3. Never gonna happen.
Your children become the heroes of their own plots, timeworn narratives in unrecognizable new bindings. The eighties pass while your energies are spent elsewhere—on building up the collegetuition war chests, on making partner, on helping companies copyright common English words. You still read for pleasure: all kinds of things. The hunger remains, but, as with sex, the costumes must grow ever more elaborate to produce the same transport. You're caught somewhere between reading for recognition and reading for estrangement.
Mostly what you read are reviews. Too few hours left to do more than scan the books that you know you'd love. At least you can read what the gatekeepers say about this fall's lineup. And, often, imagining a book from its synopsis beats what you do manage to slog through.
The reviews accumulate faster than you can flip through them. What you really need is a thumbnail summary of the thumbnail summaries. A year or so after Grenada or Iran-contra or some such thing, while blasting through last year's stack of unread literary weeklies prior to pitching them, you come across the fact that To the Measures Fall, long out of print, is being reissued in an annotated Essential Library edition—part of a general renaissance of Wentworth, who, the review laments, has been in a twenty-year decline. The reviewer calls Measures the "once celebrated, now forgotten British Magic Mountain." He claims that Wentworth's wartime Midlands still have as much to reveal as any of the marginalized regions of the earth. Can that possibly include Lesotho, Lebanon, the Punjab?
The retrospective appreciation feels like one of those lifetime-achievement awards that you get for having the courtesy to stay dead. The new cover for the Essential Library edition is dazzling; it makes Wentworth look like the next Alice Walker. You're not sure what constitutes a decent interval between "much revered national asset" and "unfairly undervalued." For the reviewer, the revival proves the one universal truth about literary merit: quality will surface, in the run of time. The trick is to stop time at just the right moment.
Who is Elton Wentworth, exactly? Choose one.
1. The currently most unjustly underrated author of his generation.
2. The formerly most justly overrated author of his generation.
3. The soon-to-be least unjustly rerated author of his generation.
New annotated editions flood the market. Does your boat go up? You break down and pay an appraiser ten times what you would have, ten years ago, to look at your copy. Churchill's marked-up volume, it turns out, went for eight hundred pounds at Sotheby's, just as the new Wentworth renaissance hit. Your copy belonged to a Cotswold sheep farmer named H. H. Cleanleach. The appraiser offers you ten bucks off his fee.
The boys in Information Processing install a terminal in your office that fulfills your old dream: rapid access to abstracts of all the articles that you can no longer find time to read. In between researching briefs, you follow the boomlet in Wentworth studies. The reader-response people take him up, then those who study reputational revision. There's a minor heyday in swarming any author still in the state of pre-post-exhaustion, just before the idea of single-author studies gives out.
A modernist at New Mexico State proves that To the Measures Fall was really written around 1928, suppressed by Wentworth for two decades, then published, despite his objections, in a form he didn't want. A Barnard associate prof proves that half the novel was the work of Wentworth's longtime mistress. A graduate student at Indiana proves that the book is riddled with historical error. Scholars of all ranks show how Wentworth was the product of a thousand horrific cultural blindnesses and Eurocentric brutalities.
Write a brief letter to no one, about what you once thought the book might mean.
The Berlin Wall falls, and the Evil Empire falls with it. The Cold War ends, and for a moment history does too. You stop reading anything that is more than two months old.
You don't exactly remember the nineties. The Gulf, of course. Something about Somalia and Sarajevo. Smoke everywhere. Lots of colored ribbons tied around America's trees. The firm keeps dangling the promise of senior partnership, but it never quite happens.
The 1993 feature film adaptation of To the Measures Fall stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson. There's an extended hallucinatory sequence depicting the suicidal "slow walk" at the Somme (filmed in Scotland), graphically matched to a torrid sex scene on the heath outside Wotton-on-Wold (filmed in a Hollywood sound studio). A tie-in paperback edition appears, with a glossy movie-still cover featuring the gorgeous leads.
