there but that we weren’t seeing and are only now, with the genius of retrospection, finally seeing as it should have occurred and might as well have occurred and, better yet, is still likely to occur.  In writing, the different between the no more and the not yet is totally negligible.

This he calls “the spectral realm of quantum mnemonics,” and thus leaves some of us, myself included, in the dark.

It’s a maddening essay. He’ll say something that seems quite brilliant and then go off the deep end!  As you can see in the quote above.  He’s into ontological waters where I can’t swim.

There seem to be two camps of memoir readers/critics. Or perhaps it would be better to describe these as two ends of a spectrum. On the one hand are the Fact Sticklers. They want to know whether the brother was there or not, dammit! It matters to them, and it undercuts the reliability of the memoirist who plays fast and loose with the facts. Aciman’s answer to this is that “Writing not only plays fast and loose with the past; it hijacks the past. Which may be why we put the past to paper. We want it hijacked.” This is the sort of thing that makes the Facts Sticklers apoplectic.

At the other end of the spectrum are the loosey-goosey Literary Liberals. They don’t care whether the brother was there or not; they are after something else. They want to know if the scene works, if it’s true to something below and beyond mere factual accuracy.  Is it true in the deepest sense, in a spiritual, emotional, psychological way?  Is it what the persona of the memoir actually felt? The brother is a detail which may or may not matter. They trust the writer to make that determination. They, like Aciman, may not believe that the past is solid and can be captured with a high degree of accuracy. They accept the role of the imagination in the writing of memoir. They don’t want things that matter made up– but they’re willing to accept the kind of nudging, perhaps, that  Aciman seems to be championing.

Most memoir writers fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. They’re doing their best to be true to the past as they know it. At the same time, they understand that the act of writing transforms the past, replaces it, and creates it to some extent.

Aciman says, “We want a second chance, we want the other version of our life, the one that thrills us, the one that happened to the people we really are, not to those we just happened to be once.”

I don’t think this is true for most memoirists. They write out of the person they really are now about the person they once happened to be.  But maybe Aciman means that in the writing, we become or at least access our deeper, truer selves, both now and then. We write a version of the past that is truer than a mere recitation of factually accurate details.  I haven’t read the two passages of that last walk in Alexandria that Aciman refers to. But I can imagine that his focus was on some personal truth of the experience, what he would call one version of the past, that was true, not literally to exactly what happened, but to the felt-sense of the experience, the literary truth of it.

I don’t mind, myself, that he nudged the brother out of the way.

P.S.  The online comments following Aciman’s piece make for fascinating reading as people react to his provocative piece.

The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp

Emily Rapp was a creative writing student of mine at St. Olaf College in the early 1990s.  She was an unusually gifted writer even as an undergraduate, standing such head and shoulders above the other students that it was a given that she was headed for a successful career as a writer.  She was also lovely, a beautiful, vivacious redhead, delightful in every way to the extent that I knew her.  She had just about everything she needed already in place: a keen intelligence; a gift for language; a rich, complex sensibility; and a literary style and voice already well developed.  The only thing she lacked was age and experience.  Time would take care of both of those.

She did indeed go on to a distinguished career as a writer and professor of creative writing.  In 2007 she published a memoir called Poster Child, which, for reasons lost to me now, I never finished reading.  I think the subject matter, her experiences with having her left foot amputated at age four due to a congenital defect, and losing her entire leg by the age of eight, didn’t engage me sufficiently.  Of course it is about more than that—about living with a disability, about self-image, especially as a female, about acceptance of one’s body, no matter if flawed.

Emily now has a new memoir out which is getting a lot of attention, such as a full-length, positive review in The New York Times Book Review.  She was on the Today Program (I know because we’re friends on FB), and the book is being widely reviewed and well received.  The memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, traces her ordeal and grief over the shocking diagnosis in January, 2011, that her son, Ronan, nine months old, had Tay-Sachs disease, an always fatal, genetic, degenerative disorder that usually results in death by the age of four or five.

At the suggestion of a friend, Emily began blogging about her experience.  The blog, Little Seal, (“Ronan” means “little seal” in Irish) was named one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2012 by Time Magazine.  Emily had found a great outlet for the turmoil in which she was swept up, and an appreciative, sympathetic audience.

Still Point has some of the most moving, beautiful writing that I’ve read in any grief memoir.  Especially in quiet moments with Ronan, she captures the heartbreaking sadness of losing her baby bit by bit:

I stopped for a moment and gently removed his hood. I let the wind ruffle his red-blond hair and I looked at his sleeping face and I rocked him for a bit in the sun.  We kept walking into a tunnel strewn with dry leaves where both our shadows disappeared and we were alone.  I stood still and listened to his breath and mine.  I felt a momentary flash of peace, a great still pause.  T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world,’ and of course this terribly tender love, and I thought, This is all I have to give, and I tried with all my strength to pass that feeling into Ronan, and then I thought, Remember this.

