Beth Kephart's Blog, page 72

It's the uncertainty that bungles us—

that strikes us down, a paralysis.

Think it through, make the decision, pursue the dream, part the mountains, leave the mist behind.

Action is the cure.

Belzhar: Meg Wolitzer/Reflections

Meg Wolitzer began The Interestings, her acclaimed 2013 novel "for adults" (my quotation marks, because I so dislike/unlike categories) with this convocation of the teenaged young:

On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time. They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. Julie Jacobson, an outsider and possibly even a freak, had been invited in for obscure reasons, and now she sat in a corner on the unswept floor and attempted to position herself so she would appear unobtrusive yet not pathetic, which was a difficult balance. The teepee, designed ingeniously though built cheaply, was airless on nights like this one, when there was no wind to push in through the screens. Julie Jacobson longed to unfold a leg or do the side-to-side motion with her jaw that sometimes set off a gratifying series of tiny percussive sounds inside her skull. But if she called attention to herself in any way now, someone might start to wonder why she was here; and really, she knew, she had no reason to be here at all....

In Belzhar, Woltizer's new book "for teens," it is not a camp teepee toward which the characters are drawn, but a school for emotionally fragile children called The Wooden Barn. Unknown to each other in the school's early days, the students have arrived bearing secrets. Soon enough the core protagonists will forge camp-like bonds in a miniature English class focused on Sylvia Plath and facilitated by journal writing. They will learn, unlearn, and learn themselves. They will enter a mystical world called Belzhar, a condition or place that Wolitzer explains like this:

Belzhar lets you be with the person you've lost, or in Casey's case, with the thing she's lost, but it keeps you where you were before the loss. So if you desperately want what you once had, you can write it in your red leather journal and go to Belzhar and find it. But apparently you won't find anything new there. Time stops in Belzhar; it hangs suspended.

Wolitzer's theme, in Belzhar, is second chances, and in order to have a second chance, you have to be honest with yourself, you have to know what really happened. Through Belzhar, Wolitzer transports these student-friends to the past. She builds a reckoning mirror and holds it steady.

Whereas The Interestings (which I reviewed for the Chicago Tribune here) was rich with detail and character asides, full of the messy, tangential sprawl of messy life, Belzhar is lean, plot-focused and plot-purposeful. Like We Were Liars, E. Lockhart's summer sensation, it harbors a secret within a secret that will keep readers turning pages.

But perhaps what I liked best was this simple and essential thing: Wolitzer has written a novel that reminds teens how much words matter. A message that must burn eternal.

take one photo, make it a story

this, today, is where my story begins.

Spend time alone, and do not look away

Time spent alone writing the novel provided a different kind of instruction. “I learned not to look away at the moment when I should be paying the most attention,” he said. “The closer I got to the heart of a scene, to the really difficult material to write, the emotionally challenging stuff or the exchange in which the conflict is made most explicit, the more I’d look for a way out of writing it. This was out of fear, obviously, because you don’t want to run up against your limitations in craft, intelligence or heart. It’s much easier to duck the really vital material, but it kills what you’re writing to do so, kills it instantly.”

—Matthew Thomas, author of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, in an email interview with the New York Times

Reviewing Diane Ackerman's "The Human Age," in Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal

My thoughts on Diane Ackerman's new book, "The Human Age," appear in this weekend's Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal. 

The review begins like this:

Mental caravan.

It is the phrase that appears on the penultimate page of Diane Ackerman's new book, "The Human Age." The two words bracket all that has come before in this wide-ranging exploration of our world right now. This mini-history of our slurry epoch. This summary of human plunder and residual wonder. This panoramic investigation of vertical ocean gardening, geo-friendly architecture, Wakodahatchee Wetlands, the "bounty" that grows on planted urban walls, the coming age of regenerative medicine. This poetic treatise on microbes and the medicinal power of human touch.

And continues here.

Anthony Lane on Young Adult Fiction: a generalized and generally disturbing definition of the form

Generalized definitions of anything—or anyone—are provocative, sure. They get the readers' ire up. Which is to say they attract more readers. I am sure that Anthony Lane of The New Yorker (a terrific if mostly acerbic reviewer) knows that YA fiction comes in many hues and forms and flavors, and that it is fed by many ideals and many wild imaginations, many time periods, many themes, and a full array of characters and landscapes.

But here, in Lane's review of the movie "If I Stay," based on the Gayle Forman novel, he issues a standardizing decree.

Young-adult fiction: what a peculiar product it is, sold and consumed as avidly as the misery memoir and the self-help book, and borrowing sneakily from both. One can see the gap in the market. What are literate kids meant to do with themselves, or with their itchy brains, as they wander the no man's land between Narnia and Philip Roth? The ideal protagonist of the genre is at once victimized and possessed of decisive power—someone like Mia, the heroine of Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which has clung grimly to the Times best-seller list, on and off, for twenty weeks. And the ideal subject is death, or, as we should probably call it, the big sleepover.

Oh, the blogs/articles/talks that will erupt from this. Oh. Or? Perhaps we who write young adult fiction that is not part misery memoir and not self-help book, not, indeed, any single one thing, grow weary of the castigating, the easy sarcasm, the sneak and overt attacks?

