Books — Little Faith

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Little Faith

Nikolas Butler, Ecco (2019) 

Find the book here. Check out Butler’s website here.

I read Nickolas Butler’s Little Faith on the advice of my friend Chris, who suggests books from time to time and is always on the money with what he thinks I’ll resonate with. In specific, there are three elements of this book that really align with what I try to create in my own work. 

First, this is what I would refer to as a quiet narrative. It slowly burrows into the lives of a retired couple living in rural northern Wisconsin who are trying to hold onto their tenuous relationships, primarily with their adopted daughter and grandson, around whom their lives increasingly revolve. Buried in the core of all of this is the loss that reformed their lives in the first place. 

“The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne the burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome. It blots the sun, steals every color, snuffs out any music—it dissolves marriages like acid, bleeds out happiness and leaves in its wake nothing but gray despair.

“No one knew this better than Lyle and Peg…” (291).

This loss is what every moment is reflected against for the entirety of the novel, deepening even the casual gestures of connection with their community while adding weight to every slight and rejection of human connection.

The second facet I gravitate to in this narrative is the way in which it interrogates fairly the damage bad religious practices can inflict and also the ways in which faith is pervasive in the face of it all. Butler captures this in a spot-on depiction of a corner of Evangelical culture ripe for becoming a cult of personality reconstituting the object of its belief around a charismatic pastor.

Rather than just depict faith this singular way, however, Butler counterpoints what might be seen as an easy representation of bad church culture with Lyle’s relationship with his life-long friend and now Lutheran pastor Charlie, who listens to jazz over bourbon, shepherds a slowly dying congregation of stoic Midwestern believers, and dispenses quiet, worldly wise advice when Lyle feels like he might be losing his ability to believe.

The contrast between the two is necessary in any depiction of faith because, counter the American desire to overwrite one cultural narrative on any diverse community, religious practices and expressions of faith are numerous and divergent and seeing them as such matters.

And finally, I love stories built around decisions characters make that have clear necessity but don’t discount the costs they also carry. In this case, Lyle decides to take his grandson, who is gravely ill and being denied medical care by the cult his mother has joined, by physical force. The decision may have saved the boy’s life, but it also likely ended his relationship with his daughter. 

In sum, this book is a meditation on loss and love and what people hold closest when life inevitably begins to strip the rest away. And it is just so good.

Books — House of Broken Angels

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea, Back Bay Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Urrea’s website here.

I’ve been a fan of Luis Urrea‘s work since someone handed me his book Beside the Lake of Sleeping Children almost a decade ago. His prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is so spare and precise without losing its emotional energy.

Urrea has a way of using the sequence of his details to carry the sense of a moment, whether in scene or dialogue, that is powerful in its unassuming form. He leaves the reader to sit with what’s what’s just been revealed on the page and also prompts us to explore what they make of where it takes us off of it. The effect allows his stories to feel strangely familiar even when the circumstances are not.

This is a key to the deeply moving story at the core of his novel The House of Broken Angels, a multi-perspective rumination on family and belonging and the endings that inevitably follow beginnings.

The basic premise of the book revolves around the funeral of Big Angel’s mother and the last birthday party he will ever have, both of which happen within a few days of each other. The two events bring Angel’s extended family together at his East County San Diego home where all of them wrestle with where life has taken them and how it will, inevitably, give way to something else in death.

Swirling around Big Angel—who until his cancer became advanced was the loud, decision-making patriarch of the clan—his children and siblings try to honor his wishes for one more party and chance at reconciliation for all the ways life has estranged and bound them together at the same time.

In everyone else, the patterns of life and family unwind in new generations while the members of Angel’s ponder slipping into the roles of the elderly, some clinging to their youth while others succumb to the persistent erosions of time. This reminded me quite a bit of the dynamic of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy  in which the characters who attend the titular Billy’s wake construct themselves in the same moments they build an increasingly complex portrait of him. 

And in it all, Big Angel tries to understand what he is about to give up in death; to evaluate whether or not he has truly lived and lived well. This rumination ends in a single moment when he is able, in his weakened way, to act one last time as the father figure so many in the family still needed.

“And that was it for Big Angel. The string was cut. He felt and saw sparks rise around him. Now he knew why he was not dead yet. The sparks whirled. He thought he had stayed alive to enjoy his own wake. He thought he was still alive to make amends. He thought he was still alive to try one last hour to unite his family. But now he knew. What a pretty little tornado of light” (306).

The House of Broken Angels, then, is a novel about the living we do when we know that dying will come, not in the abstract but the tangible. And in this space, Urrea challenges readers to ask the same questions of themselves they find his characters asking.

This, I believe, is a gift.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.

A novel concept that needs to be a novel

This the second installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of many charts and diagrams I’ve created over the years trying to get an handle on this novel.

The whole point of my sabbatical, on paper anyway, was completing a novel that has been eluding me for close to eight years now. The problem: the sabbatical application that goal was written down on committed me to actually finishing the thing.

About that…

I first had the idea for the story when I was teaching in San Diego. It’s sprawling and complicated.

• Twelve independent voices collectively telling the story without the main character every getting her own chance to do so. 

• A major incident around which the entire story is built, but that never gets expressed directly on the page.

• A secondary story that may or may not draw all the threads—material and metaphysical—together as a coherent singular.

• The small question of why bad things happen and whether or not that is even a possible outcome in asking questions about those bad things in the first place.

• And doing justice to my hometown that is so often invisible on the literary landscape.

No pressure. But I had six months and a mandate…yeah…no pressure at all.

And in the end, is it done? Of course not. It’s drafted, mostly, and the rest of the stories that aren’t quite there are in process. I think it might actually happen if the sprint that is teaching my classes doesn’t completely derail my progress…which it might. *Narrator’s Voice* It did indeed derail that progress.

I needed the sabbatical because of that barrier in the first place. The problem, though, was that other barriers, good and bad, sprang up in my time away and I’m not where I wanted to be on the story. It’s not ready for others to read what I’ve come up with so I can refine it and get serious about looking for a publisher.

But I’m close. Closer than I’ve ever been with this story. I have hope. Maybe that was the best possible outcome of the sabbatical because before I took it, I was starting to lose any sense of every getting this book done. 

Or the three other ideas I have behind it.