This Month: Celebrating Small Presses Doing Great Things

In the Morning, The City is the Prairie by Rob Roensch (Belle Point Press, 2023)

One of many things to admire about this novel is that there are almost no flashbacks. In the course of a single week, we travel swiftly over a narrative surface that’s almost as flat as the Oklahoma prairie—or as the apparently unexamined life of Matt Bennet, who has dropped out of college and quit his band to work full-time at Costco. One evening, Matt comes home to find that his parents have evicted him from his room to make way for his dying aunt Becky. In a dislocation that mirrors the loss of his personal compass, he is welcome to sleep on the living room floor with the dog.

Becky’s arrival has also divided Matt’s parents, who argue frequently about money: “[my] father and mother don’t notice me. Their antlers are stuck together. There is sweat on their faces.” Matt’s father harbors a deep resentment against his dying sister, who has been in and out of jail over the years. “You don’t know what she did,” he tells Matt. “Some things can’t be forgiven.” But Matt’s mother is determined to bring about a reconciliation between them even as she struggles to provide Becky with dignified care. Meanwhile, Matt’s younger sister Sylvie, who has usurped his guitar, is writing songs and taking an exceptional interest in the problems of the world. But Matt is laconic and quick to make the obvious joke. This doesn’t help his relationship with his girlfriend Jane, who has joined a statewide teachers’ strike for better pay. When Matt shows up to meet Jane at a demonstration at the state capitol, he is alarmed at the distance he’s allowed to develop between them. “Why don’t I know who she’s talking to?” he wonders. “Why don’t I have any idea what she’s saying?”

Part of the trouble might be that Matt spends much of his free time getting high with Connor, a weirdly brilliant young man who claims to be seeking the intersection of poetry and capitalism. Connor takes Matt up in a skyscraper one night to watch a lightning storm from inside a darkened restaurant: “to build something tall,” Connor says, “you have to conceive of something taller; it’s a metaphor for America; it’s a metaphor for capitalism; it’s a metaphor for how to live.” It is Matt, however, who needs to know how to live; and in his oddball way, Connor is trying to help. He urges Matt to come work for him, an offer Matt never takes up.

But Matt is not feckless, or not entirely so. Though he has numbed himself in response to some disappointment, Matt remains generally cheerful. When Sheila, a visiting nurse, finds him asleep at ten a.m. on the living room floor, Matt takes her ribbing in stride. “She smiles, as if she understands how I can’t help agreeing with people I’m talking to, and at inappropriate moments.” And while Aunt Becky is salty–she asks Matt to buy her some beer, and she can always tell when he’s high–her frailty has a humanizing effect on the whole family. Here is Matt, assisting his mother in putting her back to bed:

I lay her down, trying not to break the surface tension of the lake of the bed. I’ve never tried to be so gentle before. “That hurts,” says Aunt Becky. … She holds one arm at an angle, like it’s stuck in a cramp. My mother shoulders me out of the way. She has a pill pinched between two fingers like she just plucked it from a flower; she dips to Becky, slips the pill into the corner of her mouth, and whacks me with her other hand. “Water,” she says. I grab the flowered tumbler from the side table and pass it to my mother, who holds it to Becky’s lips with a firm, impersonal, ceremonial air, as if it was communion wine.

This is beautiful writing; and while the Bennets may have their problems, the family clearly has good bones. Matt and Sylvie absorb Aunt Becky into the household without complaint. And though Matt is underemployed, he shows a surprising attentiveness to the simple, satisfying aspects of his job:

I love the weight of a roll of nickels best of all the coin rolls. They are also the best coin, not only heaviest but also somehow the roundest. I love the process of changing the receipt roll. I love when an order comes down to an interesting number–$57 even, $77.97, $301.03. I love knowing bananas’ number. I love having the good zapper. … I tell myself I am practicing mindfulness.

I tried making a similar list immediately after I read this; I wasn’t nearly as particular or as successful as Matt. Despite his tendency to blurt out something ridiculous while withholding what really matters, Matt’s humility, his basic goodness, are very appealing.

Matt’s father finally tells him the tragic reason he can’t forgive Becky, but it takes time for this revelation to do its work. “’I told you the story, okay?’” he says. “‘You know the story. Congratulations. Can we watch golf now? Can I have a moment’s rest?’” In a significant exchange, Matt asks his sister Sylvie what they should do about it. Sylvie is playing the guitar. “She’s in the state of distracted concentration. The chord goes up, the chord goes down, broken. … ‘Being present is the first step,’” she says. Later, Matt admits, “I know exactly what I used to think the goal of being alive was: …guitars at the volume of good screaming, the drum like your own heartbeat filling your ribcage….” But now, “[t]here’s a voice speaking I can’t quite understand.” Meanwhile, the teacher protests at the capitol are heating up, and soon, the idealistic Sylvie is deeply involved. When a crisis occurs, Matt and Connor must take the lead. Here at last is Matt’s chance to figure out his vocation–and maybe even find his way back to Jane.   

