Showing posts with label Pat Conroy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pat Conroy. Show all posts

Thursday, June 21, 2012

"Even if the Dream Isn't Real, the Dreamers Are"


20th century American literature is awash in a particular version of the American Dream, the green light that always seems to be in grasp through the accumulation of wealth.  But as Balzac purportedly opined, "behind every great fortune there is a great crime", be it to society or one's family or both. It plays out in our literature and one only has to read a newspaper to see it in life.  Gatsby or Madoff, living the dream, for love or money or both, at least for a while.  

In the last thirty years we have had two real estate busts, people pinning their hopes of wealth by buying and selling, flipping,the greater fool theory at work in its purist form, like a game of musical chairs, until the music stopped.  And so it is for the protagonist in Eric Puchner's first novel, Model Home, as well as it was for the author's father.  While the novel is in some ways autobiographical, in subtle or more transparent ways, so are most novels.

For some time I've been "worrying" about who will carry on the tradition established by our great American novelists and short story writers, the most recent ones (in my opinion) being John Updike, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver and perhaps to that list I might add some of my other favorites, ones who could join the ranks of the big four, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Russell Banks, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Franzen (merely on the merits of two novels).  Unfortunately, of the first four, only Roth is still alive, but anything he writes, and the others I mentioned, I will buy and read.  That goes for Pat Conroy, Anita Shreve, and Ethan Canin as well.

So it was a thunderclap when I read Eric Puchner's novel (hat tip to my son, Jonathan).  Here is a serious contemporary writer who knows how to tell a tale, paint a picture of American life through his characters, make us feel moved, walking the line through the comic-tragic, drawing us into something important about family relationships.  It remains to be seen whether his first novel will be his best, a literary catharsis of his own life experiences, or whether this is setting him up for a truly great literary career.  Puchner also has published a collection of short stories, Music Through the Floor, and although I have not yet read them (but will do so), I understand there are elements of Carver and Cheever in those stories.  I can't think of a higher praise than that.

The story itself, although set in the 1980s, is as relevant for today's economic times.  It is about a family, the Zillers, who have moved to California for the "good life" -- a family which was close when they lived with more modest expectations in the Midwest -- but now find themselves being pulled apart.  The father, Warren Ziller, hides his deteriorating economic circumstances from his family, which makes his wife, Camille, suspect him of having an affair.  No such luck -- that would have been an easier road to travel.

In an ironic twist, the real estate development that Warren had been hawking, in the middle of the desert, but portrayed by him as an upcoming idyllic community (with the promise of a major shopping center which is actually being constructed as a waste treatment plant that stinks up the neighborhood literally, and their lives figuratively), ultimately becomes their own home, the only such residents, when Warren's secret comes out and his older son, Dustin, suffers disfigurement from the explosion and fire of their former home before it was repossessed.  Meanwhile, his younger sister, Lyle, has had an affair with the security guard from their former community, Hector, who later becomes Dustin's caretaker (for reasons best explained by reading the novel). The younger child, Jonas, is neglected by his family, left to wander the desert outskirts. 

This is a family that has been incinerated by the American Dream, and after a metaphorical  climax, they are hurled in different directions.  Puchner draws heavily on his own family history to portray the heartbreak of this devolution. Some of the author's feelings about his own childhood are endowed in Jonas.

Most great writers have a strong sense of place.  Cheever had his NYC suburbs, Updike had New England and PA, Roth harkens back to Newark and its environs, Richard Ford's New Jersey, and Anne Tyler and Baltimore are peas in a pod.   Puchner has staked out California to explain his version of the American dream.  Ah, California, when as a publisher, I used to visit the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, monuments to the documentation of the American dream itself.  I felt LA, or at least that part of it, was unreal.

Puchner's particular focus is not California's glamorous Hollywood, it is the underbelly of the American dream as played out in the California desert.  Remember Dreiser's lobster and squid in mortal combat, a scene from his The Financier?  As a child, Frank Cowperwood, the young financier, watches this battle in a fish tank, Dreiser writing: "It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: How is life organized? Things lived on each other – that was it…Sure, men lived on men.”

