Some people have rules for reading. They only read certain genres, they won't read other genres. they don't like fiction told through a second-person point of view (this is one of my hang-ups; if I notice it, this POV interferes with my reading the way a photo-bomber distracts from the photograph's subject). Librarian Nancy Pearl has a rule about how many pages to read in a book before giving up on it, including a mathematical formula that utilizes one's age.
My reading this past week demonstrated once again why rules for reading are meant to be broken. Had I followed the Pearl rule, for example, I would have missed the part of Paul Harding's new novel, Enon, that brings home the point of this story of grief and serves as a brilliant example of how structure can powerfully show the point of a story.
Harding won the Pulitzer Price with his first novel, Tinkers, a "small" novel (in number of pages) that tells a story about generations of a family. It concentrates on George Crosby, a clockmaker in his last days, but includes tales of his father, a traveling peddler, and his grandfather, a minister who may have been mentally ill. In addition to meditations on family, loving and forgiving others, there is a closeness to the natural world in Tinkers that is celebratory but open-eyed. Harding's characters, their world, are drenched in the New England sunshine and winters and way of being.
The same beautiful style, the same closeness to nature, the same idea of writing about multiple generations of the same Crosby family are evident in Harding's new novel, Enon. Both novels are less than 200 pages. Enon also deals with death, but not that of an older grandfather looking back on his life and his forebears. Instead, a father suffers the sudden death of his young daughter on the verge of young womanhood, and his soul is as shattered as his hand that he smashes through a wall.
Charlie Crosby is George's grandson. He honors the old clockmaker's memory with his love of things they did together and shares with his child, Kate. Charlie even drives his grandfather's last car more than a decade after his death. But when his daughter is run over in a car-bicycle accident, Charlie can't pick up the pieces. His wife leaves and he spends his time in a stupor of pain pills and alcohol. Charlie is well aware of what he is doing to himself, but he also is aware that he cannot just get over this devastating fact -- the daughter he treasured, who was such a wonderful person, is no more. He even spends nights in the graveyard near her resting place.
The emotion in the story is relentless. For a short book, it's a dense, thick read that meanders in and out of incidents in Charlie's life, including both his daughter and his grandfather. The painful grief he feels is palpable, and many readers could well give up on trying to forge through the thick sludge of sorrow, no matter how beautifully written.
But then Harding does something that shows why it pays to carry on, why one never knows what illuminating moments are in store if one does not follow reading rules that insist on quick pay-offs.
Charlie's winter has been a long one. He tried to clean things up once but it was pretty haphazard and didn't become an epiphany of "life goes on". A neighbor brought him a casserole but hurried away at the sight of just how haggard he has become. In early March, after months on the couch with his drugs and his booze, Charlie runs out of coffee and cigarettes. It's too much, even for him.
He finds a clean shirt in the bottom of a drawer and makes his way to the nearby convenience store, figuring he will buy several cups of coffee, to reheat for the next few days, and some smokes. But Charlie can't even pump the coffee out of the nearly empty dispensers without making a mess. The man behind the counter takes pity and helps. They have a conversation in which Charlie hopes he isn't being too nosy and the man, a father from India who hopes to bring his two children to the states, answers politely.
Walking home, feeling a little better because he managed to talk with someone, even if it was little more than passing the time of day, Charlie manages to spill most of the coffee and get some of the cigarettes wet.
This scene works so well because it is not a game-changer. It is instead an illustration of what Charlie's life has become. The scene mirrors Charlie's overall journey. Charlie making it outside in the daytime does not result in his suddenly becoming a serene, productive member of society in a Road to Damascus-type moment. His chat with Manny behind the counter touches on fatherhood and how he is no longer one. He couldn't not bring it up, but neither does it change their encounter as Manny gives Charlie his condolences and then conducts the business part of their transaction.
At the end, with his coffee running on the ground along the side of the road, in the same manner as his daughter's life bled out on the side of the road, the reader comes full circle in the same way that Charlie is hit more than once with the realization that his daughter really is dead, she really did die, she really isn't coming back, he is not living in a dream that this happened. The coffee in the last cup "pulsed out of the small opening in the lid, the way blood would come out of an animal or a person, I thought, because it looked like it was being pumped through the hole, as if by a heart."
He walks home as fast as he can without running. Charlie isn't running anywhere in life anymore. But he is still noticing things.
These small noticings are an essential part of Harding's writing. They are little treasures that make his two novels memorable in a way that a fast-paced plot or unique characters would not do. They cannot be found by speed-reading or having an arbitrary cut-off point by which to be entranced. The fact that the next segment in the novel could be an Aimee Bender short story just adds to the entrancement.
In another conversation lately with another book lover, I noted that it was the act of reading itself, and how I engaged with the text, that made a book worth my time even more than how many stars I might award it or whether it would merit a Roger Ebert thumbs up. This scene from Enon was an example of how I have been rewarded by reading this book regardless of how it ended. The little stops along the way made all the difference.
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