Roensch’s understated, evocative descriptions of Oklahoma brought to mind a passage from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, a book I first read in the suburbs of Omaha, where I grew up:

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

In Omaha as in Oklahoma City, we have built a great many Costcos and Taco Bells since then. But there is something restorative in the way Roensch depicts the self-healing topography of the prairie:

None of the buildings in Oklahoma City are old; even its ruins are obviously temporary–either the neighborhood will ride a wave of oil-boom investment and be reinvented, or the wind and weeds will overcome everything. The unpredictable, enormous sky and the gently troubled flatness of the land are the only true permanents.

This deeper vision will take Matt Bennet a long way beyond Costco.

N.B. I’ve read two books now from Belle Point Press, and I’m deeply impressed so far with the quality of their titles. I encourage you to check out Child Craft, a beautiful collection of flash fiction from Amy Cipolla Barnes. You might also dip into one of their prose series bundles or any of their poetry collections and chapbooks. There are some fine authors represented here.

It’s Thirty Seconds to Midnight. Where is God?

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

The shadow of doomsday hangs over Paul Murray’s new novel, The Bee Sting, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the aftermath of a financial crash, Ireland is getting hotter and hotter; there are horrible floods, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. In response, Dickie Barnes, who manages the family’s once prosperous but now failing car dealership, joins his friend Victor out in the woods adjacent to his property, where they spend their days digging a well and fortifying an old shed into a bunker, hoping to fend off their ill-prepared neighbors when disaster inevitably comes.

The Bee Sting is told in a series of exquisite novellas, each from the point of view of a different member of the Barnes family. In the first, teenage Cass struggles with questions of friendship and being liked; in the second, her younger brother PJ must evade a bully who wants to extract an impossible sum in repayment for an alleged offense at the family’s car dealership. PJ texts back and forth with an online gaming friend who encourages him to run away, leaving us virtually certain that this “friend” is no child at all. Meanwhile, Cass and PJ’s parents are obsessed with their own problems: while Dickie works away at the bunker, his wife Imelda resentfully sells off her belongings on eBay to help pay the family’s expenses. In the children’s accounts, Imelda is little more than a thoughtless consumer; at best, you might say she is bored. And Cass has discovered that there are no photographs of her parents’ wedding, presumably because her mother was too vain to take off her wedding veil after she’d been sung on the eye by a bee on her way to the church.

But when Imelda takes over the narration in the third part, we learn that a bee sting on her wedding day is the least of her worries. As a young girl, Imelda is rescued from a very hard background by Rose, who has the gift of second sight. Imelda initially falls in love with Dickie’s brother Frank, a local football hero and the darling of his parents. She prevails upon Rose to tell her whether there will be sun on her wedding day–only to learn that there will be a ghost at her wedding, a ghost whose identity Imelda tragically mistakes.

When Frank is killed in a car accident, Dickie and Imelda eventually turn to each other in their grief–though nearly everyone tries to warn them off, including Dickie’s mother, who offers Imelda her insight on the relationship between the two brothers:

Though Frank was younger Dickie idolized him

No She caught herself He didn’t idolize him In fact I’m not sure he even liked him very much But everyone else liked Frank and that’s what Dickie wanted for himself He wanted to be the boy that everyone liked But he was very clever and very complicated and you can’t be clever and complicated and have everyone like you That is just not how it works And he ended up making himself very sad …

I just wonder what kind of a life you see the two of you having together

But Imelda is determined to go through with the wedding, and, having lost Dickie’s brother, she longs to see him appear in fulfillment of Rose’s prophesy. As she and Dickie take the floor for their first dance, Imelda sees her own hazy reflection in the mirror and realizes what she has done:

She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost

A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast

Meanwhile, Dickie, who is filled with self-loathing after engaging in homosexual relationships in college, is desperately trying to settle the ghosts of his past. When he takes Frank’s place and marries Imelda, he tells himself that things are back in order: he will be the Frank that Frank was meant to be. But such thinking, of course, is inherently disordered, and instead of setting things to rights, Dickie is succumbing to darkness. He has begun spending his nights as well as his days out in the woods:

evening arrives, in the sudden, surprise-attack way it’s been doing all week as autumn takes hold, seeming to bloom from the air in dark-blue clouds that soak into it moment by moment until it is drenched, the air, the day, it is saturated in deep blue, like the blue clay dust that fills the well, immersing bodies, trees, the van, the tents, then slowly sealing them up within it.

Things begin to come to a head in Dublin, where Cass, like her father, attends Trinity College. Dickie makes his way there on the night of a terrible storm, having used an alias to try and reconnect with Willie, his former lover. Willie, meanwhile, is a candidate for office, and Cass and her friends hear him speak about climate change:

to face up to reality we first need to set aside all of these inventions and disguises we’ve been so busy accumulating. We need to take off our masks. … We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end. … The sad truth is that right now, at the worst possible moment, we’re being deluged in new ways to hide.

