Jake, Samantha, Victoria, and Adriana.
It’s all children, spouses, grandchildren, grandchildren’s boyfriends here. No energy left over to write. However, I’ve been reading, sitting out by the water, several novels by Stewart O’Nan that fascinate me. I’m thinking I might try writing something like them eventually. The first one I read was Henry, Himself, suggested almost apologetically by my friend Catherine. It’s quiet, she said. Which apparently was just what I needed. Now I’ve read the other two in that series. Henry Maxwell is 74. He’s a retired Westinghouse engineer married to the same woman for 50 years. His family has the usual complications—an alcoholic daughter, a son whose career has gone nowhere, and so on. They have a summer place that sounds like my own. Their lives go on in vignettes, being the ordinary lives of people. Nobody gets murdered. The children have children. There was an embarrassing affair, but it’s over.
How O’Nan holds me is in the complexity of their relationships, and in the sheer detail, the smell of water in a bucket, the rain hitting the roof, the children lined up in their sleeping bags listening for their turn at the bathroom. Tea, flowered cups, Rufus the aging dog. It’s brave to write a novel like this. You could say it’s almost a poem, but that would be a diminishment, to say it’s “almost” anything.
Tradition is for every able body to swim across the lake the last evening of their stay. That’s Zach on the paddleboard wearing the stupid traditional multiflowered swim cap.
I admit, it’s a little like strolling through an antique shop. Each item recalls my own past. But it isn’t really like that any more than a historical novel is like my past.
This isn’t a book review. It’s just a kind of wonderment that you can get away with writing about ordinariness like this. The plot is simply being alive. Not, will they finally get together, or will they catch the bad guys. You’re pulled forward by what will happen next, but the next is the next moment, not the expectation of resolution of a larger, more dramatic plot.
The only fiction I’ve written was in an undergraduate creative writing class, the first such class offered at the University of Arkansas. We were required to write all genres, so I wrote a couple of short stories. “How did you know to write this?” wrote the instructor. Something in my story about a lonely salesman on the road seemed to pull some of my own self into it. (I hadn’t read “Death of a Salesman” yet).
So I’m thinking my life is a creative writing class and maybe I could take on another genre. I believe I’ve been afraid of fiction, thinking I would have to develop a plot I couldn’t keep up with, rather than one that lives pretty much where I do. O’Nan gives me ideas, though.
Abby and Kelly. Abby’s off to college this fall.
I am writing this story in my head as I sit at dinner with the family, the evening sun so blinding off the lake that the person at the end of the table only sees black outlines of everyone else. I am thinking the glass water pitcher with the blue rings would be in it, smudged with the high calcium of the well water, which is essentially lake water. I am remembering one year there was an infestation of some sort of winged creature (carpenter ants?) that flew out just at dinner through the hole in the ceiling that led to the compartment under the eaves. How that year we ate holding our breath, hoping we could finish dinner first.
The grandchildren think we’ve had the same checkered blue vinyl tablecloth all these years. Fortunately, Bachmann’s store continues to carry the pattern.
None of this is of earthshaking importance, but it all is, actually. It’s the warp and woof of our being. Is it enough? Depends on how it’s told, of course. Also, I think these days, as I get older and presumably wiser, that our lives are exactly enough.
The P.S. . . .
If you have 14 minutes to spare, you might enjoy watching this episode of John Mauk’s wonderful “Prose from the Underground” series. He asks me what prose is, what poetry is, and what I’m working on now. I try to think of answers.
WATCH THE VIDEO