Marvels

It’s been quiet here. A few months of attending to nothing but the most physical of matters. These haven’t been good months for thinking, reading, or writing. The physical matters include awe and exhaustion related to…pregnancy (!). Totally joyful news. Such big news to become accustomed to that it easily eclipses things not food, sleep, wondering whether it's safe to run/ bike/ take hot showers/ etc. In other words, I started so many books and lost interest. Pages of great writing fell, a bundle of syllables and punctuation, to mean as much noise and sense as a plastic knife scratching up a plate. My mind was elsewhere – often, honestly, asleep.

Still, I managed to finish Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, which may have been ambitious in its riff on Bluebeard but seemed dissonant, disturbing, and at times, downright nonsensical to me. I made it to a James Salter reading, which is one of the best things I’ve done in a long time. I was expecting the auditorium to be packed full but it wasn't. It didn't matter anyways, because there was older, magnificent Salter reading aloud from his new book, behind a lectern in a blue blazer and shined, beautiful, shoes. I also finished John Williams’ Stoner. Of all the books I’ve started and stopped in this interim (Roth, Karen Russell, Elissa Shappell, Taiye Selasi, Hawthorne's and Lispector’s short stories, pregnancy books), I could not put Stoner aside. It is a marvel. It is a restrained, evocative story of a man whose life adds up to failure. Reminiscent of Cather in its spare tone, Stoner is a perfectly rendered portrait of a man whose failures seem so unjust and inevitable that his resignation  moves even the most absentminded reader to fling the book down upon completion, convinced she'd read  a perfect novel, indeed!