But even as Willie proclaims our urgent need to drop our false selves and wake up to our danger, his suggestion that we alone can save humanity reveals the essential hubris of the doomsday cult that disfigures our proper concern for sustainability and good stewardship. After all, we are not God, nor did we make the world. But perhaps Murray is simply acknowledging here the role of original sin and free will in the present calamity.

An awareness of the fall is also at the root of Dickie’s lifelong fear of the apocalypse. “Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric,” he reflects. “Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterward gets around to pretending they didn’t know.” But Dickie believes that the proper solution is to withdraw from society altogether. If he can just take his family into the bunker, he thinks,

The world, the fallen world, will fall away. The toxicity that you were part of, that you made them be part of too, will be gone. The four of you will be de-worlded: no more school, news, internet: instead only the straight reality of the four walls around you, the sky overhead, the food you have grown from the soil.

This supposed idyll is disrupted when a former lover of Dickie’s threatens to post pornographic images of him online. Dickie confides in Victor, who proposes killing the man when he comes to the bunker to pick up his hush money. In Victor’s eyes, Dickie confronts pure evil:

You don’t speak—you can’t speak; nor can you look away from the splayed gaze, the eyes that angle off into other dimensions, leaving between them a space of pure emptiness, a terrible place of darkness, where you seem to see yourself, ungrounded, null.

And yet, Dickie kneels down near the bunker to wait for his blackmailer, just as he has regularly knelt in church over the years. “But how long since you prayed?” he asks himself. “Prayed and expected to be answered? Or even listened to? … Now in place of the Cross is the Bunker. You can still just about see it, sepulchral in the gloom.”

But there is a moment when Dickie could draw back: someone appears to him, someone he at first takes to be Victor.

You don’t have to do this, Dickie, he says. There is another way. … Admit what you did, her persists. Tell Maurice, tell Imelda, tell the kids. …They’ll find a way to understand. Imelda too, even her. That is what love is. It is bigger than facts. It is bigger than the sum of what you have done. You can be done with that false life, take the good things with you. Start again.

But Dickie refuses to lay down his mask as Willie has counseled, and tragedy follows. What does this say about all his future-proofing, his attempt to ward off the end of the world?

One of the things I loved best about The Bee Sting is the revolution it enacts in our perception of Imelda. At first, she appears to be little more than a gossip and a compulsive shopper. But notwithstanding her refusal to punctuate, Imelda is by far the best storyteller in the family; and despite her tragic history—the worst of which is not revealed until the very end—she tries hard to resist temptation and do the right thing. And there is hope, too, in the relationship between brother and sister. As Cass and PJ make their way home in a blinding storm, Cass asks her little brother for a distracting science fact. He tells her that, due to the flourishing biome in our gut, our bodies contain more bacteria cells than human cells. “People get so hung up on are they this kind of person or that,” PJ says.

But if you have ten times more not-human cells than human cells, then, in a way, you’re not even you. It kind of takes the pressure off…. I feel like if people knew they were mostly bacteria it would solve a lot of problems.

Cass and PJ enter the woods on this fateful night like Hansel and Gretl, trying to find their way back to the parents who have abandoned them. And this is fitting, because throughout the novel, an old folk tale has been in tension with Dickie’s doomsday narrative. A man finds himself alone in the woods at night without food or shelter. All at once, he hears the sounds of music, laughter, and dancing; a door has opened up in the hillside, and when he steps in, the celebrants all insist they’ve been waiting for him. The traveler enjoys an evening of good food and drink. But when he wakes up, one hundred years have passed, and all his loved ones are dead. PJ has been troubled for a while now by an idea that was suggested to him by the movie Pet Sematary: if you bring someone back from the dead, they might be changed for the worse. He has tried very hard to resurrect the loving father he once knew. But when they get to the woods, what—or who—will he find in Dickie’s place?

Prizewinners

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (Liveright Publishing Corp., 2022). Translated by Angela Rodel.

This year’s International Booker Prize winner, Time Shelter, recalls the work of W.G. Sebald, who often wrote from the point of view of a traveler receiving the stories of enigmatic and suffering post-war characters. Sebald’s great novel Austerlitz was reportedly inspired by a picture postcard of a proud-looking young boy in a white satin page costume that Sebald found in a secondhand shop. In Sebald’s novel, the young Austerlitz escapes Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport just ahead of Hitler’s invasion. As an adult, Austerlitz wanders through Europe seeking information about his lost parents. “[I had been] keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was….”

