Best of the Backlist: Vol 2024.2
Marilynne Robinson and Lauren Groff
Marilynne Robinson, arguably one of the greatest writers and philosophers of the modern age, won the National Book Award for her first novel, HOUSEKEEPING [1980.] Reading then, and again, and now, her descriptive power withstands time, and the tale of orphaned sisters tossed from pillar to post, in the grip of an eccentric cast of relations, remains simply astounding.
I knew what the silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards – in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses. As, for example, one of two, lying still in a dark room, knows when the other is awake.
Above all, the novel has to do with impermanence. With the fleeting moments that make a life and undo a life. With the importance of a sense of home and the traumatic effect on children scrambling without. These two, Ruth and Lucille, bonded and ripped apart by tragedy and temperament, are products of place and time, and the elements, as we all are. You will be captive to every glorious word.
The next day was very fine. The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water. All day two cats prowled in the branches, pawing at little eddies and currents. The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed.
Robinson, like the younger Lauren Groff, sets a scene like no one else. Every story and novel is a master class in fiction, and, as in the very best fiction, the reader is voyeur, plot glimmering like those branches on a frozen lake.
And Robinson gets inside a character’s psyche like no one else, except maybe Groff.
I expected – an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might the last of its kind.
In Groff’s FATES AND FURIES [2015] time is again the centerpiece. Mathilde and Lancelot [Lotto] marry young, anchoring each other’s’ lives and clinging to each other like ballast on a stormy sea. Along the way, they discover the healing and destructive consequences of belonging. This novel is a different take on the impact of family tragedy – desperation, determination and, perhaps, redemption.
Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.
In a broader canvas of characters and place, they will rise and fall, rise and fall again. Groff is edgier and raw, sometimes painfully so. Robinson is gentler with her characters – their circumstance is what bleeds. In both novels, we get the characters, we root for them, cheer for them, judge them and despair for them. And, in both, we empathize with the great sense of longing in those whose roots never quite take.
Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.
Both remarkable writers, through their storytelling, reveal the challenges unique to women, not feminist rhetoric, rather contemporary and historical realities.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then.
I had no intention to pair these novels when I chose them from the backlist TBR pile, but they are perfectly complementary. Read more about marriage from different perspectives in Carol Shield lovely novel, HAPPENSTANCE. And about the devastation of orphancy in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winner, DEMON COPPERHEAD, or its progenitor, Dickens’ DAVID COPPERFIELD.
Stay tuned for further reviews of the best of the backlist, with a few new great novels thrown in, because they cannot be ignored. Cheers.