These days, you arrive in a new place from a great height. Brief glimpse of patterned land, sometimes sea, then trundling along skyways until finding your way down to the ground and the transport available there. Eventually, you make your way to the heart of the place, where you can approach it from eye level.
“In House” is a weekly column featuring trawlings and reflections from our editors.
It’s the end of the summer and we’re all digesting a season of vacations. Here’s a sampling of reflections from around the web, from armchair dreamers to day trippers to professional travel writers:
At Killing the Buddha, Ben Brazil reflects on the pleasures and pitfalls of searching for larger meaning in the serendipitous moments that occur while traveling: “Travel as a spiritual practice, can distort at least as much as it reveals, and not only because its magic involves wealth and privilege.”
September Love
Paul Yoon on James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime
September. It seems these luminous days will never end. I first encountered those lines over ten years ago in New York City. I was living near the United Nations building. It was late evening. I was on the fifth floor of a high-rise and through my windows I could see the sky’s reflection against other windows. I felt lucky to be able to see the image of the sky from my apartment. I felt lucky to be in New York. I believed I had figured things out. Which is to say I was young. I could count the amount of friends I had on one hand and I was happy about that. I enjoyed being alone. I preferred the company of imagination. It was what, in the end, seduced me, more than any person during that time. And for a few nights, what lived with me was the narrative of Phillip Dean and Anne-Marie Costallat, in faraway France, in a world so very different than mine; and yet their story felt, page by page, more alive, more vast, more sensual and more true than my life could ever feel or become. And rather than being depressed by this, I was elated. Joyful. Celebratory. I paced my apartment. I looked out the window at other windows. I went to work and came back and returned to the pages.
Book by MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Reviewed by
Welcome Aboard
My childhood years were marked by the roar of sea waves. I would wake up early on Sunday mornings to the sound of the waves rushing forth and striking the shore before withdrawing. The growth of coconut trees outside my window meant that I could not, from my room, watch the Bay of Bengal—for that I would have to climb up the staircase, a task that, to a ten-year-old, is not even conceivable on Sunday. So I would lie there, blinking in the leaf-filtered sunlight, listening to the waves. I fancied they had a dialogue: saying I am there, when striking the shore, and then I am not there, when withdrawing.
So years later, it was a windfall when I bought Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table—that is about a sea journey—and on the same day, a little ship that had been put together by a Turkish artist from scraps found along the sea: driftwood, sail, and mooring hooks.
Book by ANDRE DUBUS III
Reviewed by
Townie is a book about fighting and writing. But it’s mostly about fighting: wanting to fight, learning to fight, training to fight, getting in fights. In the end, it’s about learning not to fight. (I’m not giving much away: a whole lot happens in the middle, and the final scene in which Dubus peels himself away from the urge to fight is lovely and stirring.)
Andre Dubus III spends his boyhood getting beat up a lot. Still scrawny at fourteen, he tells himself:
“I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?”
Book by HÉCTOR TOBAR
Reviewed by
Where does Los Angeles begin and end? A response to that question stammers when faced with the infamous concrete sprawl of the city without a center. The hazy boundaries of the metropolis would seem to resist any effort at a comprehensive and coherent portrayal in novel form.
The wide maze of highways, the omnipresent gloss of billboards, the horizontal swarm of neighborhoods and business parks and shopping centers that resemble each other, and the army of cameras transforming the city into a vast stage set have led writers to describe LA as a projection of surfaces that blurs reality and fantasy. The long-established connection of LA to the film and television industry makes it easy for visitors to view the hybrid architectures of the city as mere props and the multicultural residents as typecast actors and actresses always “in character.” In Nathanael West’s seminal LA novel, The Day of the Locust, the protagonist Tod Hackett sees “people of a different type” standing apart from a passing crowd costumed in the latest fashions. About these marginalized onlookers, Hackett understands “very little…except that they had come to California to die.” By “California,” Hackett means southern California, Hollywood land—the living spectacle he aspires to depict in a painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” The moribund folks on the sidelines of LA’s trendy masquerade have recently migrated from the midwestern and eastern U.S., lured by the elegance and leisure depicted in movies and advertisements. The American migrants in West’s tale have “eyes filled with hatred,” an expression likely owing to the disenchanting realization, upon arrival in LA, that most occupants of Hollywood land do not live forever in the glimmering form of an image.