I couldn't help but think of that quote reading Puchner's description of Jonas' sojourns in the California desert: "Most days he spent roaming the desert. It was a relief to be free of school, that gloomy place where the teachers wore shorts and his locker was so hot he had to open it with a sock over his hand, where no one spoke to him except the garbled voice in his head and he'd somehow completed his transformation into a ghost. In the desert, at least, there were extraordinary things. There were scorpions eating each other. There were rats hopping around like kangaroos. There were wasps dragging tarantulas around by the leg. There were snake skins dried into paper, bird nests as small as contact lenses, lizard skeletons dangling from creosote bushes, delicate as ice. Once, not far from the house, he saw a roadrunner go after a rattlesnake, its right wing extended like a matador's cape, When the snake lunged, the roadrunner snapped up its tail and then cracked it like a whip, slamming its head against the ground - over and over - to bash its skull."

And when one pursues dreams of riches, or in its more sanitized version, the better life, there are winners and losers.  Even the material winners may find their dreams to be vapid.  Warren's fall from grace is even harder, a once happy family, now grappling with his mismanagement and unfortunate economic circumstances.  Like Madoff, Warren's life became one of lies and self deceit, convincing himself that even though they were rapidly running out of funds, the big payoff will come when he makes a success of his land development scheme (Auburn Fields, an ironic name for a place in the middle of the desert), all will be well: "He did not want to lie to her, but every time he considered telling her the truth-that he'd lost their retirement funds, the kids' college funds, and every fund in between-his tongue dried up like paper and he couldn't speak. When he managed to get Auburn Fields off the ground, he reminded himself, he'd be able to put the money back in." 

And dreams are not only Warren's.  His wife, Camille, pursues approbation from her family and colleagues as a producer of educational films, without much success.  Ultimately she has to leave him:  "She could forgive him for moving them out to California, perhaps, for bankrupting them in pursuit of some fantasy of wealth, for falling victim to a malady of shame he could never pay off -- she could forgive Warren these things, but this was different from getting over them.  In the end it was her disappointment in him that had proved toxic.  He'd squandered the life they might have had together....Now that she'd left, she could see him more clearly: a broken man, well-meaning but not as brave as life required, who'd become something he'd never imagined."

Dustin, the older son, sees a fabulous career for himself as a rock musician but becomes a withdrawn malcontent after being disfigured in the explosion. Jonas who is mistakenly blamed (by himself as well) for Dustin's accident becomes the invisible child.  Lyle, the daughter, has dreams of attending Columbia, but is convinced that hope is remote: "Driving to work, Lyle tried not to let the monotonous brown vistas lull her into a coma. She distracted herself by touching the Columbia bumper sticker on the dashboard. She made an effort whenever she could, so that its Ivy League juju would enter her fingers and climb upward to her brain, transforming her into a perfect applicant. She liked to fantasize that she was the only one to get a sticker in the mail: so eager was Columbia to have her as a student, they'd slipped it into her application materials like Willy Wonka's golden ticket. Lyle had stuck it on the dashboard  to remind herself -while she was driving through the barren, dream-sucking desert - that she wouldn't be living out here forever."

Each family member feels like he/she is on the outside, looking in, dazed by the events that profoundly change their individual lives and drive them apart.  Puncher writes from Camille's perspective: "What had happened?  How had they unraveled again, worse than before?  The mystery of life was not how it started, Camille thought.  It was how people with every excuse to be close could grow distant as satellites."  Then, there is Warren's take on it: "What an odd thing a family was, Warren thought.  The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless."

