A friend of mine recently mentioned that a book he’d just read was “deeply moving,” that it actually had him in tears—and I was as surprised to hear this as I was jealous. I could not remember the last book to provoke in me a profound emotional response; lately, when I talk about literature, it’s the cold language of assessment that I hear. I admire a novel’s restraint, or its structure; I laud certain contortions of language, or creative transgressions of narrative; I measure the vicissitudes of its protagonist against the agitations of the plot. But when was the last time I confessed that a particular work of literature moved me—casual shorthand for a profound experience? Is it possible, in the age of detachment and snark, to earnestly invoke a word like “catharsis” to describe a moment of transformation—an intensely induced feeling—rather than an Aristotelian sum of tragic parts?

I looked at my summer reading projects and wondered if anything approaching emotional purification was in store for me. I am not sure. Currently, I’m in the early chapters of The Child in Time, a novel by Ian McEwan that I snatched from the library one damp afternoon, rushing while my youngest daughter chatted her way up and down the rows, threatening to spill whole shelves of books onto the floor. The novel is about a child abduction, subject matter likely as any to terrify me, and the first couple of chapters are effective—but then, this is McEwan, and the kidnapping is an occasion for contemplating the mind’s perception of the passage of time; the dissection of this devestated family is, at times, clinical. McEwan is also interested in things like education and social policy and the relationship between stories and their audiences, and I’m intellectually engaged with the material, which is enough, isn’t it—only, a deep personal purgation is probably not ahead. We’ll see, though.

Meanwhile, I decided in May, before catharsis became a desirable prerequisite for summer reading selections, that I would revisit science fiction this summer, and to that end I’ve borrowed a hefty collection of four novels by Frank Herbert, smashed together in small type between two covers. Understand: my thirteen-year-old self loved these books, from the weirdly illustrated cover art to the inevitably musty smell that wafted up from the pages. I suppose I understood, back then, that all literature transports the reader in some sense or another, but books like Dune did more than transport: they obliterated. Gone were the oppressive elements of my immediate reality—bullies, parents, siblings, homework, religion—and gone, too, the very planet itself. I am curious to see how Frank Herbert’s work holds up, now that I’m in my mid-thirties and the desire, once chronic, to escape my sense of self and the routine of my life, has diminished.

Innocent nostalgia, yes. But catharsis? Epiphany? Unlikely, I suspect.

Perhaps there’s hope. A friend in New York City recently mailed me some books, and two of them are on my reading list. The first is The Interrogation, by J. M. G. Le Clézio, a writer I knew nothing about until Wikipedia told me he won the Nobel Prize last year. The cover of the book is handsomely existential, with a lot of blank expressions and disconnected gazing, just slightly reminiscent of my paperback copy of Nausea. Ah, the French. The solitary review on Amazon notes that “the adamantine opacity of the descriptions are reminiscent of the nouveau roman,” which sounds like something I might have said seven or eight years ago, when churning out literary essays was an imperative. Regardless, I think I’ll enjoy this book a lot, though the prospect of catharsis appears dubious.

However, the second book from New York is Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn; according to Paul Morton, “Tóibín has a Bergman-esque eye for the Irish landscape and a Jamesian eye for the strange, ambiguous and uncomfortable social interaction.” I’d say this is true, although some of the Tóibín I’ve read can be understated, even muted at times. Anyway, I’ve done my best to avoid spoiling myself on the plot of Brooklyn, but so far it seems the most likely novel to produce the sort of “moving” experience I covet.

In any case, these are probably enough books to get myself through August; still, I am interested in what others have chosen for their summer reading lists, and open to suggestions—particularly for books that are likely to be emotionally transformative, but really, anything. (Warning: anyone who mentions Mitch Albom is forever banned from making comments.)

Share This

Our policy with Eleanor’s name has been (and still is) a simple one: call her whatever you’d like. For a long time we called her Ella, or I did, anyway; my mother and brothers still do. My wife prefers the trisyllabic heft of the full name, on which she performs jazzy variations: Eleanora, Noodle, Noodlelicious. My father-in-law calls her Nora; my mother-in-law skips to the middle name and calls her Yvonne. My own father, adrift from the orbit of our lives, doesn’t call her anything, but once transmitted via email that he liked the name, “even if it’s a mouthful to say.”

