# 1: Richard Powers
Richard Powers’ Generosity is a wonderful work of fiction. The man is a genius; he knows so bloody much it boggles the mind. Not only can he structure a book so it moves ineluctably toward a goal (the aim of most novels), but he creates characters so likable and indelible that you not only wish you knew them, but hankered as well to crawl inside the pages of the book and save them from the harshest of the fates he’s provided for them. Not the least of his skill sets is his ability to do this while creating a frightening view of the future which will probably happen, like it or not. However, like Nabokov and several others, he can’t resist becoming the intrusive narrator. Just as you’re getting so chummy with his characters that you want to hug them, or slap them, or give them a talking to, he gives you his periodic reminder that this, after all, is only fiction. I loved this book so much I can barely forgive him for that. And yet! What observations he delivers, in these asides, on the subject of fiction! My favorite is the following, which makes me smile every time I read it. Has anyone ever given fresher expression to this thought?
“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.”
# 2 Jayne Anne Phillips
A very different kind of book is Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips. It’s a powerful story of war and ordinary folks living ordinary lives and accepting both the ordinary and not-quite-so-ordinary calamities that befall them, and getting on with it. It cuts back and forth in both time and place, with characters whose lives become more closely linked the more you get to know them. The repetition of themes, motifs, and events — with slight variations — has an almost hypnotic effect. And the story builds to a series of climaxes that wrench you with their simultaneous horror and hope and inevitability. I don’t mean to spoil anything for you but I want to call attention to one moment in the book — quite near the end — that I found astonishing. This is dense prose, almost poetry. I’ve italicized certain sentences, though they weren’t in the original, because I wanted to call your attention to them. The passage can’t possibly have the same effect as it would if you’d read the whole novel to this point, but still. I invite you to read it over several times to get the full impact. Leavitt, a jazz trumpeter, is a soldier in Korea. As he lies already dying in a cave, wounded by friendly fire with a whole barrage of further “friendly fire” about to rain down on him and the others in the cave — refugees fleeing south from the North Korean army — he senses his son being born back home, and seeks to impart to him the only advice he can manage:
“When the pounding begins the white light on his face goes blue. Look inside, he tells his son, inside is where you really are. He wants to lift his baby away from this beautiful deadly world. The planes always come, he wants to say, like planets on rotation, a timed bloodletting with different excuses. Part of a long music. Don’t look, only listen. His son is born. Leavitt feels him turn in the salt and the blood, squalling and screaming in the close hot wet. Stop screaming, Leavitt tells him. Never scream. They’ll find you. Stay still. Listen. You can’t come with me now. Breathe, breathe. Take your turn.”
# 3 Yours truly
Finally, something of my own. I found this while culling my files recently. It’s a snippet I’ll probably never use in the novel for which it was intended, nor do I foresee its use in another. By including it here I’m not suggesting that my own prose — here or elsewhere — is a match for the two great writers I’ve just written about. But since it continues to speak to me, I thought I’d share it.
“The way I introduced my mother just now sounded like an afterthought. As if she were a little dab on the canvas, a light brushstroke somewhere, perhaps in the upper left-hand corner, where a few wispy cirrus clouds can be seen struggling across the desert sky. Not so. My mama no wisp of cloud nor smear of paint. This was a woman who dominated my life, then and now. Who bludgeoned and clubbed and slithered through my life, who so tangled and enveloped me in the strings to my lips and limbs she gripped so tightly that I have spent a lifetime clipping those strings, trying to break free. Yet this was the same woman who clung to my father as if he were a life-raft and she were in danger of drowning. Clung to him like a burr under the saddle, which she sometimes was. She left me with a spine made more of scorn than pride, but stiff and stubborn as if carved from the same tree. Left me filled with awe and wonder at both the plenitude of her strength and the black hole of her need. And where was love in all this? Hers for me, mine for her? There was love there somewhere. It skittered around like a tiny desert lizard from rock to rock, pausing and hiding, flicking out its tongue to test the air.
“I wrote somewhere:
‘Her stubbornness runs through my veins
Like a bicycle chain
Had she the grip on love
She had on jar lids
I would have dwelled in alfalfa fields
Forever.’
“The love I have felt for women, most of my life, has been much the same as that described here: skittering around from rock to rock, pausing and hiding, flicking out my tongue to test the air.”