In fact, the forty-nine chapters of the novel constantly switch back and forth between the main characters, almost like a series of tightly woven short stories with the commonality of the Ziller family experience.  And Puchner's writing can be quite moving and beautiful, such as when towards the end of the novel, Warren is trying to make a living and salvage some self respect working as a cutlery salesman, and while selling to a woman who has a son and a daughter, younger than his, Warren "pretends" that his own family is watching him in action: "He was making a pitch to them as well, the family he'd lost.  It was not the words themselves that mattered but the fact that he was making them.  He was doing something for a change.  In the end, if it was a good-enough pitch, his family might even buy what he had to offer.  They would say, It's not too late, you've actually learned something, your life hasn't been entirely hapless and for naught."  Knowing Warren's huge fall from grace, these words are heart-rendering.

A "must read" companion piece is GQ's March 2011 nonfiction piece by the author, Schemes of My Father; Like most California dreamers, my East Coast dadtried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternalsuntans. Too bad we all got burned   It explains much about the novel's autobiographical elements and passion, particularly the author's love for the "real California" which is not the beach life that we've all associated with the state.  As Puchner puts it: "It's this real California—and not the one my father invented for us—that I still call home, one that's closer to my heart than any place on earth. There's something about my father's love for the state, no matter how misdirected it was, that seems to have seeped into my blood. Or perhaps it's the love itself that I love. Which is to say: Even if the dream isn't real, the dreamers are. There's something about the struggling actors and screenwriters and immigrants who live here, the pioneer spirit that despite everything still brings people to the edge of America in search of success, that makes me feel at home."  Puchner writes with uncommon honesty.

The novel made me think of the "model homes" of my own life.  We bought our first home in Westport, CT in 1971, staying there for only three years.  Although a cottage, it was situated on two beautiful acres of pine forest.  We moved to Weston, CT where we lived for twenty two years, the home where we raised our family.  It too was secluded in the woods.  We constantly worked on the house, expanding it until it was truly a rambling ranch.  I wept the day we left that house, not only because of what we put into it, but for the symbolism of leaving it with our sons now grown.  Ironically, it was ripped down a few years after we moved to build one of those "McMansions," all that work, all those years, poof! --  vanished!  This was followed by four years in a home on the Norwalk River, perhaps the home that had the most spectacular views, as Oyster Boats went out each day or barges would move up the river.  Then finally our home of the last twelve years in Florida, again on the water, where one can always find that special sunset.  So, two homes in the woods and two homes on the water and none in the desert.  We've been lucky. 

I eagerly await Puchner's next work.















Thursday, September 29, 2011

Catching Up...

The last few weeks went by in a whirlwind. During that period we took a two week cruise in the Baltic region, trans Atlantic flights to Holland and back, packing up from our summer on the boat, and then closing it up involving a myriad of operational chores best left unsaid and then driving the 1,250 miles home, 800 miles on the 2nd day -- made pleasurable by Stephen King's audio edition of On Writing read by the author himself -- arriving to assess all the work to be done in and around the house, particularly on the tropical overgrowth of landscaping, courtesy of the humid Florida summers.

The ports we visited deserve their own commentary and as I pull together photos another posting with a description of the ports will be forthcoming, but a few preliminary words on the cruise itself. We've taken many and of course beside the interesting ports, ship life and days at sea are high points to me. We try to confine our cruises to the "smaller" ships, in this case the MS Rotterdam. This particular ship accommodated "merely" 1,380 passengers on this trip, her displacement at 61,849 tons. We had been on this ship once before, almost ten years ago, through the Panama Canal. She is still an elegant ship, although refitting and updating will be needed soon.


Our cruise covered 2,998 miles (remarkable as I did not realize the region was so large). We arrived in Amsterdam after the fastest trans-Atlantic flight I've ever been on as the tail winds were over 100 miles per hour, only five hours from JFK. They served drinks and then dinner shortly after departing, turned off the lights for this "overnight" flight and it seemed as if only a half hour went by before they were turning on the lights for breakfast. At one point our air speed was 720 miles per hour. I felt like Chuck Yeager about to break the sound barrier. I hadn't flown KLM in some time, a very decent airline, but well worth the few dollars to upgrade to "economy comfort" seats.