Rate the film:
1. Worth the price of a movie ticket.
2. Worth videotaping, when it comes on TV.
3. Worth denouncing at a dinner party.
4. Worth a class-action suit by readers everywhere.
On your fifty-fifth birthday—the age at which the terminally ill Sarah Beck must identify her son's body at the foot of the South Downs gravel pit—you join a book group. The kids are grown, the career's on autopilot, the husband is off playing paintball, and it's time to read again. Books are back, in more flavors than ever. Cool books, slick books, innovative remixes, massive doorstops, funny jeux d'esprit, weepy Uighur bildungsromans, caustic family sagas from Kazakhstan. Books in every market niche and biome: avantaprès-post-retro. Back too is the long-dead art of communal reading. Okay: maybe a few of your book group members are in it for the finger food. But you'd forgotten what a pleasure it is to discuss out loud—aimless talk about love and lust, responsibility, hope, and pain. Together, over two years, you read the major national selections. Your fellow members bring their old secret freight out of deep storage. You take nine months to work up to your request. You're unsure of your friends. Unsure of your ability to reread. Unsure ofjust what's in that treacherous book these days.
You read it slowly this time, a chapter a night, over the course of weeks. This time through, the book is no more than a grand, futile gesture of nevertheless in the face of human frailty: Francis Beck's refusal to believe that his wife is ill—a feckless cowardice that turns, by insistence, almost heroic; Alice Wright's paralyzing premonition, which she can't act upon without destroying the man who would destroy her; Trevor's premeditated signal to Alice, ready to launch itself from beyond the grave.
Two club members report flinging the book across the room in a rage. Another demands her three days back. Accusations multiply: it's mawkish, it's cerebral, it's meandering, it's manipulative, it's cold and cunning and misanthropic, it's wrecked by redemption. How are we supposed to care about these characters ? I just wanted them all to get a life.
But a few people in the group don't know what hit them. One friend hated the first fifty pages but wanted fifty more after the end. The quietest man in the group comes back from Wotton-on-Wold wrapped in brittle bewilderment at his own existence.
It's a custom of the group—introduced by the male minority—to assign every book a letter grade. Yours gets a C+.
What percentage of your pleasure has gone out of the book forever? Fractions permitted.
Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin. It's a chance to recapture everything you've ever lost: college friends, out-of-print rarities, quotations that had vanished forever. Your on-line hours must come from somewhere, and it isn't from your TV viewing. You lose whole days on the roller coaster of real-time eBay auctions. Volumes of Wentworth go off at every price, from triple digits down to a buck ninety-nine. You rescue a few, to give to friends, someday, or whenever.
It thrills you to discover a site where all the shameless, recidivist Wentworth readers in the world gather to post their guilty pleasures. You subscribe to a feed. Six months later, the community spirals into civil war as a thread between sock puppets and anonymous avatars goes up in flames.
You watch the Amazon ratings for To the Measures Fall drop steadily, from a high of four and a half stars to a low somewhat below that of a defective woodchipper. The wisdom of crowds means to se
nd Wentworth into a third and final eclipse. You consider logging in at Comfort Suites across the country, creating all kinds of personae to rescue the book for another generation of Wentworth readers, whenever they dare to come out of hiding.
How many aliases do you create to rate the book?
1. Just enough to boost the book back to its rightful rating.
2. Sarah Beck would never create an alias.
Then the new century. Terror and sci-fi become life's dominant genres.
War turns perpetual.
The last print newspapers head toward extinction.
More words get posted in five years than were published in all previous history.
Global warming threatens to flood coasts inhabited by half a billion people.
Most of the planet suffers from drought or tainted water.
Name the book that best captures life as now lived.
Two months before you plan to retire, you learn that you have a massive hilar tumor, nestled up in the stem of your lungs, where nothing can reach it. It's right where Sarah Beck's is, if you're imagining correctly.
Your daughter the reader brings you the book, to keep you company in a state-of-the-art cancer center, in your bed next to a window that looks out onto a brick wall ten feet across a cement courtyard. You read it again. Not the whole book, of course—you couldn't possibly read a whole anything. But you manage a few pages, searching for a creature that recedes in front of your gaze.
