"Killing Our Darlings" or a Double Review

 

As a writer I am painfully aware of the commandment that we must "kill our darlings." 

For those of you who haven't run into this rule yet, let me explain. It's that line in your poem that is so perfect it hurts your heart. It's that bit of dialogue in your novel that makes your character glow with their own personal soul. It's that bit of wisdom that makes writing worth living. And you wrote it.

But -- and it's a very big 'but' -- if the rest of your work is less perfect, you gotta cut it. 

Why? Because the whole point of writing a poem or a story is for the reader to experience it. It should all happen inside their head. They should see it and feel it themselves.

The very beautiful and quotable line that you are so proud of will throw your reader out of the story. It will say to them "Forget the poem for a minute or maybe forever because this bit is so much finer. I am the god who wrote that. Aren't you impressed?!"

That is not to say that there are not writers who can liberally sprinkle such gems throughout their work and I, as a reader, will be carried without interruption through their story, buoyed on beauty. 

Barbara Kingsolver is just that sort of writer. I believe she is the finest writer living and working today. 

My first experience of her was the Poisonwood Bible. It was published in 1998, but I didn't read it until two years ago. I was amazed by its language and structure. It's a story told in first person from five points of view -- a mother and her four daughters moved by her Southern Baptist missionary husband from a segregated Georgia to a small village in the lush but dangerous Belgian Congo.

I've since read several of her short stories and I'm pleased to say each is well-done.

Animal Dreams, published in 1990, is every bit as good as The Poisonwood Bible. 

Instead of going into the unknown jungle, Codi, the main character is returning to a small Arizona town named Grace where she and her younger sister grew up.

          "Hallie and I were so attached, like keenly mismatched Siamese twins conjoined
     at the back of the mind."

Codi remembers the day her sister left Tuscon to do good deeds in Nicaragua. 

          "She left in August after the last rain of the season. Summer storms in the desert
     are violent things, and clean, they leave you feeling like you have cried." 

And she, too, left Tuscon to return to the home she'd never felt at-home in. She was returning to care for her father, the town doctor who was declining into that worst of aging's punishments, dementia. She describes her town when she arrives by bus.

          "There wasn't a soul on the street today and I thought of those movies in which a 

     town is wiped clean of its inhabitants, for one reason or another -- a nuclear holocaust,
     say, or a deadly mutant virus -- leaving only a shell of consumer goods." 

          "I knew I'd been there. Sitting in Jonny's ... hunched in a booth drinking forbidden
     Cokes, reverently eyeing the distant easy grace of the girls who had friends and mothers.
     Those things didn't seem so much like actual memories as like things I might remember
     from a book I'd read more than once."

Some of those memories had not been true and some had.

          "I can see my mother there, a small white bundle with nothing left, and I can see
     that it isn't a tragedy we're watching, really. Just a finished life."

And Ray Bradbury may be the best wordsmith ever. Where Kingsolver scatters her jewels on every page, Bradbury often builds each paragraph, each bit of dialogue with the most wonderful lines. In one of the many short stories in the collection which takes its title from my own favorite short story "I Sing the Body Electric" we meet Bradbury's robotic grandmother. She was purchased by a father for his three motherless children. Each child has their own needs, their own perspectives and after describing the care giver each wanted -- three different colors of eyes, three different styles of hair, three different everything -- they receive their perfect grandmother.

          "And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked

     back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the
     overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced
     into the sun.
          Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold,
     with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed
     into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted
     and fused together."

          "The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend

     with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all her bright
     sun symbol, daughter-of-Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an
     illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends."

A grandmother that we would all wish to have raised us and to raise our children.

Now, if only we all wrote as well as Kingsolver and Bradbury, none of us would need to "kill our darlings." 

Do I have darlings? Yes, and they have been torn from my writings with me screaming and kicking for every one. (This is why we need editors!)

They are all safely ensconced in a folder marked "Cut Stuff That Might Be Good Somewhere."

Kingsolver – A Review (Rumination)

I thought to call this piece a review, but I have a daughter. And as any mother of a daughter knows, what we think doesn’t matter. She graciously pointed out to me that I’ve never written a “review.” Not a proper review. She likes what I write but, they’re not reviews.

Okay. I’ll call this a rumination – as I will all my reviews henceforward.

That same daughter introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a marvelous novel written in first person. First person from five points of view. As a writer, I understand the difficulty of portraying a character’s unique point of view, then maintaining that identifiable point of view through the length of a novel. Kingsolver did it with five characters, a mother and her four daughters, the children ranging in age from five to fifteen at the beginning. She wrote each as an identifiable individual with particular peculiarities of thought and language. Five significant and singular points of view.

So when I was looking for a book of creative nonfiction Kingsolver’s name in the credits of Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, along with Amy Tan and David Sedaris, I was sold.

Creative nonfiction is new to me. At least the term. Having enjoyed David Sedaris and Bailey White and Baxter Black for years on NPR, Creative nonfiction in the short form is not new to me at all. Come to think of it, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” would be considered creative nonfiction.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about.”

I came here to talk about Barbara Kingsolver, the woman I met in her work “High Tide in Tucson,” a wonderful true story that begins with a displaced hermit crab and moves into her life.

Kingsolver doesn’t define herself as a high school English teacher would, giving us her date of birth and where she went to school and when she married and how many children she has and how many awards and commendations she’s received. Or, as too commonly with autobiographies and memoirs of people successful in their field, what celebrities she’s met and slept with and/or disapproved of.

She offers us her view of living. Not in florid and overblown language, but concretely as a true word smith should.

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross,” she writes “from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.” 

I've been there and am doing that. I bet you have and are, too.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver -- a review

My daughter has been trying to get me to read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible for a while now. I’ve been trying to get her to read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. Since I’m writing a review on Kingsolver’s book and Grace isn’t writing one on Irving’s, I guess you know who won this one.

Actually, I think I’ve won, because now I’ve read them both. And I’d give them each five stars. That means I think they’re worth reading more than once, which is the rarest of endorsements from me.

I am disinclined to read any book titled anything to do with a bible. And, having said that, I will add that books written in the first person are not generally my cup of tea. If you’ve read many of my reviews, you know all too often I begin them by saying this is not the kind of thing I read, but ….

And here we go again.

Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is written in first person from five women’s points of view -- a mother in her mid-thirties and her four daughters from ages fifteen down to five. The Price women accompanied their Baptist missionary husband/father from Bethlehem, Georgia, to the Congo during the 1960’s, a time of political upheaval in both places.

Nathan Price’s point of view is not recorded here. He is just another of the natural disasters that this family must face and survive. That said, this is a book that gives us strong female characters, each different and identifiable one from the other. And, I think, each is a realistic portrayal of women, not a homogeneous ‘they’ but a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ five times. Even the youngest sees things as she would see things, not as her sisters or her mother do.

In this book tension is sustained and heightened not by chase scenes and explosions and things that jump out at you, but by impending death and the fear of death. Death doesn’t stalk these five women and the people of the Congo like a jungle cat. It hangs in the humid air and lies curled beneath an elephant ear leaf. It shadows children in raggedy clothes and floats down the Congo River. It festers in the hearts of men – Americans and Belgians and Congolese – far away from the Price family. And in the ambitions and jealousies and fears of men in their village and in their own house.

The women come through this period in their lives, each in her own way. Though not always in a way that we might admire or seek to emulate, they each demonstrate that greatest of human strengths, they endure.