We arrived in Amsterdam very early in the morning and had to wait several totally disorganized hours for the pre-arranged bus connection we had made through Holland America to finally depart for Rotterdam where our ship awaited. One would think that at least this part of the trip would be under control -- after all HA has done this before.

The cruise took us to Copenhagen, Warnamunde (Berlin's nearest port), Tallin, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm. We were supposed to go to Helsinki as well, but weather prevented the visit, for reasons I will explain when I write up our port visitations.

Embarking in Rotterdam, our ship life began by locating our cabin (mid ship, Ocean view), and as we live on a boat during the summer, we found it commodious by comparison --including several spacious closets and lots of drawer space!

There are so many things to do, even on a relatively small ship such as this, but our routine was to have a set dining time, a table with three other couples, nice people with whom we could exchange pleasantries about the trip, but politics and related topics were strictly off limits. After dinner most people went to the musical production shows but we discovered a great jazz trio in one of the lounges and became regulars there. Every evening they took requests from the great American songbook, the music we love so much.


The drummer (Seth) and the pianist (Jane) are a married couple who do gigs in Nantucket when they are not traveling on a cruise ship (the bass player was from Spain, hired by the ship, and fit right in). Jane is one of the best jazz pianists I've ever heard on a cruise ship and she plays requests from "lead sheets" or "fake books" which is the way I play, taking the melody line and the chords and improvising (although her skills are head and shoulders above mine). But she does all this from an iPod which has searchable PDFs of thousands of songs. I requested (among many others) the little-played "Cottage for Sale", a rendition we loved having been recorded years before by Julie London. To our amazement, Jane came up with the song immediately...

"A little dream in a castle
With every dream gone
It is lonely and silent
The shades are all drawn
And my heart is heavy
As we gaze upon
A cottage for sale

The lawn we were proud of
Is waving in hay

Our beautiful garden is
Withered away.
Where we planted roses
The weeds seem to say..
A cottage for sale"


Jane's style is so reminiscent of Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. Her voicings are superb. In fact she played several Bill Evans pieces, including Waltz for Debby. These are not the kind of offerings one normally finds on a cruise ship. More information on Seth and Jane can be found here.

When I am away from everyday life while cruising, particularly the day to day gyrations of the market and politics and my beloved computer, reading becomes a pleasure, interrupted only by port visits, the obligatory meals, and jazz delights. The rest of the world goes by as contact is mostly limited to CNN International on board, a 4 page summary of the New York Times, and, of course, occasional, but very expensive and slow, Internet connections via satellite. Still, I tried to keep up with the baseball scores and the pennant races while on board, and the latest machinations of the approaching presidential election.

While away it seems that President Obama proposed a job-creation, infrastructure-fixing plan, with tax implications for the wealthy, one that was immediately shot down by the Republicans. How one can be so against a more progressive tax structure -- albeit with fixes of loopholes and some of the complexity along the way -- while 46 million Americans are living at the poverty level is beyond me. We had lunch with a woman one day who pontificated that half of Americans don't pay any taxes and that is why we should have a flat tax (very regressive in my mind). Hence, politics and the economy were off limits discussions (for me at least -- no sense on such a trip). However, on board I managed to see parts of the "Republican presidential debates" which were laughable as moderated by Fox, most candidates invoking God and the Constitution as their very own personal, exclusive allies.

So it was no wonder, off with the TV and on to some good reading. The first one I tackled, sort of an underground classic for which I thank my blogger friend, Emily, was J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country. This is written in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, a wonderful tale about a medieval mural of the apocalypse which was painted on the ceiling of a church in the countryside somewhere in England and whitewashed over. The man who is hired to restore the painting, in the process, resurrects his own soul in the bargain. He is separated from his wife, Vinny, and recovering from his experiences during WWI:"The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought -- a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won't be a casualty anymore. Well, we live by hope." It is a little gem of a redemptive novel.