Let others stomp their feet and say what they will. We've got work to do.

Garden Ghosts and River Voices, this evening at Radnor Library

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} </style> <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">One of my incurable obsessions is imagining Then. The yesterday years. The years before those. The land before it was cultivated. The earth before the glaciers peeled off. The mountains before they were sprung loose from the seas. The birds when they were the size of dinosaurs.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Give me an afternoon off, keep me on hold for a conference call, put me in the car alone for a long drive, and I’m thinking about Then. We live in a transitory and transitional time. We have entered, say some, the Epoch of the Anthropocene. We have reconstructed and redirected our planet to suit our own needs. Nothing that is here right now was here eons ago. And none of it will be here in the long future.</div></blockquote><br />— excerpted from "Garden Ghosts and River Voices," the talk I'll be giving this evening as the Community Garden Club at Wayne kicks off its season. The <a href="http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/2014... </a>is free and open to the public. Copies of <i>Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River</i> (the affordable paperback edition), my Chanticleer memoir <i>Ghosts in the Garden</i> (some of the final copies in existence), and my Chanticleer young adult novel <i>Nothing but Ghosts</i> will be available.<br /><br />The details:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><b>September 4, 2014, 6:30 PM</b></span><br /><span style="color: red;"><b> </b>Community Garden Club at Wayne<br />"Garden Ghosts and River Voices"<br />Nothing but Ghosts/Ghosts in the Garden/Flow<br />Open to the public<br />Winsor Room<br />Radnor Memorial Library<br />Radnor, PA</span> </div><br /><br /><div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK... src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK..." border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK... src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK..." border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK... src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK..." border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK... src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BethK..." border="0"></img></a>
</div>

What if we spent September re-reading our favorite books, like "Housekeeping"?

Readers of this blog (and of Handling the Truth) know how much a certain Alyson Hagy means to me—the quality of her work, her character, her mind. Not long ago she mentioned that she was re-reading Housekeeping, one of my very favorite novels of all time. Oh, I thought. And lifted my copy of the book from its shelf.

The extraordinary thing about re-reading a much-loved novel is realizing how brand new the novel can feel, even the fourth time around. For here I am this morning, turning the early pages of Marilynne Robinson's exquisite story, and thinking: How could I have forgotten this? Or this? And this? Yes, I remember the train and the lake, Sylvie and her flowers, the laundry being hung on the line. But I did not remember how swiftly and gracefully Nelson moves through genealogy and across landscape. There's that impeccable first line, "My name is Ruth." Then an indication of grandmother, sisters-in-law, a daughter, and Edmund Foster—all in seven lines. Then a sudden shift to place and to Edmund Foster's childhood home, described in great detail, "no more a human stronghold than a grave."

All this, and we haven't turned a page.

Why?

It's almost as if the novel has broken into tangents before it has even begun, and this (among so much) is what I didn't think about before (or maybe I forgot thinking about it before so that I read it as brand new)—how Housekeeping declares itself by means of a branching interiority right from the start.

Do I see that now because of something Alyson said in a note to me, or would I have seen it anyway, and is it because of the number of books that I have read between my third read of Housekeeping years ago and now, or because of my age, or because I am looking for something new in the stories I read?

I don't know, but I do wonder this: What if I decided to re-read my favorite two dozen books? What would I learn—about stories and about me?

What if we did?

A project to ponder, as September unfolds.

Geometric September

The bold geometries of baled hay. The beginning of September.

the news worth telling

I had 30,000-plus images stored in my computer, and the old Apple wasn't going to take it much longer. And so, for the past four hours I've sat here whittling those images down.

Reviewing a photo log is like reviewing a life, in miniature. Yesterday I might not have been able to tell you, as assuredly as I can now, that my photo obsessions (which may also be my life obsessions) can be divided rather readily into: family and friends, unusual (to me) places, portraits of children, my house in every season, dancers, and Chanticleer garden.

It seems that there is not that much more to me than this: I love those I love, I love to find and explore the new, I find peace in the sheltered quiet of this world, young people thrill me, dance is magic. I don't tend to photograph my vast collection of books. But I love the books too, of course.

The other day I was actually thinking about this question—the me of me. My son had called and had told me his news—the adventures he'd been having, the conversations, the outtings with friends, his river at night, his city from a rooftop club. And then he stopped and asked what I'd been up to lately, and I stumbled. I find this question a perennial stumper. What's new? What's up? It's a rare day when I have something meaningful to say.

Because most of what is new with me is what goes on inside my head. I read a great book. I had this idea. I was fighting with a sentence. I was lying down and looking up and I remembered my grandmother. Or I remembered Uncle Danny's laugh. Or I thought about a meal I once had and tried to resurrect the recipe. Or—oh, I know—I was thinking of painting the bathroom. On a good day I can tell you about a movie I've seen or opine over "Orange is the New Black" or mention that I've been to Adamstown and bought a pair of 19th century baby shoes. Or maybe I'll say (if I sense that there is time) that I lucked into a Hamburg hamburger festival, and that will be it: my news. A sentence or two, and I'm done.

What's new? Every time I'm asked I feel the Tedium of Beth coming on.

What is the life news worth telling? At my old age I'm still figuring it out.