Similarly, in Time Shelter, an enigmatic psychiatrist named Gaustine evokes a past world for his suffering clients using artifacts that he gleans from the secondhand shops. The “time shelter” of the book’s title refers to a Swiss sanitorium intended to comfort a growing number of people who are losing their memories—perhaps including the narrator, who is known mainly by his (and the author’s) initials, G.G. Gaustine’s clinic is a hospice facility in an age of dementia—or perhaps a return to the cocoon of an imagined past for a people who have determined that Europe has no future.

The Zurich apartment Gaustine uses as his clinic has been decorated in the style of the nineteen-sixties, and here, G.G. encounters a red Olivetti typewriter. “Immediately I wanted—my fingers wanted—to pound something out, to feel the resistance of the keys, to hear the bell ding at the end of a line….” He remembers hitting random keys as a child: “A possible code, which we will never crack.” G.G. determines that his highest calling shall be to scour the world for similar nostalgic items, and the two team up to expand the clinic. Soon, the whole building is full of suites dedicated to various time periods.

And yet something is wrong with Gaustine. Having announced at the beginning of the novel that “[on] September 1, 1939, early in the morning, came the end of human time,” Gaustine takes off for central Europe; it appears from his letters that he has gone back to the late nineteen-thirties, where the second World War is looming. G.G. is left to run the clinic while Gaustine becomes “a vagrant in time, if you will.” As the time-shelter contagion spreads, all of Europe holds a grand referendum in which each country chooses to return to a particular decade of the twentieth century. Soon, a long spine of the 1980s stretches from France into Germany; it’s the 1970s in Scandinavia and Portugal; and a streak of the 90s runs through the former Eastern bloc countries. The narrator’s home country of Bulgaria leaves the EU, and the old socialist dictatorship soon descends. G.G., who is visiting Sofia, has seen this story before, and he gets out two days before the border closes: “It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.” But in characteristically neutral fashion, Switzerland chooses to return to the date of the referendum. This is a way of saying that “I don’t dance to your time—for a certain time, at least. But I can measure it out for you, if you’re willing to pay, I’ll time it with a stopwatch…and I’ll sell you clocks, I’ll guard your paintings, rings, diamonds…if anyone experienced severe claustrophobia from the past, Switzerland could offer them temporary asylum. A shelter.”

As G.G. tells the story, he begins to wonder if Gaustine might be a creature of his own imagination: “I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me.“  The doubling of author and narrator, narrator and character is memorialized in a quote from Borges and I: “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

Near the end, in an echo of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the narrator is losing words, even letters; his thoughts shuffle backwards until his childhood seems much more real to him than the recent past. “Somewhere,” he says, “the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. … The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.” This astonishing book, which reads like a hymn to the end of the world, is so stuffed with quotable aphorisms that I could hardly keep up.

Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2022)

This novel, which shares the 2023 Pulitzer Prize with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, is divided into four overlapping novellas ostensibly written by four different people. The opening story, “Bonds,” recalls a favorite novel of mine, Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World. In seeking to form his daughter’s brilliant mind, Leopold Brevoort succumbs to the study of strange, occult practices and dubious theologies; soon, he speaks a nonsense made of fragments of various languages, and his writing becomes a series of meaningless symbols. Meanwhile, Leopold’s daughter Helen develops almost supernatural intellectual powers—she can recite passages from memory after hearing them once, even alternating line by line between two poems or tracts, forward or backwards, a parlor trick that her mother exploits to her social advantage. On the eve of the Great War, the impoverished family removes to Europe to depend on the kindness of wealthy friends. As Helen walks alone for the first time in a silent town, she makes a discovery about herself. “She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.” The Brevoorts are extracted from Europe as the fighting begins by a wealthy and pompous young man who serves as the romantic envoy of a reclusive New York financier, leaving the now-addled father behind in a Swiss sanitorium. {Hint at Helen’s illness.}

That last aside of mine is an allusion to the second novella, “My Life,” purporting to be Andrew Bevel’s self-serving memoir of his career as a wealthy financier whose market manipulations may have induced the crash of 1929. His story, which is heavily salted with such editorial notes as “give two or three examples,” is eerily similar to the story of “Bonds”—but the names and point of view have changed, along with the details of the illness that takes Andrew’s wife Helen—or, rather, Mildred. Here, the brilliant Helen becomes docile and childlike. As Bevel writes of his wife’s final illness, he reminds himself to include “[examples] of Mildred’s innocent wisdom during this period. Her thoughts on nature and God. Our last walk in the woods. Sweet incident with an animal.” This is a breathtaking risk for a writer in that the second novella often reads like amateurish drivel. But the risk is calculated—and, in my view, wildly successful. Bevel’s omissions always reveal his personal failings, along with the lies he is telling himself.