From the sublime to the entertaining I picked up another Jonathan Tropper novel, This is Where I Leave You. Here is yet another clever novel by him, the focal point of which is our hero, Judd Foxman, sitting a seven day shiva with his dysfunctional family, as his marriage is falling apart. Tropper is known for his smart witty dialogue and this novel delivers. Although comic, Tropper is an observer of the manners and mores of modern times and I almost think of him as a Jane Austin type, delectable to read, with stinging observations. For example, this is his riotous description of sitting shiva (sat on chairs lower than their visitors) on one particular day: "The parade of weathered flesh continues. Sitting in our shiva chairs, we develop a sad infatuation with the bared legs of our visitors. Some of the men wear pants, and for that we are eternally grateful. But this being late August, we get our fair share of men in shorts, showing off pale, hairless legs with withered calves and thick, raised veins like earthworms trapped beneath their flesh who died burrowing their way out. The more genetically gifted men still show some musculature in the calf and thigh areas, but is more often than not marred by the surgical scars of multiple knee operations or heart bypasses that appropriated veins from the leg. And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane, ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. there really should be a dress code." A laugh a minute because it is so true.

My final novel for the cruise was one I've been saving for years for the right moment, a mass market paperback edition, small and portable, although some 500 pages, so ideal for carrying on a trip -- Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline. I've read most of Conroy and when he writes autobiographical material, he is at his best. I'm sure many of the episodes he chronicles in this book, one about a boy coming of age in a military college in Charleston, SC, come right out of his own life experiences. It is powerful and fast-moving, a page turner, beautifully written, Conroy being one of our most lyrical writers today. It is about the true meaning of honor, a painful lesson our protagonist, Will McLean, learns in the real world. Will is not from the elite society of Charleston as are some of his classmates. He is on scholarship as the point guard on the basketball team, as was Conroy himself was when he went to school. Although Conroy's autobiographical My Losing Season primarily deals with that subject (basketball), well worth reading, this novel devotes only a dozen or so pages to the topic, but perhaps the most vivid, accurate ones I've ever read about playing the game. Still, it is the beauty of his writing that glued me to the pages of this novel: "The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye. But to me, Charleston is a dark city, a melancholy city, whose severe covenants and secrets are as powerful and beguiling as its elegance, whose demons dance their alley dances and compose their malign hymns to the far side of the moon I cannot see. I studied those demons closely once, and they helped kill off the boy in me."

Thanks to these three novels, the jazz trio, my ship time was spent in good company (and with Ann of course). Ann wrote a detailed email to her friends about our trip, describing each port, and I am going to draw heavily from her observations when I get around to editing and selecting photographs, as well as adding my own thoughts.

But I will say one thing as a teaser for a future piece. The high point was St. Petersburg where we hired a private guide for two ten hour days. One cannot tour Russia without a Visa or a registered travel guide (or one of the ship's bus tours, which we did not want to do). Our guide turned out to be as stunningly beautiful as she was knowledgeable, a graduate of St. Petersburg University, with a degree in Art History, and with excellent English skills. Each place of visit was accompanied by her knowledgeable narrative. It started with an early morning visit to the Peterhof Palace, with its lush gardens and magnificent furnishings, these two exterior photos hardly do it justice, but, as I said, this is merely foreshadowing of a more detailed account in a later entry.


















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Friday, April 29, 2011

Conroy's Reading Life

Our good friend Edie gave me My Reading Life by Pat Conroy when I recently entered the hospital, which was supposed to be for a more routine visit than it turned out to be. She knows I love good writing, and she thinks of me as a writer as well. It was a very thoughtful gift. Yes, I write, and I enjoy it, but to be a real writer means to forsake just about everything and dedicate yourself to the craft. It also helps to have an abundance of talent, an omniscient eye and an encyclopedic memory.