Book by CATHERINE CHUNG
Reviewed by
Early in Catherine Chung’s debut novel, Forgotten Country, the narrator’s mother and aunt, as girls in Korea soon after the war, come upon an unexploded bomb in the woods.
“It can’t go off now, can it?” her mother asks.
“Of course it can,” the sister answers. “It happens all the time, don’t you know anything?”
The bomb does not go off, and the sisters make up afterward, and when the elder sister goes to university, she is taken in the night by North Korean agents and never heard from again.
Forgotten Country is unrelenting with such reversals, but with such calm assurance that I had the sense of being borne along on a great river whose pace was not immediately apparent for its scale. There are few moments that cascade into edge-of-one’s-seat crisis; I soon learned to read every page at the edge of my seat, for what is liable to happen when the bombs don’t go off.
Book by BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
Reviewed by
If the Mississippi River belongs irrevocably to Mark Twain, then it’s safe to say Bonnie Jo Campbell has staked her claim in the waters of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Campbell’s new novel, Once Upon A River, takes place on an imaginary tributary that flows into the Kalamazoo, the swift, treacherous Stark River. Out of curiosity, I spent some time looking at maps of the Kalamazoo River watershed, comparing them to the map of the Stark River that accompanies the book, illustrated in careful, calligraphic strokes by Adrian Kitzinger. While there’s no clear analog for the Stark in real life, one upward slash of blue caught my eye: Battle Creek. As much setting as character, the Stark is also a refuge and a hazard for abandoned teenager Margo Crane, who takes to its waters to escape the reach of her extended family and the looming threat of Social Services. Margo’s battles are both internal and terrifyingly tangible: after her father’s murder, she struggles to live without him, taking lovers out of an intriguing mixture of sexual curiosity, longing, and an instinctual knack for casting the best odds for her own survival. Part foundling, part Annie Oakley, and part proto-feminist, all Margo wants to do is escape the violent consequences of being on her own long enough to learn how to live.
Book by KAREN RUSSELL
Reviewed by
Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! (based on one of the stories in her collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) is the mystical coming of age story of Ava Bigtree, a skilled alligator-wrestler at her family’s failing theme park in the Everglades. Setting plays an important role in this book, and made me notice the settings within a setting. Swamplands, swamp flies, buzzards, and a feverish humid mud mash surround the narrative. Since Swamplandia!, the Bigtree’s theme park, is also a family history museum (Ava’s mother’s wedding dress is on display among other exhibits), family is a setting. The conflation of family and place familiarizes the wildlife around the reader (Ava calls all their alligators “Seths”), while also revealing the darkness and wilderness of a family.
Book by JIM SHEPARD
Reviewed by
Sometimes, after finishing a particularly impactful book, I experience a partial paralysis. It’s a sort of ecstatic exhaustion, I think; I’ve felt similarly after long, intense runs. If there is a window nearby, I’ll stare out it without really noticing anything in particular. If my chair is capable of rocking, I’ll do so steadily and rhythmically to the point where people sitting nearby will clear their throats in my general direction. I will occasionally mutter an expletive over and over under my breath. I don’t deny that all this is sort of dramatic. In my own defense, it doesn’t happen that often, and it requires a fairly momentous reading experience. Again, this happens usually after finishing a book. It seems significant, then, that I felt emotionally KO-ed after nearly every story in Jim Shepard’s new collection of short fiction, You Think That’s Bad. The equivalent would perhaps be getting picked up by the same girl eleven times in a row despite having your heart broken every single time. And being ready to be picked up again, if she ever comes back.
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