A woman named Ida Partenza takes over the story in “A Memoir, Remembered.” After a successful career as a novelist, Ida returns in her old age to the former Central Park home of Andrew Bevel at 87^th and Fifth, which is now a museum. As a young woman, Ida applied for a job as a typist turned amanuensis turned ghostwriter– an occupation she will keep secret from her anarchist father, who works as a typesetter, and her indifferent boyfriend, a failed journalist. When Bevel asks Ida why she wants the job, she surprises herself by replying that money is “the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities. And if money is the god among commodities, this…is its high temple.”

Ida’s main task in drafting Bevel’s memoir is to refute what Bevel believes is the libelous portrait of his wife and family in “Bonds,” a popular novel loosely based on his life. Ida begins by reading Vanner’s book, and her reaction might well be an expression of the aesthetic of Trust: “It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. … Lucidity, [Vanner] seemed to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning…. Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.” But in an effort to align reality with his own preference, Bevel is determined to destroy all remembrance, not just of the offending book, but of its author, Harold Vanner. “For the first time,” Ida says, ‘it occurred to me that I should be afraid.”

Ida develops a troubling loyalty to her unrepentant capitalist employer even as she attempts to uncover the real Mildred Bevel, a task at which she only partly succeeds. Despite Bevel’s admonitions, Ida sneaks into Mildred’s room: “there was a monastic sort of calm here—what, in retrospect, I recognize as a modern, austerely avant-garde atmosphere.” At the library, Ida gains access to some of Mildred’s papers. But there is “something runic” about Mildred’s handwriting, and to unpack this code, Ida must draw on the skills of reading forward and backward that were first attributed to Helen Brevoort in “Bonds.” She tells her father that, as a typist, she “had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited. He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was always spotting the nick and face of the next one. … He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward.” Ida finds Mildred’s blotting paper: “I thought of my father and his inverted truth.”

The final entry in the book is “Futures,” a slim journal Mildred kept during her final illness. Here, Ida discovers the secret that Andrew Bevel so desperately sought to conceal in the memoir she wrote for him. Trust is in large part a critique of capital and its monstrous effect on its most devoted adherents. But it is also the story of a brilliant woman whose true essence eludes all the people who claim to love her.

Independent Bookseller Edition

Half a Lifelong Romance by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen S. Kingsbury (Anchor Books, 2016)

As the summer of our thirtieth wedding anniversary comes to an end, I can frame my experience with visits to three independent bookstores in three different states—one old favorite, and two that are new to us.

Whenever we go to see Shakespeare at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, we always stop at Arcadia Books. This lovely bookstore features thoughtfully curated contemporary fiction, along with beautiful cookbooks and gifts, children’s literature, and a cafe called the Paper Crane. As I browse the tables, I like to test myself on how many of the staff recommendations I’ve read. But this year, a dear friend drew my attention to the rolling remainder bins tucked under the front window display. They look like those little carts filled with wooden blocks in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog–as if any child in America could neatly corral their modern-day toys in such tiny receptacles. Okay, maybe yours could. But not mine.

These remainder bins are really a toy store for grownups. I found early titles by Nicole Krauss and William Trevor, among others. And when a title by Eileen Chang caught my eye, I turned to my resident expert—my husband–who assured me what a fine writer she was.

Half a Lifelong Romance is set in Shanghai, partly against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of 1937. The story was originally published under a pseudonym in China in the nineteen-fifties, in serial form and with a party-approved ending. But long after Chang fled China to live and write in the United States, she significantly revised and republished the book under her own name (see Kingsbury’s illuminating introduction). And while Chang often released her own English versions of much of her work, she did not do so with Half a Lifelong Romance.

Gu Manzhen and Shen Shijun are colleagues who soon become star-crossed lovers. When the story begins, Manzhen’s father has died, and her older sister Manlu has broken off an engagement in order to support the family as a taxi dancer, an occupation that quickly deteriorates into prostitution. When Manlu becomes the second wife of one of her clients, Manzhen is determined to take up her sister’s former financial burden through honest means. She postpones marrying Shijun, an engineer, until one of her younger brothers is old enough to support the family in her place.

This opens a gap that will divide the two lovers. Manlu’s husband Hongtsai begins to covet Manzhen, and Manlu decides to exploit her own sister by faking an illness to lure her into the house for the night. Hongtsai comes to Manzhen’s room, and there is a struggle; in the end, he “[carries] her unconscious body to the bed and [strips] off her clothes: [she looks] like a luscious corpse. This [is] his chance to romp to his heart’s content.” Once the rape is accomplished, the couple imprisons Manzhen and demands that she become Hongtsai’s third wife, driving her to the verge of madness. Manzhen escapes thanks only to the kindness of an impoverished woman giving birth in the hospital bed beside her.

But the chain of misunderstanding and missed opportunities between Manzhen and Shijun has begun. Over the years, both young people are subject to the misguided machinations of their respective families, with tragic results. Fourteen years must pass before the two lovers finally meet again in a scene reminiscent of An Affair to Remember–with shades of Portrait of a Lady to boot. Shijun reflects that “Love is not passion, perhaps. Not yearning either, but the experience of time, the part of life that accumulates over the months and years.”

