Locked out

It was not so unfortunate that I locked myself out of the house for three hours yesterday. As the man at the park told the woman he was with, the sun is shining, what more can we ask? I had two library books with me, picked up on whim, and a riverside park fixed with benches only a few blocks away.  The day was just turning the corner on noon, people were coming outside, making plans on cell phones, walking dogs, watering flowers with weak hoses.

One of the books I had with me was David Grann’s, Lost City of Z. I recently saw an old review of Grann’s work on Slate where the author extols Grann’s storytelling talen and I saw that my enthusiasm for every New Yorker bearing his name is not so singular a phenomenon. Grann, too, makes the point early in Z that obsession is what enables him to construct a narrative complete with brick-and-mortar facts and author's zeal to keep the reader moving.

I sat on the hard bench, facing a high and muddy river. I was reading about the Victorian explorer Fawcett, the hero in Z, who is driven to conquer unknown corners of the Amazon. I was thinking about the how one is driven to explanation by fact or by fiction. There is a scene in the book where Grann looks at an old Victorian exploring map and observes that the beastly monsters inked in are less frightening than a stretch of blank page. I was also thinking about how the purpose of a story is an altogether different reveal than the sudden discovery, of, say, a swarm of gnats made visible by wild shadows on the pages of my book. Prose versus poetry maybe?

The structure of the Lost City of Z is very much like a New Yorker essay, drawn out over the course of chapters. Every chapter moves us between Fawcett's travels and Grann's retracing of that history. The time shifts in Grann's essays are more seamless, more intuitive, and the author's presence less necessary. In the book, we move between past and present by stick shift. What makes this particular story relevant is Grann, his desire to tell us the story of the mythical city. It takes incredible guts to put lines together, to deign symmetry and logic from a collection of facts, and convince others that this is story. But the necessary presence of Grann made me very aware of being a reader.

I am not yet finished reading Grann’s book. Before I knew it, it was time to return home and the second half of The First Circle called out for completion (more on that soon). While I like Grann’s book and he remains, undoubtedly, one of my very favorite magazine writers, I don't know that this book made me love his writing any more. Jungle exploration, eye-popping glee for requisite physical stamina, the intrigue of disappeared maps and codes, is undeniably exciting. But. The other library book I carried with me was a beautiful hardbound copy of Middlemarch and in truth, the ground (I think) to be discovered there seems, in some ways, to be the more challenging terrain – for writer and reader, both.

Well! These two books are apples and bananas. And this is no review. Maybe Grann will disprove whatever opinions I've formed so far (though spoiler! I understand that the book leaves much unresolved). The point is yesterday I had time to sit outside and to read, without other obligation. I could make something from those unexpected hours. Sunbathers lay on the grass. People sat alone, in twos, on benches staggered towards the river, some with books, newspaper, and stacks of loose paper. One girl read quietly and moved only once in the hours I sat, to take her hair down from its brown pony tail. I thought about David Grann and how to woo a reader. The couple that sat near me leaned into each other, the woman threw one leg over her companion's lap. The sun is shining, he told her, what more can we ask?