This time, the book is about the shifting delusion of shared need, our imprisonment in a medium as traceless as air. It's about a girl who knew nothing at all, taking a bike ride through the Cotswolds one ridiculous spring, mistaking books for life and those roiling hills of metaphor for truth. It's about a little flash, glimpsed for half a paragraph at the bottom of a left-hand page, that fills you with something almost like knowing.
A freak snow hits late that year. You lie in bed, an hour from your next morphine dose, your swollen index finger marking a secret place in the spine-cracked volume, the passage that predicted your life. For a moment you are lucid, and equal to any story.
Score the world on a scale from one to ten. Say what you'd like to see happen, in the sequel.
The Call of Blood
Jess Row
FROM Harvard Review
MORNINGS HE FINDS Mrs. Kang upright in bed, peeling invisible ginger with an invisible knife. She watches her hands with rapt attention, picking up the stalks from a pile at her right and dropping the peeled pieces into a bowl on her lap. A cloud of white hair rises from her scalp, fine as spun sugar. The first time he tries to raise her, putting his hands gently beneath her armpits, she bats them away; the second time she forgets to resist. She weighs eighty-eight pounds on a good day. In the wheelchair she sits up, ramrod-straight, and waves a finger at him. E na pun no ma! Her voice like wind in a crevasse. You are a bad boy!
Hyunjee, her daughter, says, No offense, Kevin. But if she knew it was a black man taking care of her, it would finish her off.
Hyunjee has a funny way of smiling, like squinting into the sun. He can tell she finds this thought faintly entertaining.
I'm not black, he says. My father was from Jamaica and my mother was from Queens. Irish Queens.
Oh, I know, she says. It's complicated. But it wasn't complicated for her. She was held up three times after Dad died and she was trying to run the place alone. She had nightmares for years afterward. Wouldn't admit it, though. Typical Korean mother.
Hyunjee's hair is already streaked gray on one side, though she can't be much older than forty. She wears it long with a wooden clasp, and loose-cut linen clothes, all in blues and browns and blacks. A jewelry maker—he has her card—who doesn't wear any herself. Divorced, with two little girls who come only once every two weeks or so. She comes every day, with food in a stack of steel boxes.
She was saying something different today, he says. Something like Dung gum kuei go chora.
Dung jum kuel go chora. Scratch my back.
Okay. I'll remember that.
You don't have to do everything she says, you know.
If she's itchy it means that her skin is too dry, he says. It could be a sign of dermatitis. That's what you're paying me for, to watch out for those things. The hospital nurses won't do it.
He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, trying to relieve the bone-ache in his arches, but nothing helps. These Nikes are two weeks old; he's tried lacing them loose, tight, in between. There's no stepping out of the shadow of this pain.
It's too bad, she says, her back to him, shoveling leftovers into the garbage, filling the room with the smell of sour cabbage and garlic. Until last year her English wasn't bad. She used to watch Oprah every day. But after she woke up from the stroke—nothing. What a shame, you know? All that wasted effort.
Not wasted. She used it to survive.
She used to say speaking English made her tongue tired. And it's true! Even I remember that, from when I was first learning. All the correct sounds in Korean are wrong in English. It's absurd, really, if you think about it. Nobody should have to work that hard to ask for a glass of water.
Count yourself lucky, he thinks, that she can speak at all.
He could tell her about the saddest cases, the old women with half-melted faces, their minds wiped clean by a clot smaller than a baby's fingernail. But nurses don't compare. To do so would be to suggest this patient is not the only patient in the universe, their only and every and always, their one sole concern. Doctors, yes. Doctors comfort by comparing, by giving the odds. Nurses never say, It could be worse.