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (NYRB Classic, 2021)

We made a trip to Chicago the day before a NASCAR race was scheduled on the Magnificent Mile–there was fencing in front of the Art Institute, and bleachers on some of the sidewalks. After touring a Van Gogh exhibit, we sought out Exile in Bookville, which is tucked away on the second floor of the historic Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. Here, you can pick out some vinyl and ask them to play it while you browse. I seem to recall hearing Joan Armatrading that day.

This lovely bookstore is full of contemporary titles and apparently hosts lots of author events. But we were drawn to a good collection from the New York Review of Books, where I picked up Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel about growing old in a place where one has few connections. “It was hard work being old,” one of Taylor’s characters admits. “It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost.”

When Laura Palfrey first uses her cane to mount the rainswept steps of London’s Claremont Hotel, we are told that “[she] would have made a distinguished-looking man.” Before she was widowed, Mrs. Palfrey had lived for years with her husband in Burma. “After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life,” the Palfreys retired to comfort in Rottingdean. Now, as Mrs. Palfrey peeks discreetly through the windows of London’s basement apartments, she recalls watching her husband’s strong hands as he built what he called “a good toast fire” in the grate. “If I had known at the time how happy I was, she decided now, it would only have spoiled it. … In the end, the perfect marriage [we] had created was like a work of art.”

And yet Mrs. Palfrey creates an alternative history for the other pensioners with whom she shares her evenings. When an impoverished young writer named Ludo assists her after a fall, she invites him to dine at the Claremont in the guise of her grandson Desmond, who has been slow to appear. Ludo agrees, overcoming his vague distaste in the service of art; when he gets home that evening, he will shamelessly transcribe all the details of the visit. Mrs. Palfrey tells Ludo that she and her companions aren’t allowed to die at the Claremont, and Ludo adopts her phrase as the title of his novel.

As Mrs. Palfrey notes, “[the] disaster of being old [is] in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.” One by one, the women of the Claremont succumb to their frailties and move on—beginning with Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose worsening incontinence forces her into a state of rigid neglect in a nursing home. Meanwhile, Mrs. Palfrey receives an offer of marriage from the hotel’s only male inhabitant, a man who writes letters to the editor and tells off-color jokes to the male staff. Naturally, she declines, reflecting that her husband Arthur would want her to soldier on as she was.

But Mrs. Palfrey cannot resist writing to her daughter about the proposal. And when she suffers an accident, her imprudent letter brings her grandson to visit at last–but because Ludo has been impersonating him all this time, the people of the Claremont take the real Desmond for an impostor. In the end, Desmond withdraws, assuming that Mrs. Palfrey’s injuries will forestall the marriage that might have deprived him of his inheritance. At her death, he neglects even to place an obituary–thus unknowingly leaving her story to Ludo, his double. Perhaps it is those with whom we are thrown together by chance who, in their proximity, are best able to love us–even when, like Ludo, they break our confidence.

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, translated by Jane Billinghurst (Greystone Books, 2016)

Near the end of the summer, my husband and I returned to the scene of the crime—Omaha, Nebraska, where we were married in 1993 at St. John’s Church on the campus of Creighton University. My husband loves to tease me that when we come to Omaha, my sisters and I spend two hours having lunch before we decide what we’re going to do for the day. As if that weren’t the point! And besides, when our children were younger, it often took them a while to settle on bowling versus the trampoline park. Now, we look for coffee shops and independent bookstores.

Dundee Book Company began as a pop-up cart with offerings tailored to the venues it visited. Now located in a 1910-era home in Omaha’s Dundee neighborhood, it features contemporary literary fiction, poetry, translations, and “under-the-radar classics,” according to owner Ted Wheeler in Shelf Awareness. When seven of us visited in a body that afternoon, we easily fanned out through the entirety of the store’s offerings in the home’s living room. We made up for that by buying several books.

The Hidden Life of Trees resonates with Overstory by Richard Powers and with Paul Pastor’s lovely essay on fungi in Ekstasis. For years, author Peter Wohlleben worked for the lumber industry in the beech forests of Central Europe, but his perspective changed when he began offering tours. “Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. … I began to notice bizarre root shapes, peculiar growth patterns, and mossy cushions of bark.” As a writer who loves to anthropomorphize trees, I quickly responded to this–but I found it much harder to accept Wohlleben’s suggestion that trees could be sentient, though he anticipates my reluctance and seeks to unpack it. Human beings have more difficulty understanding plants than animals, he says, “because of the history of evolution, which split us off from vegetation very early on.” More importantly, trees are “so incredibly slow. … Their complete life-span is at least five times as long as ours. Active movements such as unfurling leaves or growing new shoots take weeks or even months. And so it seems to us that trees are static beings, only slightly more active than rocks.”