I cannot think of any great writer who is not obsessive compulsive about writing. In many ways, I wish I could roll back time and make that choice, but it would have been to the detriment of a publishing career I loved and other avocations such as the piano, studying the machinations of economic markets, politics, and a bunch of other things. Although I started Conroy's work in the hospital, I had difficulty concentrating on it or anything else after undergoing such major surgery. My recovery left me unable to do much but change channels watching awful TV which I can only describe as crap, and if that is emblematic of where American "culture" has migrated, there is no hope for our society.

Once I returned home, I picked up the book again. Conroy achingly cries out in poetic terms for an understanding as to why he writes, why he found refuge as a child in literature, first as a means of connecting with his mother (no, worshiping her) and as a means of escaping his father. I have a particular empathy for literature as a means to understand family, as I wrote in an earlier piece: "What draws me to these writers is families, or more specifically, dysfunctional families. Strong mothers or weak fathers or weak mothers and strong fathers with borderline “crazy” behavior, dark humor and the unpredictable maturation of children from those families. Of course if art mirrors life, it may be that “dysfunctional” is merely normalcy in today’s world."

It was heartbreaking, though, to read Conroy's dedication page. My Reading Life begins with: "This book is dedicated to my lost daughter, Susannah Ansley Conroy. Know this: I love you with my heart and always will. Your return to my life would be one of the happiest moments I could imagine."

So, as in my family, succeeding generations are affected by the tribulations fostered by previous generations. I naturally tried to discover more, and found his comments about the dedication page in an NPR review: Apparently he has been estranged from his daughter since divorcing her mother in 1995: "She has a perfect right not to see me. She's 28 now. But I thought this [dedication] was going to be a last cry of the heart. I would at least try to get her attention and see if I could get her to come back. It has been one of the most soul-killing things to ever happen to me." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Maybe his daughter will reconnect with her father if she has the opportunity to read this book and understand the undertow of Conroy's maturation as a man and as a writer. He covers a wide range of influences on his writing, first and foremost his mother, who became immersed in Gone With the Wind, continuously reading passages from the novel to her son, beginning when he was five years old. "I owe a personal debt to this novel that I find almost beyond reckoning. I became a novelist because of Gone with the Wind, or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a "Southern" novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word "Southern," because Gone with the Wind set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl in Atlanta, and it was the one fire of her bruised, fragmented youth that never went out....It was the first time I knew that literature had the power to change the world."

Then there were the teachers, in particular Gene Norris's English class, and the "anti-teachers" in particular his father, Donald Conroy, the Marine who beat his family. Conroy bore much of this. "From an early age, I knew I didn't want to be anything like the man he was....I was on a lifelong search for the different kind of man. I wanted to attach my own moon of solitude to the strong attraction of a good man's gravitational pull." Gene Norris was that man and he became a lifelong friend and mentor to Conroy and introduced Conroy to a wide range of classic literature.

Then there were people in his life who could have been negative influences, the librarian, Miss Hunter, at Beaufort High School, Cliff Grabart, the proprietor of the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta, and the cantankerous, but lover of literature, a book representative, Norman Berg, who I met on several occasions at book conventions. Conroy even went out on sales calls with Berg. That was the foundation of the publishing business then.

From each of these people Conroy took away something and bonded with them in his own way. In fact, Conroy was sponge-like in his dealings with people and the literature he read, recording everything, the eyes and ears of a writer on duty at all times. This is what separates mediocre writers from great ones.

He did the ex-pat "thing" in Paris in the late 1970s. "Parisians... relish the xenophobic sport of stereotyping and love to offer an infinite variety of theories on the nature of Americans. To them, we as a people are shallow, criminally naive, reactionary, decadent, over-the-hill, uncultured, uneducable, and friendly to a fault....Whenever Parisians heard my execrable attempts at French, they would cover their ears with their hands and moan over the violation and butchery of their sweet tongue." My own visits to France taught me a similar lesson, my high school French had to be left behind and I sometimes pretended to be Canadian. But maybe the French are on to something, given my captivity by the mindless TV programming during my hospital stay.