Originally, I wanted to name my youngest daughter Nora, a name that seemed playfully barefoot somehow, a light and easy name that twirled on its toes. But my wife and I were done having children—never again would we stamp an infant with the jumble of sounds by which the world would know it—so this one had to count. Four days after she was born we finally settled upon Eleanor. It seemed a sturdy name, it alluded to women in history that we admired, and so far as nicknames were concerned, it was pliable. I tried using Nora, of course, but my wife and other children chose Ella, and it was easier for me to fall in line. By the time Nicole dropped Ella and reverted to Eleanor, the habit was set, and I could not will myself to call my daughter the name I preferred.

Twenty-two months later, though, and the girl—whatever you call her—is talking. “Mama, I need chocolate now!” she says. “Mine!” she says. “Sit in my chair!” she says. “Blanket now. Read now. Cup now. Eat now!” She points to her stomach. “Belly!” she yells. She follows her brother to the bathroom. “Potty now! Diaper off! Off now! Bath now!” The cat dashes across the hallway, a black and white blur against the stairs, and my daughter points, shrieks so loud my ears register feedback. “Bippert! Bippert run!”

Bippert? But our cat’s name is Ophelia—a name our oldest daughter chose for her. Our cat is freakish and brutal, more Lady Macbeth than her own tragic namesake. She cowers in the corners, licking her paws, waiting for us to let her outside, where even our small backyard surrenders enough mice and birds to slake her bloodlust. Sometimes, especially when winter drives her indoors and makes her pitiful, I call the cat Baby-O. Rarely, when my son talks about her, she is Kitty. But she is never Bippert.

“What’s the cat’s name?” I ask Eleanor.

“Bippert! Say meow!”

I think for a moment, then point to her brother, who’s splashing in the tub beside her. “What’s his name?” I ask.

“Mason!”

“And your sister—what’s your sister’s name?”

“Madeline!”

“What about me? What’s my name?”

“Daddy!” She aims her finger at my head and laughs. I reach out and put my finger on her chest.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Nor!” She punches both of her fists into the air above her head when she answers. “I’m Nor!”

“Nor?” But of course: it’s the last three letters of her name, the scrap of sound she retains when she hears her mother calling, her sister cajoling, her brother teasing.

Later that night, dressing her for sleep, I finally call her Nora—it’s strange, suddenly, to think I’ve been calling her Ella, that I’ve been getting it wrong all these months. But her face scrunches into a frown. “No,” she says. “I’m Nor. Nor!”

I haven’t called my daughter Ella for several weeks now. It seems impossible that I ever called her Ella: it’s not her name, or nickname even. I invoke my paternal prerogative, naturally, and call her Nora more often than Nor: after all, if she can call the cat Bippert, I can append one lonely vowel to the name she’s taken for herself. On this matter Nor is usually tolerant, but every now and then she glares, thumps her chest, and corrects her ridiculous father.

Share This

I was eighteen when I read my first short story by John Updike, an elegantly plotless piece called “Playing With Dynamite” that appeared in the 1993 edition of The Best American Short Stories. I had graduated from high school that year, and for a time shared with an eczematic roommate a bleak apartment that overlooked a bleaker gas station. I was lonely and depressed and bored, crushingly bored, and I read a lot, mostly in a listless and inattentive mode. Consequently I’ve forgotten most of what I read. Looking back, it makes sense that I remember reading Orwell and Camus and Kafka—dystopia and absurdity appealed to me, suited me, then.

It makes less sense, though, that I remember reading Updike. What did I know about adult love and sex and marriage, about fidelity and infidelity, about aging and religion? What, for that matter, did I know about America? My world was circumscribed by the gas station, the bakery where I worked, the schedule of buses when my car broke down, the comings and goings of my roommate, the estrangement from my family, the occasional visits with friends. It seemed impossible that I would ever have a properly arranged domestic life, with its own particular wrinkles and entirely respectable and perhaps even profound moments of reflection, despair, crisis. But, apart from my inability to relate to it, Updike’s story seemed true, and a year later, when I moved back in with my parents—I was burned out in the end—I purchased The Afterlife, my first Updike first edition hardcover. Now, in my thirties, married and raising children, I own twenty-three of his books.

Obviously, I like his work, like him.