But too often in the book, at least for my taste, there is something manic, perhaps a bit hysterical (and why not!), repetitive, and overly Read More

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur by Kawasaki and Welch 

I listened to a webinar this past week on shewrites.com by Guy Kawasaki, who is BIG right now for his (self-published) book (along with Shawn Welch) on self-publishing: APE:  Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur.  I found the talk superficial and simplistic but maybe you get what you pay for (it was free).  I can’t judge the book by a 30 minute webinar, but Kawasaki is one smart guy, “chief evangelist for Apple” (what does that mean?  Is that an actual job?), author of 12 books, including Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which was a New York Times best seller, and What the Plus!  Google+ for the Rest of Us.  He’s a marketing genius, apparently, and is now an expert on self-publishing, which he refers to as “artisanal publishing,” meaning writers who love their craft and are involved in every aspect of it from beginning to end, just as there are “artisanal” beer makers, bakers, cheese producers, etc.  Guy can coin a phrase.

During the webinar, he did acquaint me with a term I had never heard of: crowdsourcing.  What the heck.  He crowdsourced APE, sending out first an outline of the book, then the manuscript-in-progress, and the final draft to all his considerable social media contacts, soliciting feedback, expert info others had that he lacked, fact-checking, and even copy-editing.  He didn’t go into a great deal of detail about his crowdsourcing in the webinar, but I found a more detailed description of it on a website called The Creative Penn, by Joanna Penn.

Penn asked Kawasaki how he managed to get 145 reviews on Amazon for APE within a few days of publication, 135 of which were five stars.  He said he sent an email to 4 million of his social media contacts (and you thought you were popular), offering a review copy of the near-final manuscript.  That enabled him to have 1,100 readers before it went live.  4 hours before Amazon turned it on he sent emails to those readers asking them to post a review for him.  He woke up the next morning to 45 five star reviews.

Not many of us have 4 million social media contacts, the publishing track record Kawasaki has, or his incredible business background and marketing savvy (not to mention ambition and energy).  Nor are most of us publishing a book like APE, which is right place/right time.  Still, I was fascinated by his experience.  Crowdsourcing sounded so savvy, especially for a non-fiction book like APE:  solicit alpha and beta readings from people who have self-publishing experiences, stories, and expertise he could draw on!  It makes tremendous sense–an on-line, stream-lined version of research.

Still, crowdsourcing seems anathema to writing novels.  What happened to the writer alone at her desk with nothing but her own mind (such as it is), trying to open that proverbial vein?

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Sylvia Smith  photo by Oliver Lim/Evening Standard/ permission of Rex USA

I don’t know about you, but I love a good obituary.  So you can imagine how I perked up when I saw this headline in the March 2^nd NYTimes: Sylvia Smith, 67, Memoirist of the Life Banal.

I know a thing or two myself about the life banal, but I’ve never considered it grist for the memoir mill.

I had to read on.

Sylvia Smith was not, apparently, an interesting person.  British, she dropped out of high school at 15, never married, “never had a great adventure or suffered a great misfortune, and never read books by most accounts.”  Still, I found the obituary (well written, by Paul Vitello), if not Smith herself, rather riveting.  I have been thinking about Smith and her writing ever since.

According to the Times obit, she began writing her memoirs in her late 40s, when illness and a government disability pension allowed her to quit the last of a long series of secretarial jobs, mostly as a temp.  Her first book, Misadventures, was published in 2001 when she was 55, after hundreds of rejection letters.

The book, a plainly written, deadpan chronicle of an ordinary life, seemed to push the allowable boundaries of ordinary, entering an edge-of-space world where critics quarrel over literary metaphysics.  Reading Misadventures, they were divided over whether they saw a bad joke or a kind of outsider-art masterpiece in a passage like this:

“Early in December, Carol asked me, ‘What day is Christmas?’  I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The following morning she told me, ‘Christmas is on the 25^th of December.’ I replied, ‘I know that, but I thought you meant what day of the week.’ She didn’t believe me.”

O-kay . . .

Was this—as one critic described it—“another nail in the coffin of our cultural life” or, as another reviewer saw it, “an existential classic, a work of dry, mordant wit that pricked the fakery in most celebrity-memoir writing.”

Ms. Smith said her intention was for her books (along with Misadventures, Appleby House and My Holidays) simply to be “hysterically funny.”  According to the obituary, she laughed out loud while writing them and never gave a thought to existential philosophy.

She just liked writing books and wanted to get published, she said.

It’s in her favor that she intended to be funny. There’s that laughing out loud while she wrote bit.  But can one be funny and banal at the same time?

Of course there’s the possibility that she wasn’t funny.  And maybe just banal.

Here’s her description of her room in a rooming house:

“There was a single bed against the far wall, and everything was shabbily furnished in either red or white, with the walls, wardrobe, wall cupboard, bedside chest of drawers and fridge in white, and two armchairs, the carpet and curtains in red.”

