★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I can’t decide what to make of this first novel by Paul Harding, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2010. Harding is a graduate of the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and there are similarities in style and tone to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, though perhaps lacking that book’s substance and depth.
The book begins with the hallucinatory thoughts of a dying man surrounded by family, but soon widens to include his father and grandfather. Mental illness weaves through this family, and we observe in touching vignettes the pain and beauty that accompany a different way of seeing the world.
Big themes run through this spare novel: fathers and sons, the vagaries of old age and mental illness, the frailty and power of memory, the mystery of existence, the quiet desperation of conventional life. There were passages that pulled me up short:
What is it like to be full of lightning? What is it like to be split open from the inside by lightning? … It was as if there were a secret door that opened on its own to an electric storm spinning somewhere out on the fringes of the solar system.
And,
Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?
But the storytelling felt disjointed and confusing, with odd intervals that seemed indulgently vague. I hoped these fragments would gather meaning as the story progressed, but I never caught the thread of connection. Perhaps the scope of the book was simply too ambitious. It might have been better had Harding gone deeper with one or two themes than attempt to tackle so much in one short book.
Highlights
What is it like to be full of lightning? What is it like to be split open from the inside by lightning? Howard used to imagine that it was like the rupture of a fit. Although he never remembered them, he had the sense that, although there was cold before and chills after, during his seizures his blood boiled and his brain nearly fried in its skull pan. It was as if there were a secret door that opened on its own to an electric storm spinning somewhere out on the fringes of the solar system. He imagined the door. Closed, it was invisible, cloaked in the colors of the world (it was outside; it moved). Open, it was made of thick plain oak and swung outward. It had a wooden knob because the electricity on the other side would erupt from a metal handle.
There was the door, or maybe the doors, or maybe not even doors, just the curtains and murals of this world and the star-gushing universe was usually obscured by them-the curtains and the murals and Howard, by accident of birth, tasted the raw stuff of the cosmos. Other, larger, inhuman souls might very well thrive on such a feast. Howard thought angels, but the image he had of the seraphim, with their long blond curls and flowing white robes and golden halos, did not fit with the more frightening, dark, powerful species he conjured, which would gorge on and delight in what, when ingested by him, instead of sating, instantly burst the seams of his thin body.
O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs’ eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your buster against the world God gave you. Enough of clamor, your embarrassing tendencies, your crooking of paths in the name of straightness. Enough of your calling ruin upon the Moor and the Hindoo, the Zulu and the Hun. None of it gains you a jot. Behold, and be a genius!