In 2003 I left my wife and daughter at home and dragged my friend Miles to New York City with me, to hear Updike read at the 92nd Street Y. Updike’s collected short stories had just been published, and I had been reading his novels steadily for about a year: nothing but Updike. Was there another writer describing family life in America the way he had? So Miles and I took a train from New Haven to Central Station and stepped into the rainiest day I’ve ever known. I’d failed to check the forecast, and neither of us had umbrellas or even good jackets, and we tried in vain to avoid the puddles in the street, in vain to hide out in Starbucks and, later, a restaurant. We’d arrived in the city early, had hours to kill, and when we finally took our seat in the auditorium, we were cold and soaked to the skin.

If the situation had been reversed, and it had been Miles who so poorly planned an expedition to see an author for whom I might muster only a passing bit of enthusiasm, I doubt I’d have been as patient with him as he was with me. After the reading we started to wait in the back of a very long line of Updike acolytes, many of them bearing armfuls of books to be autographed; the line led to an elevator, which took small groups down or up to what I could only guess was another long line. After the travel and the storm and all of the waiting we’d already done, after shivering in the auditorium all evening, I called it off: no book-signing for us.

“I just want you to know,” Miles said when were were outside, walking to the subway, “I was prepared to stay in that line with you.”

Looking back, I’m not sure why I so keenly wanted to see Updike speak—something like reverence must have been involved, right?—but the trip was worth the effort. He read two stories that night: “The Lucid Eye in Sleepy Town” and “Leaves.” The former is easier to hear than to read, the latter—dense, poetic, introspective, more of an essay or meditation than a story—is easier to read than to hear, and is probably the better piece of writing. “I am told I behaved wantonly,” he read, “and it will take time to integrate this unanimous impression with the unqualified righteousness with which our own acts, however miscalculated, invest themselves.” That line, ten years after I’d first read Updike, snapped me back to “Playing With Dynamite,” and I realized something like this: even a mundane, ordinary life can explode, is rigged to explode from the start. That was the true thing that, in the fog of post-adolescent malaise, I’d not understood before.

Not that Updike ever described my life, though he described just about everything, tangible and abstract; not that I saw myself in his protagonists; not that I held his faith or shared his vision or, through his words, experienced a personally transformative epiphany. But, insofar as a writer is the reader’s companion, he was a good companion for me: wise, eloquent, kind, entertaining, provocative—and insofar as the reader knows the writer through the writer’s art, I am sad that he is gone, and I will miss him.

Share This

On certain Saturday mornings—if he wasn’t working overtime, if we weren’t going into the city for our magazine ministry—my father would make pancakes for us while my mother slept in. “Super-duper-flip-flop-flapjacks!” he’d call. He served them with tall glasses of milk and we, still in our pajamas, ate them faster than he made them.

The pancakes came from a box of Bisquick and we usually had some Log Cabin or Aunt Jemima syrup. We thought there was nothing more delicious, and even in my twenties it was unthinkable that I might ever make pancakes another way. Sure, my father could be miserly with the syrup; there had to be enough for four boys, after all, and we all wanted seconds and thirds and then my mother would want pancakes too, when she woke up later. We must’ve demolished a box of Bisquick and drained Jemima dry every pancake breakfast we had. Still, it was impossible for us to imagine a better breakfast.

Fast-forward to adulthood and marriage and children and me at the kitchen counter, watching pancakes on a hot plate while my children skid their chairs into place and bang their forks on our scratched, crayon-streaked dining room table. Some mornings, for a moment, I feel that I’ve stepped into my father’s role. Then again: nearly every morning like this, Mason and Eleanor both help me make the batter from scratch, flip the cakes, spread their own butter. That’s our own bit of ritual, not passed down. All things my father did, even the things he did cheerfully, he did at a distance. His happiness felt rehearsed. The “super-duper-flip-flop-flapjacks” line, which I do not invoke for my children, was not my father’s: it came from a children’s book we had about a boy who wanted to run away from home.

Also: in our house, we have real maple syrup. This is no point of snobbery. The first time I had real maple syrup was when I started dating Nicole, sometime in late 2000. We were grocery shopping, and I reached for the supermarket variety of maple syrup. “What are you doing?” she said. “Did you know there’s only two percent syrup in that?” The small glass bottle we bought at the supermarket was easily three times what a large bosomy bottle of Jemima cost, but later, in the kitchen of our apartment, on a morning that was cold the way today is cold—the incipient chill before frost—the maple syrup was … sharper, somehow. Less viscous but fuller, more concentrated in flavor. In any case it was not at all like the syrup I’d known: it was much, much better.

