Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday August 28, 2010
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LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME: A Memoir of Friendship
Gail Caldwell
Random House
ISBN 978-1-4000-6738-1
190 pages
$23
Reviewed by Heller McAlpin
You can shelve "Let's Take the Long Way Home," Gail Caldwell's beautifully written book about the best friend she lost to cancer in 2002, next to "The Year of Magical Thinking," Joan Didion's searing memoir about losing her husband to heart failure. But that's assuming it makes it to your shelf: This is a book you'll want to share with your own "necessary pillars of life," as Caldwell refers to her nearest and dearest.
What's the draw in reading about "unspeakable sorrow"? Well, despite Caldwell's assertion that "the only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course," sensitive portraits of love and loss stir our nobler, empathic feelings, reminding us of our possibilities -- and realities -- as human beings.
Actually, Caldwell's book is more heartwarming than devastating. It's about the joys of friendship as much as the ravages of "intolerable loss." She evokes the sort of soul mate most of us yearn for. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Boston Globe, Caldwell writes of meeting Caroline Knapp, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s: "Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived."
They certainly had a lot in common: Both writers were exercise fanatics who were single by choice and temperament and worked at home. Each lived alone in Cambridge, Mass., with a beloved dog. Both were high strung, sensitive and thin. Caldwell, nearly nine years older, had grown up in the Texas Panhandle and survived not just a "family tree (with) a root system soggy with alcohol," but childhood polio that left her with a limp. She had "given up a lot of what didn't work," including cigarettes, and was disturbed that Knapp, who had beaten anorexia and was the daughter of a Cambridge psychoanalyst, continued to smoke until shortly before her diagnosis with stage four lung cancer.
An even deeper connection was their shared history of alcoholism -- "that empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction." Both had stopped drinking in their early 30s, a fact Caldwell gleaned from Knapp's forthright 1996 memoir, "Drinking: a Love Story," before they became close. Caldwell had told few people about her sodden past. She writes about her alcoholism for the first time, partly because of its importance to her link with Knapp. "I used to think this was an awful story -- shameful and dramatic and sad. I don't think that anymore. Now I just think it's human, which is why I decided to tell it."
The two women bonded over their dogs, which they took on rambling, bucolic, "analytic walks." They had "endless conversations about whether we were living our lives correctly," discussions they prolonged by deliberately taking the long way home. In "Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs" (1999), Knapp described these walks as "one of the most sustaining aspects of my life, weekly shots to the soul of connection and laughter."
Together, the two women were "the merry recluse" and "the cheerful depressive" who "named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine" and "gave the other permission to lower the bar." Caldwell introduced Knapp to the joys of swimming laps, while Knapp initiated Caldwell into rowing on the Charles River. How's this for an elegant description of how a supportive friend helps you blossom? "The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose."
If you want a great memoir written about you, it helps if you're close to a writer: Trite as it sounds, writers process life by writing about it. As Caldwell comments, writing about Knapp years after her death helped provide "a happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the journey." Boswell's "Life of Johnson" may be the mother of all friendship biographies; Caldwell's memoir is more akin to the recent spate of tributes to writer-spouses, including Didion's "Magical Thinking," John Bayley's "Elegy for Iris" and Donald Hall's "Without," along with Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty," about her intense friendship with writer Lucy Grealy.
Caldwell is aware that she's telling "an old, old story": "I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too," she opens, noting later that "it's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it." Actually, what transforms the story is a combination of fearlessness and grace. Caldwell dares to ask, "What if dying weren't a bad thing?" and concludes, "Caroline's death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight." Her memoir, a tribute to the enduring power of friendship, is a lovely gift to readers.
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR.org, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING
Steven Amsterdam
Pantheon
ISBN 978 0 307 37850 7
199 pages
$24
Reviewed by W. Ralph Eubanks
"Everything will be fine until it's not. Then we can worry," someone says in the first story of Steven Amsterdam's debut collection, "Things We Didn't See Coming." Those 11 words establish the tone for the rest of this book.
The setting is the eve of the millennium, and the 9-year-old narrator is fleeing the city for his grandparents' country home ahead of an anticipated Y2K calamity. As we all know, Y2K turned out to be much ado about nothing; in Amsterdam's fictional world, however, it triggers events that cascade across these connected stories, bringing about an apocalyptic transformation of the world. In each well-crafted piece, the narrator grows older, endures downpours that last for months, encounters victims of a highly infectious disease and finally finds his one true love.
This is not, however, a collection of "my-God-what-have-we-done?" tales that will add to your laundry list of worries about modern life. "Things We Didn't See Coming" captures contemporary anxieties about environmental destruction and the influence of technology, but the book is nonetheless hopeful. As the unnamed narrator develops from cheeky preteen to adolescent thief to adult survivor and government bureaucrat, the reader marvels at his adaptability, growth and transformation. The stories are as much about the human instinct for survival as about what we are doing to the world.
The milieu that Amsterdam depicts has something in common with our daily concerns about pandemics and climate change, though conditions have become much more harrowing. "The Profit Motive" opens with this description: "This is an era of violence. Border clashes, the flu, the weather, and all the migrations they caused -- none of it has fostered anything like camaraderie."
Sound vaguely familiar?
Given that "Things We Didn't See Coming" progresses like a Dickensian serialization, one might argue that it is a novel. As the title suggests, the reader really cannot see what is coming from story to story. Amsterdam keeps us wondering how the setting will change as the world deteriorates and is reborn into something both familiar and breathtakingly strange. The landscape appears to be an amalgam of the author's adopted country of Australia and his native New York City. "Dry Land," with its description of torrential rains that keep grapes from growing and make wine a precious commodity, seems to imagine what would happen to Australia's drought-ridden farmland if it got months, even years of constant precipitation. In the stories "What We Know Now" and "The Theft That Got Me Here," the city that his characters are fleeing, with its diligent checkpoints and police presence, feels more like post-9/11 Manhattan than Melbourne.
Still, the stories have a universality about them. No matter where you're from or what landscape is imbedded in your mind's eye, there are common emotions to connect with. Perhaps that is why I never grew tired of these pieces and read each one straight through, eagerly anticipating the next. They are fresh and original. Amsterdam is an innovative storyteller with a great gift for dialogue and staging.
"Things We Didn't See Coming" is the kind of book that can inspire us to think differently about the world and entertain us at the same time. In its occasional darkness, we can also see light.
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of "Ever Is a Long Time" and "The House at the End of the Road."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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