Briefly

Reading this week:

Philip Connors on his brother's death in The Lapham Quarterly, here.
"Everyone else, it seemed, had chosen a fixed version of his story. The gunshot was a sudden impulse, the gunshot was a calculated rebuke. He slipped over the edge, he was pushed over the edge. He was broken by a battle with depression, he was broken by the sudden loss of love. He was afraid of failure, he was too accustomed to it. He clung too tightly to other people, he didn’t know how to reach out for help. The list of explanations was as long as the list of people who’d known him, and each was a simplification, perhaps even a lie.
I knew these accounts were attempts by those who loved him to soothe the pain of an otherwise inexplicable absence, and for this I could not fault them. But I took it as my duty to preserve some ambiguity, if for no other reason than to allow him an inner life of some complexity, resistant to pat answers. He deserved that much from his only brother, I thought, and I hoped that time and patience would one day reward me with the truth...."

Re-reading Salter with the Paris Review, here.

Have you read The Sea, The Sea? Just finished and still puzzling over it. Hopefully, a little blurb in the next few days on what that puzzle looks like. !Happy holidays!