After real maple syrup, you can’t go back. Just like, after you invite your children to make the pancake batter with you, you can never again make it alone. And on mornings like this, real maple syrup is all it takes to make me feel, in a way that’s strangely comforting, fatherless.

Share This

Yesterday Nicole had some afternoon appointments and Madeline was at a friend’s house and I assumed that, with only two children at home, I’d have a couple easy summer hours on my hands. Mason was wonderful, of course. He looked at books and played with cars and blocks and was generally pleasant to be around. Eleanor, on the other hand, engaged in the following activities for the brief duration of her mother’s absence:

gnawed at a stick of butter she took from the refrigerator, then smeared her greasy hands all over the art easel

pulled open the oven door, which fell on top of her

ripped the pages of a book I was reading to Mason

hurled all of the mail and magazines from the dining room table to the dining room floor

attempted to throw my alarm clock into the toilet

stood on the arm of the couch, toes curled over the edge, leaning forward

climbed on top of the trash can so she could reach into the sink and toss cups around the kitchen

turned the air conditioner on and off, on and off, on and off, ad infinitum

stuffed her mouth full of marbles and pranced around the living room while I chased her

opened a tube of toothpaste and squeezed it onto the bathroom sink

yelled the word “cup”—whether she had a cup or not—more times than I can count

shampooed her hair with fistfuls of cheese

She did these things smiling, laughing, without a hint of malice—with, in other words, the kind of disposition that says, love me or hate me, this is just who I am.

Share This

The New Jersey Turnpike was breaking our hearts—hearts that had been already beaten by the stop-and-go jerkiness through New York. The tolls broke our hearts. The skyline, streaked now and then by thin clouds and loud airplanes and ramps that rose and fell in undulations of concrete, broke our hearts. But it was the horizon that did us in: every turn, every small ascension of highway, seemed to offer hope that the traffic around us would loosen, set us free from the automotive coagulation of metal and glass and tire and exhaust, and let us drift easy down 95 to Florida.

After six hours I took over the driving, and Nicole put a pillow up against the window and tried to fall asleep. An idling truck would wake her up. “We’re still here?” she’d say. “How can we still be here? How?”

It was half past midnight when we finally reached the end of the Turnpike. The tollbooths were about fifty car-lengths ahead of us: turnstiles into open highway. But we did not move. None of the cars moved. The pavement wasn’t painted, and without lanes the cars had bunched together even tighter. I thought of metaphors: a jigsaw puzzle glued together; a glacier receding through a narrow valley corridor; a colander clogged with lard. I resisted the urge to lean on the horn.

Maddie woke up.

“Where are we?” she said. She was lucid, and in three words had adopted a serious, literal, accommodating tone that in her appears infrequently. Her mother, sister, and brother were still sleeping. Braking taillights cast a pink glow on the unshadowed part of her face.

“We’re still driving,” I said, though we were doing no such thing. “You can go back to sleep.”

She extended an arm. I reached back and took her hand. She leaned her head against the seat. I don’t remember what she said next, or what I said to her. I want to say that her remarks were empathetic: “It must be hard sitting up there all night.” Or precocious: “How odd it is, all these cars unable to move forward.” But the truth is, I don’t remember what she or I said—just the feeling that here, beyond the context of our normal lives, we had entered into each other’s company without pretense: she wasn’t a fairy queen, or an impatient brat, and I wasn’t a grumpy patriarch—and, conversing in this strangely late hour of night, we were receptive to and grateful for the pleasantly insubstantial utterances that made our conversation. She fell back asleep ten minutes later, her hand still in mine.

Though we hadn’t moved so much as a foot across the dark expanse of macadam, I felt unusually alert, optimistic, and magnanimous when I dropped her hand and took the wheel. After we finally got through the tolls I took the first exit—the AM radio warned of highway sinkholes ahead—and aimed the car south on the first route I saw. Soon we were lost. Nicole awoke and fetched directions from an all-night convenience store and fell back asleep. Forty minutes later we were on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The moon was still low enough to light up the water, and the bridge stretched on and on. No other cars, no brakes or headlights, no tolls. I reached back and touched Maddie’s hand, I jostled Nicole’s shoulder, but no one woke up. I had driven my family, all of them sleeping and probably dreaming, into a photograph that was like a dream, and was the only one to see it.

Share This