Conroy was finishing The Lords of Discipline in Paris, staying at a hotel where he encountered a wide range of travelers, including other artists. As my son is an inveterate traveler, I was fascinated by Conroy's exquisite explanation as to what it is to be an ex-pat, meeting other people on similar journeys: "Because we were strangers who would know one another on this planet for a very short time, we could trade those essential secrets of our lives that defined us in absolute terms. Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives. The men and women I met at the Grand Hotel des Balcons traveled to change themselves, to trust their bright impulse with the hope they would receive the gift of the sublime, life-changing encounter somewhere on the road. There is no voyage without a spiritual, even religious impulse. Each of us had met by accident, our lives touched briefly, fragilely -- then we continued on our own private journeys, and those intense encounters left a fragrant pollen on the sills and eaves of memory."

But to this point, My Reading Life is merely a warm up for what is the main event and influence on Conroy's writing and he appropriately entitles the chapter "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe."
It was Gene Norris who gave him Wolfe's classic Look Homeward, Angel in 1961 as a Christmas present. "The book's impact on me was visceral that I mark the reading of Look Homeward, Angel as one of the pivotal events of my life....The beauty of the language, shaped in sentences as pretty as blue herons, brought me to my knees with pleasure....I was under the illusion that Thomas Wolfe had written his book solely because he knew that I would one day read it, that a boy in South Carolina would enter his house of art with his arms wide open, ready and waiting for everything that Thomas Wolfe could throw at him."

I felt the same awe when I read the novel in college, probably at about the same time as Conroy. Never before had I felt that way when reading fiction. The only way to describe his writing is as being concurrently prodigious and poetic, an uncommon combination. And the novel was even larger before publication and luckily for Wolfe his editor was none other than the legendary Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who also was Ernest Hemingway's and F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Wolfe was in good company.

The publication of Look Homeward, Angel, had, at its heart, detailed autobiographical elements, the same sort of autobiographical elements in which Conroy's own The Great Santini is grounded. Wolfe's work caused an uproar in his hometown, beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. For a while he was banished from the town, but he did return later to write You Can't Go Home Again.

Conroy has made the pilgrimage to Asheville, first with his teacher, Gene Morris, to visit Wolfe's "Old Kentucky Home," the boarding house maintained by Wolfe's mother. Conroy rocked on the chairs where the boarders gathered on the porch. He toured the home which has been so lovingly restored. I wonder whether Conroy has seen the wonderful play about Wolfe's return to Asheville, Return of an Angel which we were lucky enough to experience during one of our visits to Asheville. It brought Wolfe's return to Asheville alive.

We have been to the Wolfe home in Asheville twice and came away with the same feeling of time having been stopped during those years, before Wolfe's untimely death at the age of only 37. Imagine the great works he would have written if he had lived. As Conroy says, "I think the novels of his fifties and sixties would have been masterpieces. Time itself is a shaping, transfiguring force in any writer's life. Wolfe's best novels sleep in secret on a hillside in Asheville -- beside him forever, or at least, this is what I believe." I agree, Pat, and thank you for reminding me of Wolfe's passion, an invitation to reread his work.

Conroy's concluding chapter, "Why I Write" is probably one of the best I've ever read on the subject, setting the serious writer apart from the potboilers that weigh down today's best seller lists. "Stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself...Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear."

Also in that chapter, he returns to the overarching theme of literature and family, the role of literature explaining who we are and where we came from: "I've always wanted to write a letter to the boy I once was, lost and dismayed in the plainsong of a childhood he found all but unbearable. but I soon discovered that I've been writing voluptuous hymns to that boy my whole life, because somewhere along the line -- in the midst of breakdowns, disorder, and a malignant attraction to mayhem that's a home place for the beaten child -- I fell in love with that kid." And I too fell in love, as much with Conroy's nonfiction as his novels, particularly with My Reading Life, as well as My Losing Season. Such truthfulness and beautiful writing. One can only hope his honesty will lead to a reconciliation with his daughter. It would be just.

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