Reading Notes: Brad Watson
Brad Watson’s story, “Visitation,” in this week’s New Yorker, caught my heart in its opening paragraph, which I’ve copied below. The story goes on from the opening, as indeed it must, with marvelous readability — near the end, a fellow motel guest who’s French, not Gypsy, recapitulates the entire story in a way that I can only term ‘neoclassical’ — but it’s the beginning that I’ll come back and back to.
Loomis had never believed that line about the quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships.
The real heartbreak begins in the very next sentence, with Loomis’s determination to marry and have a child;Â that child is the object of the title trip. It is all immensely sad, but so beautiful that one doesn’t think of how it might be fixed.
After a while, though, my sense of my own literary acumen burns off, and I’m left envying the writers who don’t believe in happiness.