Wohlleben makes a convincing case that trees can feel pain, communicate via underground networks and chemical signals, and perhaps even learn and remember. Trees nourish the sick ones among them, and they raise their young, just as animals do. They are equipped in many spectacular ways to flourish in communal life, but “[thanks] to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground,” and many of them are “[isolated] by their silence.” Cultivation, it seems, must begin with careful curation of what God has designed. And as the summer of our thirtieth wedding anniversary draws to a close, I will be watching the trees reabsorb chlorophyll and seal off their leaves so that a good wind will bring them down. A good sleep to you, trees. And to my husband: here’s to many more happy years!

Showcasing Catholic writers with ties to Milwaukee, Part Two:

Infinite Regress by Joshua Hren (Angelico Press, 2022)

In last month’s post, we left the heroine of Liam Callanan’s When in Rome at the bottom of a hole on the grounds of the fictional Convento di Santi Gertrudis. Oddly enough, Infinite Regress also involves two characters being hauled up out of a deep hole on the grounds of a monastery. But they have come for a different purpose, and by a much different route.

Infinite Regress is definitely set in Milwaukee–but it is a Milwaukee transformed by the imagination, with street names I’ve never heard of and schools whose familiar names have been transposed. For a local like me, this only enhances the book’s heady, dreamlike quality. Take, for example, St. Benedict the Moor Parish, where the Capuchins have run a meal program for decades. Hren reimagines the place as an abandoned inner-city monastery in desperate need of repair, with a sonorous bell that features magnificently in the book’s ending. I can visit the real St. Ben’s on State Street any day; but I wish I could hear that monastic old bell ringing out from its tower–or taste the fish fry at “Deplorables,” a fictional establishment formerly known as “The Black Madonna” in honor of Our Lady of Czestochowa, whose icon is proudly displayed there. Such embellishments beautifully amplify the symbolic significance of the book’s urban setting.

The story’s patriarch, Garrett Yourrick, has been a drunk since the death of his beloved wife Catherine. Of his three children–Blake, a one-time cemetery attendant crushed beneath the weight of his unpaid student loans; Max, a psychiatrist; and young Dymphna, the only daughter—only Dymphna has internalized her mother’s Catholic faith. A former Jesuit priest and influential professor, Theo Hape, wants to solve Blake’s student loan problem with a heinous offer of money for sex which he justifies by asserting that nothing is real and, therefore, traditional morality is irrelevant. Hape preys on Blake’s vulnerability; in another dreamlike exaggeration, Blake is liable for arrest because his student debt has already doubled in a most usurious fashion. The entire system is fancifully compared to the Circumlocution Office, that pinnacle of bureaucratic obfuscation found in Little Dorritt, Charles Dickens’s tale of debtor’s prison.

Infinite Regress has several narrators, but perhaps the clearest voice belongs to young Dymphna, who at her father’s direction goes to the mailbox to send $59 rolled up in an empty single-shot bottle to her brother Blake, whom her father believes is still in the fracking fields of North Dakota. “She let it drop…but the mailbox jaw creaked like a well-traveled ship, [and] as the message sank to the belly of the blue boat, made of steel for the rough seas it would ride, she was overcome with certainty that this was the wrong message….” What she does not know is that Blake is already back in Milwaukee, where the money will never reach him—and where he will avoid meeting his father by sneaking in and out of the family’s basement.

Infinite Regress is full of sharp metaphor: in Garrett’s memory, his wife Catherine walks the Camino de Santiago in a “last attempted ‘cure’ for the crippling Lyme disease that occupied and emptied her mind one mosaic tile at a time.” Later, to keep Blake from bolting, Hape “[brings] a harmless dish out from the mind’s kitchen and [sets] it on the table of conversation.” The novel’s enigmatic set pieces flow seamlessly from one to the next; my favorite section belongs to Father Marto, who is restoring the monastery and who receives Catherine Yourrick’s troubling last confession. Father Marto’s purity is such an antidote to Hape, who reads his own version of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage to Blake as a sort of apologia.

Hren’s style demands careful attention, but the payoff is rich. This novel of fathers and sons proceeds like the circles spreading from raindrops on a lake—or like a modern-day way of the cross, in which Blake and his young sister Dymphna each carry a stepladder through town on their way to a symbolic and wonderfully earthy conclusion.

Now, for some poetry:

The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems by St. John of the Cross Translated by Rhina P. Espaillat (Wiseblood Books, 2023)

When I picked up this book, I knew little about St. John of the Cross other than that he was a sixteenth-century contemporary of Teresa of Avila. If pressed, I might have been able to add that he joined in her effort to reform the Carmelite order.

