Yesterday, in the course of a bit of home improvement, the antique modem that has served us for over ten years boiled to death. There is never a good time for such things to happen, but I have to say that I managed rather well, at least after a bit of preliminary whining. I didn’t sleep very well, but just before I got out of bed I formulated a list of four things that I ought to do in the morning, trusting that arrangements to replace the modem by lunchtime would solve the connectivity problem. (Meanwhile I was able to rely on the two MiFi cards that we stock, against just such disasters.) I set to work at once, and completed three of the tasks on the list, doing the greater part of the work on the fourth as well. If I had not managed the morning so well, I should never be sitting here this evening nattering on about what I’m reading.

¶ Darin Strauss’s Half a Life is a more modest book than the promises trumpeted by its blurbs suggest. It is not “staggering” (Elizabeth Gilbert); nor is it, really, a “story of hope” (Carrie Fisher). This is all to the good, and for the reason that the memoirist, whose car collided with an errant bicycle when he was eighteen, killing the cyclist, a younger student at his high school, states at the very end: “This tragedy isn’t mine to own. It’s hers.” With a resolve that brings the stern Puritan fathers to mind, Strauss refuses to aggrandize the terrible thing that happened to him, and in the end, as we’ve seen, he disclaims finding any meaning in it. What happened to the girl, Celine Zillke, was terrible. (Strauss himself was as blameless as it is possible to be in such an accident.) But it happened to her, not to him. What happened to him was something else, something that it took “half a life” to come to terms with.

The accident has formed me. I can no more discard it than I can discard having grown into adulthood. But I am grown now. And because I am, I can say no. I can say no to the hectoring, blistery hurt. I can say to myself: It’s all right to take in the winter beach and grass smells, and crackle back across the sand of the raod, and smile at the faces you love.

Half a life, in other words, to realize that he himself was still alive — too much so ever to regret it with any sincerity.

Half a Life is very much a book — a codex. The blank pages that lie between its short texts act as cinematic fades-to-black, pressing the reader to allow the closing moment to dilate a bit before displacing it with the next. The effect is serious without being pretentious; in a book as oppressed by mortality as this one, silence is the most eloquent reminder that personal catastrophes are often, and perhaps usually, meaningless. The “ordinary” version of Half a Life would be a search for significance. Strauss is searching only for peace, and what is meaningful is that he doesn’t begin his search in earnest until he has a family to protect from his still-disordered feelings about the accident. He can’t share what he went through, of course, but he can tell us as carefully as possibly what it felt like (and this would entail not saying too much). That is what Half a Life does. The experience that Darin Strauss has imprinted on the pages of his book is a good deal more precious than meaning would be.

¶ I’ve just begun Richard Jay Hutto’s A Peculiar Tribe of People, a book about a gruesome murder in Macon, George, in 1960, that my Internet friend Brooks Peters recommended. The recommendation itself is part of the charm; this is the sort of book that, when I was a boy, a convalescent would be given as a gift. We don’t do convalescence anymore, but it’s still very pleasant to retire with a book like this, as irresistible as a dish of cocktail peanuts.

Hutto’s book is also the sort of book that simply wasn’t written when I was a boy, because of what let’s coyly call “the sexual element.”

¶ The Cunningham billing is false advertising; I’m not going to say very much about By Nightfall right now. The book impressed me as a kind of Old Master character study, like one of the Bronzino drawings that the Museum exhibited last year. The story, with its stinging little climax — a surprising, eccentric detail that turns out to be the focus of the work — is less a drama than a complete and coherent gesture. And once you see it that way, what might have seemed a slight bit of fiction becomes a magnificent portrait. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 11:59 pm.