Monthly Archives: December 2022

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The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer

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The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world.

Worse, the rest of the world is dead. Something has happened to kill the people and creatures on the other side of the wall. The one man she can see sitting on a bench outside a cottage never moves, nor does his body deteriorate. Eventually it falls over and is covered by vines. Same with the cows lying in the field, the dog on the doorstep.

This is her journal.

She begins writing two years into her isolated existence. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, she must “science the shit out of this” except that her science is that of the last 12,000 years: how to grow enough food to live using only hand tools and the few items in the hunting lodge.

It is her worst nightmare come true:

As a child I had always suffered from the foolish fear that everything I could see disappeared as soon as I turned my back on it. No amount of reason could completely banish that fear. At school I would think about my parents’ house and suddenly I would be able to see nothing but a big, empty patch where it had previously stood.

I’m reminded of the recurrent nightmares my sister and I had when young about a nuclear bomb falling while we were at school. Not surprising given our post-Hiroshima, Bay of Pigs childhood.

I was mesmerized by this woman’s narrative. It is fascinating to watch a society woman learn to chop wood, milk the cow she discovers on her side of the wall, scythe and gather grass for hay, and force herself to go hungry while saving back beans and potatoes to plant in the coming year. Frequently exhausted, she forces herself to keep going because the animals—the dog and cow and a stray cat—have come to depend on her.

The changes in her are subtle. Sometimes she reflects on her previous life, looking for what writers call the through-line. Worrying about the animals, she says:

I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends, and the theatre and laugh, keeping out secret, consuming worry in our eyes.

Her grown children are on the other side of the wall. There is nothing she can do for them. There is no future beyond her own life.

One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it, and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking the old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.

I’m reminded of the summer I lived in a tent in the woods with a friend and her children in a second tent. Life was simple. Keep the tent clean, gather blueberries in the woods, fix the many meals preschoolers require, clean up, entertain the children. My brain did begin to rewire itself that summer.

The narrator says:

I was no longer in search of a meaning to make my life more bearable. That kind of desire struck me as being almost presumptuous . . . I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament.

Doris Lessing said of this book, first published in 1968 in Germany, “women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory.” I urge you all to read it, regardless of your gender. Read it partly for the occasional insights, partly for the saga of survival, partly for the companionship of the animals, partly for the critique of our human society, mostly for the spellbinding prose.

What novel have you read that you want to immediately urge everyone you know to read?

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The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser

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I was first alerted to Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” by the Longreads list of best essays in 2019 which sent me to the Paris Review where it was published. I thought it brilliant.

So I looked forward to reading this book. Hauser calls it “a work of personal nonfiction,” saying “These essays reflect my life as I remember it and the stories I’ve made of that life to understand how to keep living in it.”

In “The Crane Wife” Hauser goes to Texas to study the whooping crane shortly after calling off her engagement. Sections alternate between her engagement and her experience with the cranes. Equally important are those who study the cranes, the motley collection of volunteers who welcome her to this Earthwatch event.

She gives a poignant recounting of her deteriorating relationship, constantly setting aside her own needs as shameful. Men are entitled to have needs, but “when a woman needs, she is needy.” At the same time she is measuring the small things that fill the needs of these whooping cranes who are on the verge of extinction.

The Crane Wife is a story from Japanese folklore about a crane who fell in love with a human man. She didn’t want him to know she was a crane, so every night she plucked out all of her feathers. “Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work.”

I found the book’s cover image disconcerting: a person, presumably a woman though not obviously, whose turtleneck is pulled up to erase her face, leaving her vulnerable stomach bare. I suppose it’s meant to refer to the title essay and Hauser’s erasure of herself, but it doesn’t reflect the collection and ultimately felt demeaning.

What makes these essays so good is the way she balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes a story’s characters, sometimes both. I especially enjoyed her bookish roamings through Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s oeuvre. I also liked her travails in deciding what to say when asked to officiate at her friends’ wedding, wanting to capture the breadth and depth of the women’s relationship, while also discussing her obsession with The X Files and what she calls its MSR: Mulder-Scully Relationship.

Another reason these essays are so absorbing is her use of specific details, like shopping for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and incisive incidents like a bit about Christmas stockings. Mostly, though, it is her openness that makes these essays hit home, her willingness to be vulnerable.

Many of them have to do with her love life, which I would have found more interesting thirty years ago. Still, I enjoyed them and even listened to the entire collection twice. It is read by the author, whose voice has a bubble of laughter under it, even during the sad parts, keeping me a little off balance, which is not a bad thing.

Near the end of the book she returns to the idea of the stories we tell ourselves about the events of our lives, stepping back from the story to comment on her authorial choices. This is a smart book and gave me a lot to think about.

What essay or essays would you put on your best-of-this-year list?

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Tigers in Red Weather, by Lisa Klaussmann

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We first meet Nick and her cousin Helena in 1945. They are leaving their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Nick headed to Florida to join her husband Hughes who is leaving active duty in the Navy and Helena about to marry Avery and move to Hollywood. Helena’s first husband was killed in the war.

The cousins will miss each other but know they will meet at the family’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard: the magnificent Tiger House and the small bungalow built years ago for Helena and her mother.