But as Timothy Murphy explains in his introduction, St. John of the Cross is also a poet of the highest order: “no other great poet of the personal relation to Christ—not Gerard Manley Hopkins, not George Herbert—takes us so far into the bower of Christ and his poet bride.” And, yes, he’s talking about love poetry after the fashion of the Song of Songs. As translator Rhina P. Espaillat notes, poets who are also mystics “often have a relationship to the deity that is more passionate than ordinary prayer, more intimate in its language, and often, during a first reading, almost shocking in the highly visual imagery with which they address God….”

Espaillat’s translation is accompanied on the facing pages by the original Spanish, which to my mind makes it a perfect fit for a high school classroom. This excerpt from “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ” will give you a taste of the lovely and natural voice in the English translation: “Whenever you beheld me, /your eyes imprinted all their graces there, / mastered and quelled me…. / Look on me now: your eyes /have scattered through me / the beauty of the gaze with which you drew me.”

I used to read poetry in college and graduate school but have lost the habit since. And so, as I add poetry to my spiritual reading, I’m especially grateful for such a beautiful and very accessible edition.

And finally, three cheers for the return of ELJ’s Afternoon Shorts!

Naked and Famous by Elizabeth Broadbent (ELJ Editions)

ELJ’s Afternoon Shorts is a series of novelettes that can be read in one sitting. In Naked and Famous, Elizabeth Broadbent takes us on a rollicking ride through the swamp country of North Congaree, South Carolina courtesy of three teenagers, Harlan, Brook, and T.S.–but don’t you dare call her Tiffany Sue. T.S. is tired of living in the shadow of her pageant queen sister Melanie, so she takes a page from her favorite tabloid and convinces Harlan to dress up as Lizardman, a towering, bellowing figure in concrete shoes who terrorizes the teenagers getting up to no good in the back seats of their cars at the Lot. In the hope of a tabloid interview of her own, T.S. asks Brook to pose as her boyfriend, which he’s only too happy to do.

It will take several appearances for the legend of Lizardman to take hold, so T.S. schedules one at her own home, with her sister as witness. “It was startlingly dark–T.S. lived right on the edge of the swamp. The rotten-sweet smell of standing water rose all around us.” Soon, Lizardman has T.S. in his clutches, and Brook, in the role of protector, throws a garden gnome at the beast: “throwing it felt righteous, holy and proper, as if I were lobbing a primary-colored hand grenade at the enemy.” When the press takes notice, “T.S.’s fifteen minutes [have] arrived.” But success goes to her head, and a cryptozoologist comes sniffing around; and as the summer proceeds, the tensions among the three teenagers come to a boiling point. Naked and Famous is a beautifully constructed treat–and the ending, while inevitable in retrospect, is never telegraphed. Buckle up and enjoy.

After all those long reads, it was time to plump up my list of books with some good novellas. I waited a long time for Claire Keegan’s Foster to come in at the library, but it was well worth it. A young Irish girl is sent to live with a childless couple for the summer, only to learn from a gossipy neighbor that their only child had been drowned in a slag pile. How can the girl absorb this terrible knowledge after they’ve both been so good to her? The father gives her an all-time great piece of advice: “‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’” This is a sweet, spare jewel of a book about the families we are given and the families we find.

In Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, a French woman, Helene, takes it into her head to run away from her Russian boyfriend Anton by boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway toward China and the Pacific. On the train, she means Aliocha, a young conscript who is desperate to escape from the army. Though they have no common language, Helene agrees to hide Aliocha in her first-class carriage on the condition that he will slip away when the train stops at Irkutsk.

Helene had been swept off her feet when she first met her boyfriend Anton in France: “the sounds of Russian boil inside his French,” and her “tragic and patchy image of Russia” is epitomized by an old song, Oi, to ne vecher, about “the plains, horses, violence: a typical Russian story.” But something impels her to leave, and soon the train, “this engine of iron that materializes time,” places her under a kind of spell. It “compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with earth’s clocks: the train like a spaceship.” The provodnitsa, or cross-border agents, “split the whole of Russia across the width, from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Vladivostok to Moscow—nearly a quarter of the circumference of the earth with each trip, did you know; …their eyes have seen wild irises and forbidden villages—clouded in coal with names that don’t even appear on maps….”

Aliocha fails to escape as planned, and when he is discovered missing, a manhunt begins. The tension is fierce, the moral implications profound. Eastbound is the story of a remarkable and highly conditional friendship set against the backdrop of a beautiful country perhaps best visited in one’s imagination.

This brings me to what Lauren Zima used to call a “shameless plug:” My novelette, “Consignment,” will be published in August by ELJ Editions as part of a series called “Afternoon Shorts.” One title will be released every month. The first two stories in the series are already available on Amazon: “Winners and Losers” by Travis Grant and “Like A Compass In Her Bones” by Kristin Kozlowski. You can preview the series here: https://twitter.com/EmergeJournal/status/1622945192360701952?s=20. One of my favorite things about this project is that I now feel connected to eleven other writers I’d never heard of before. Please give them a read.