On bright mornings, the sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals....If she had the extraordinary powers of Ts'ang Chieh, an ancient Chinese sage credited with inventing written characters, she might be able to read something in the sun's design. (p. 1)
The next in a series of nonreviews of the works of Lynne Sharon Schwartz, my current favorite fiction writer. This new (2005) novel follows the pattern of her earlier books' memoir-like tone in giving an account of intimate personal experiences that interface, sometimes painfully, with large public events. The protagonist is a single woman in New York who lost her twin sister as a teenager, then lost her father in a car wreck, and now goes to visit her mother, who ,to Renata's great frustration, has pretty much withdrawn from the world. She also collects unusual bits of language that cross her path.
There it was, the part of the story Renata liked best: "I suddenly realized." The certainty, the specificity. I won't be this any more, I'll be that....It wasn't that Renata wanted to leave the library and become a circus acrobat or a trainer of horses, the lives she'd dreamed of as a child, with her twin sister. It wasn't the future she wanted to transform so much as the past. She couldn't change the facts, but maybe she could change the way she told them to herself - different words, different emphases. Would that make a new story? Would it make her someone else? (p. 11)
Doesn't everybody do that, or am I the only one? The woulda-coulda-shoulda game, in which the protagonist acts differently in some turning-point moment, thus changing the rest of the story in some important way. I should have accepted the reporting job instead of the advertising paste-up job, and consequently we would have stayed in Chicago a little longer and gotten a different start professionally. Or its variant, the what-if game, in which some outside force acts differently, affecting the protagonist and the story profoundly. What if our offer for that house on Cooper Road was accepted, and we moved out there instead of here in town, would other things be different as a result?
What she thinks about all day long, as she pores over Cochandi (from deep in the Amazon jungle) or Etinoi or Bliondan, isn't the mechanical task of finding equivalents in English, but why language functions at all....The ready, now universally accepted answer that we're hard-wired for grammar, syntax, and connotation isn't enough: she accepts it, then dismisses it. The puzzling question is, Where is the bridge between sounds or marks on a page and our emotional aparatus? What makes us respond to ink strokes with a quickening of the heart or a surge of adrenaline? (p. 43)
I think what appeals to me so much about Schwartz's work is the way she layers the physical sensations with the more heady significance she finds in everyday stuff. The baby she cares for during a family emergency, the young girl wandering the street lost and disoriented, the street vendor who sells all kinds of books for a dollar apiece and refuses to accept more. And her rage at what she calls "false language," the hollow platitudes uttered by public figures for purely manipulative purposes: "Make no mistake, we will hunt them down in their caves and bring them to justice."
Books about writing, like movies about film-making, paintings of paintings, or songs about being a rock star, can be tiresome and self-indulgent. This isn't one of those, because Schwartz has been careful to make a meal of characters she cares about and spice it with the politics of language, rather than vice versa.
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