Helena’s relative poverty has tamed her in comparison to Nick, whose privilege of wealth and status protect her while she indulges in wild and whimsical shenanigans. These could be shocking her conservative Florida neighbors by wearing her bathing suit on the street, ignoring her own dinner party because she feels like lying on the grass smoking and watching the stars, or helping herself to any man she fancies.

Hughes is more complicated: often distant, yet never complaining about her antics. Avery turns out to be the sort of Los Angeles oddball I remember hearing about in my younger days. He devotes himself to collecting memorabilia about his deceased former love, an actress, and trying to get the money to make a film about her life.

As the book progresses through the 1950s and 1960s we see them and their children—Nick’s daughter Daisy and Helena’s son Ed—spending overheated summers at Tiger House. Daisy’s obsession with a boy named Tyler leads her through various ups and downs, including a violent tennis match. Ed, though, is a cipher. He watches. Still, he and Daisy have an enduring connection.

One reason I read this book was that it was supposed to be set in Martha’s Vineyard. Indeed most of it is, but the setting is barely mentioned. It’s simply a wealthy colony by the sea with nothing to distinguish it from any other such spot. That is probably appropriate for the characters who just want to drink and flirt and, at least for the children, play tennis. Yet such a point had been made about how this was so important a family home that I was surprised there wasn’t more made of it.

We are left with just the characters, who bumble around doing things they think will make them happy or at least make their privileged lives bearable. A murdered girl turns up, but this is not a murder mystery. None of the characters try to find the killer, though the murder does have consequences. The author does beautifully convey the preppie world of the 1960s and the subtle lines of status and discrimination within the world of the wealthy.

What I liked about the book were the different points of view. It is hard to handle multiple points of view well, but Klaussmann succeeds brilliantly. There are five parts to the book, each narrated by a different character. Thus we get to see the events of the novel through varying perspectives, each new view adding nuance to what’s come before.

The title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, about conformity and imagination. Klaussmann’s peculiar characters and her use of multiple points of view remind me to consider how others see things and why their opinions may differ from mine. It makes me reinterpret Stevens’ line “None of them are strange” as being not a critique of conformity but a call for empathy.

Have you read a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard?

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Magic Hour, by Kristin Hannah

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Successful LA psychiatrist Julia Cates is watching her career crumble. A suit against her brought by the families of victims of one of her patients has created a media frenzy that asserts, if not her guilt, then at least her incompetence. At the same time, her sister Ellie, police chief in tiny Rain Valley on the outskirts of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, faces a challenge unlike any that has come her way before.

The two sisters are opposites: Julia the smart one who never fit in and left Rain Valley after high school; Ellie the beautiful one, adored by her father and popular in school, who stayed, taking her uncle’s place as chief. They are alike in one way, though: unsuccessful in love. Ellie, whose friend Peanut says suffers from “the curse of the small-town beauty queen,” has burned through two marriages, while Julia’s all or nothing approach to love has left her bruised, alone, and suspicious of men who are too handsome for their own good.

When an emergency call takes Ellie to the park in the small center of town, she finds a ragged child in a tree clutching a wolf pup and refusing to come down. She doesn’t seem to understand Ellie’s words and only growls or howls in response. Eventually lured down with food and sedated, the girl is found to be severely dehydrated and undernourished. The scars on her body indicate beatings and—worst of all—ligature marks around her ankles.

Ellie calls on her sister, not recognising that the “wolf girl” will generate her own media frenzy that will only add to Julia’s problems. The psychiatrist’s patient list has evaporated, so there’s nothing keeping her in LA. However, returning to a town where she never felt at home and must now see her as the failure the rest of the world believes her to be is a challenge in itself.

Their parents now dead, the two sisters must renegotiate their relationship while trying to help the nameless, terrified girl who doesn’t seem to know what a toilet or a bed are and has been separated from her only friend, the wolf cub. They must navigate not only the media but also the small-town gossips and turn them into assets in their search for the girl’s family. Working with the possibly feral child exposes their own weaknesses, strengths, and secrets.

Being set in a small town the world has left behind since the logging has ended, whose inhabitants stubbornly refuse to give up, provides a fitting frame for the story. Living now in a small town myself has made me appreciate the webs of interaction that are different from those in a city.

As with all of Hannah’s books that I’ve read, this book is almost impossible to put down. The emotions that roil the action are true to life and so carefully orchestrated that they engage the reader without becoming either exhausting or melodramatic.

I’ve heard of writers charting the levels of suspense in their novels during the revision phase. Hannah’s masterful work makes me consider charting the emotional temperature of my stories. After a little searching, I’ve found that Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers have a writing craft book about doing just that: The Bestseller Code. Analysing data, they found, among other things, that high-performing books have a similar pattern of emotional highs and lows. I guess it’s no surprise that Magic Hour seems to fit that pattern.

The aspects of the story that most interested me are the wild child’s introduction to society, the relationship between the sisters, and their relationship with the past. I was less interested in the rather predictable romance aspect of the story, but that could also be due to my personal preferences when it comes to books.

This story and its well-drawn characters will stay with me for a long time. It has added more nuance to my thoughts about nature and society. It has made me think more about what we do with our past, how much we let it influence our present. Most of all, it took me in and wouldn’t let me go until the end.

Do you have a favorite Kristin Hannah novel?