Kind of a creative writing teacher’s nightmare . . . Read More

More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby

I have a book I want to recommend to you, dear readers, not that I read it myself. I SKIMMED it.  Looking for the good parts. And there were so many good parts I might as well have read it.  I didn’t have the time or patience (or concentration) to sit down and actually read it.  I’m reading other stuff, plus I’m constantly “marketing” The Answer to Your Question, which mainly consists of filling out forms with the same information over and over on online sites that announce free eBook giveaway days.  I have another one coming up, so if for some unimaginable reason you haven’t downloaded the $2.99 Answer eBook on Amazon, you can download it free on March 24.  Just think of all you’ll save!

Anyway—the book I so enjoyed skimming is More Baths Less Talking, by the British writer Nick Hornby.  I had loved Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked, plus I have this THING for certain English guys who can talk–or I should say write–as if they’re conversing with you.  They’re the most lively, quirky, funny, bright conversationalists you’ve ever heard; you feel funnier, smarter, and more entertaining yourself just from holding their books in your hand. I have a huge crush on another British writer of the same ilk as Hornby,  Geoff Dyer, based on his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (I’m such a lightweight I never seem to read more than one book by anyone).

I actually got to meet Dyer (or Geoff, as I like to think of him) at the Key West Literary Seminar this year.  He stole the show every time he opened his mouth on stage, especially when he read a passage from Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, his intended biography of Lawrence in which Geoff never actually gets around to writing about him.  He was self-deprecatingly hilarious, which to me is always sexy, and I actually got to speak to him.  When I told him how I had listened to Jeff in Venice on tape while I was driving, a look passed over his (long) face and he said, “That must have kept you awake . . .” Meaning the “good parts,” no doubt.  That was our moment.  He’s funny looking, tall and thin, Ichabod Crane-ish, and made me think of the taffy we used to pull as girls into long strands.  Everything about him (well, I can’t say for sure . . .) was long.

Geoff Dyer at the KWLS
photo permission Nick Doll

Anyway, I’m trying to write about More Baths Less Talking here, not taffy or Geoff Dyer.

Baths is a collection of Hornby’s monthly book columns for the Believer magazine, which I had never heard of.  Which just goes to show how out of it I am.  It’s Dave Eggers magazine, published 9 times a year in SF and sold in independent bookstores!  Why didn’t I know this?  Because I live in the Midwest? Because I’m old?

I quote from Wikipedia:

The Believer is a magazine, as its editor Heidi Julavits writes, that urges readers and writers to “reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible.” The magazine publishes essays that the critic Peter Carlson describes as “highbrow but delightfully bizarre,” book reviews that may assess writers of other eras, and interviews with writers, artists, musicians and directors, often conducted by colleagues in their fields. The critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of “a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement.” It has a “cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism, mixing pop genres with literary theory.”

Wowsers. Read More

The Yellow Bird by Kevin Powers

I’ve been putting off writing a review of The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers’ novel about the Iraq war.  It was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and one of the The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2012.   I feel conflicted about it.  In some ways it is a stunning book; and yet by the end I felt it was seriously flawed. I feel both guilty and insecure about my assessment.  I see on the dust jacket the high praise it has garnered from writers like Alice Sebold, Colm Toibin, Anthony Swofford, and Philip Caputo.  A novel on the Iraq war that is as ambitious and literary as this one should be touted, so why not just let it go at that?  Yet I can’t get over the feeling that there is something too—too what?  Too literary at times (can’t believe I’m saying that), too self-consciously ambitious, too straining for significance in a way that I think ultimately harms the book.  The war in Iraq was so horrible, such an infuriating and heartbreaking mistake, so costly to so many, that I understand Powers’ desire to capture that.  I can imagine how fiercely he wants us who were untouched by the war to get what it was like, what it meant, and the devastating damage it did to those who fought.  All that is in the book, often brilliantly.  So I’m surprised and troubled that I can’t give it the bowled-over endorsement I was expecting to.

The Yellow Birds is described on the dust jacket as “the story of two soldiers trying to stay alive.”  The narrator is a twenty-one year old private, Bartle, and the even younger soldier, Murphy, whom he befriends and takes on as a responsibility, promising Murphy’s mother that he’ll bring him safely home.  The setting is the city of Al Tafar, a hellhole battleground that is the martial equivalent of the myth of Sisyphus.  I have to say that the novel is truly an amazing rendition of the horror of the war, and what the rest of us can only dimly imagine as the nightmare existence of an American soldier there.

The novel is also stylistically interesting and sophisticated. Powers is a beautiful, powerful writer on the whole, with a visual artist’s eye for descriptions of the city, of light, of dying, of bodies.  Here’s how the book opens:

The war tried to kill us in the spring.  As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns.  We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers.  While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.  When we pressed onward though exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark.  While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation.  It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.

When I read that passage, I was thrilled by the remarkable writing, poetry in prose.  Read More