I REVIEWED THIS under my own name on a (much) more legit blog back in September, and said there essentially all I had to say about this excellent novel, but I would like to note here that not many reviewers (other than me) appreciated the extraordinary extended episode in the beginning of the novel when Jack and Della--about whom the reader who has not read Gilead and Home will know virtually nothing--find themselves locked into a cemetery and spend the night there, wandering and talking.
Dwight Garner in the NYT said it was "implausible." Jeez. Compared to what? I don't suppose people on the brink of falling in love find themselves locked into a cemetery overnight on a daily basis, but it certainly seems well within the realm of the possible.
Hermione Lee in NYRB: "readers may well feel they too have been locked in all night." Ouch. I, on the other hand, was hoping the episode would last for the whole book.
Only Anne Enright in LRB gets it right, I think.
The cemetery episode gets at the real magic of the novel as a form: its ability to find the something in the almost nothing in which we pass the larger parts of our lives. Novels can be action-packed, of course, with pursuits and escapes and battles and noisy doings of all sorts, but the real genius of the novel, from Defoe to Austen to Joyce to Robinson, is in its scrutiny of the perfectly ordinary, the quotidian, the unremarkable, and seeing into into so deeply that it opens up and reveals the heart of the mystery.
As Jane Eyre is truly born in that window seat when she stands up to John Reed, and so her novel begins there, so Jack and Della, both adults, are truly born when they are finally free to open up to each other, and so their novel begins there.
Jack and Della in Bellefontaine is a prolonged moment of grace, an iridescent bubble that magically holds for seventy-some pages. It's a miracle.
No comments:
Post a Comment