His mother, on the other hand, never lost her gift for languages, right up to the end. Fluent in Latin and French by seventeen, thanks to the Carmelite Sisters of Charity, she took up patois with the steely determination of a missionary. His father's parents, so the story went, refused to believe that the woman they'd spoken to on the phone was white until she stepped onto the tarmac in Kingston, shielding herself from the sun with a blue parasol. Years after his father died she stayed on as a part-time community liaison for Catholic Social Services. It wasn't unusual, when he was in high school, to come home and find her at the kitchen table, sorting the bills, the phone clasped between shoulder and chin, her face the color of boiled lobster, saying, Y'cyaan stay wid dat man, soon as 'im get money 'im gone.
It embarrassed him, in a small, private way. He himself could understand his Jamaican relatives only barely and could not speak patois at all. Like the taste of ackee and jerk chicken: a foreign thing colored by the guilt of having once been familiar. At fourteen he had refused to go to the family Christmas party in Flatbush, and somehow that single gesture, that flutter of adolescent pique, had poisoned the well. No more presents, not even a birthday card. Tell them, he told his mother finally, years later, tell them I'm not ashamed to be part Jamaican, that's not it, I meant no harm. I was just a kid. She looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug and said, Well, you meant no harm. That must be some consolation.
When his mother died, his father's family held a Nine-Nights ceremony after the mass and didn't invite him. He was twenty-one, two weeks off the plane from Saudi Arabia, desperate for a pair of flabby arms and a perfumed shoulder, a mouthful of curry goat. Instead he stumbled home from the Liffey at three A.M. Two days later he was on the graveyard shift at St. Vincent's, picking buckshot from a gangbanger's backside. Like the grunts always said: When you get off the plane, go down on your knees and kiss the ground. Tunnel into it like an earthworm. Don't make any serious decisions for the first six months. He was lucky, having never fired a shot, flipped a switch, thrown a grenade; he could carry on the same work with no interruption, one war zone to another. Like switching saline bags on an IV, a continuous flow of tears.
Sometimes he feels his brain curdling. Curdling: exactly the word for it. A snatch of conversation in the elevator, the headlines on Hyunjee's copy of the Times, a few bars of a song someone whistles in the bathroom: always it takes him a m
oment too long to see the point, to put words to the melody. Synapses atrophy, lose their shape, their elasticity, their charge. Why should he be surprised? An hour spent folding towels, testing bathwater, dividing pills into groups for the night nurses: not a single abstract thought. Even the taking of vital signs boils down to a series of small muscle movements: tightening the Velcro, flicking off the old thermometer cup, squeezing the wrist with two fingers, just so. The brain carries the numbers as long as it takes to insert a quarter into a vending machine. The body drones on, he thinks, the autonomous nervous system taking care of itself quite nicely with the cerebral cortex switched off.
Have you been a nurse for a long time? Hyunjee asks, her back turned, watering the row of potted plants on the windowsill.
Since 1989, on and off.
Is that the proper word to use? I'm not up on the terminology.
If there was another term for it, it wouldn't matter. A nurse is a nurse.
You don't seem old enough to have been working in 1989.
I joined the army when I was eighteen. I was a medic in the Gulf War. Oh.
He can hear her thoughts recalibrating, one assumption leapfrogging backward over another. It's okay, he wants to tell her, no one ever believes it. That certain slackness in the way he moves, as if he was all double-jointed, Renée had said. Hard to imagine him in formation with the helmet and the gun. His mother used to say, What is it about you that always finds the farther corner of the room?
I thought medics were doctors.
Medics are just grunts with a little bit of extra training. The MDs work in the field hospitals, out of sight, way back from the front lines.
She sticks a finger into the soil of each pot before and after watering, frowning, as if the perfect dampness is hard to achieve. A large hydrangea, the color of barely boiled tea, two long trailing ivy plants, a kind of small shrub with tiny, waxy leaves. He's never seen anyone look after plants so intently. What is her house like? he permits himself to wonder. Pristine, presumably. No dust bunnies in the corners. All uniform colors. Lots of wood, no clutter. Elaborate cabinetry. Hidden richness on all sides.