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Dear Life, by Alice Munro

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Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Radio Free Vermont, by Bill McKibben

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Subtitled A Fable of Resistance, this is the story of radio personality Vern Barclay’s mission to persuade Vermont to secede from the U. S. Seventy-two years old and dismayed by the speed, greed and corruption that have taken over the country, Vern wants to remind Vermonters of all the things they value that are being lost, not just the slower pace of life, but also local food and the strength of community: Vermont’s “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

He and his accomplices, the young computer specialist Perry Alterson, his pal Sylvia and an Olympic athlete named Trace, come up with various pranks to drive their point home, starting with a protest at the opening of the first Walmart that backfires, spewing raw sewage into the store. Vern also has hosts a podcast that Perry has set up to use over a dial-up connection to foil their pursuers. The podcast’s motto is “Underground, underfoot and underpowered.”

For Vern, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious endorsement of secession. He mostly wants people to wake up and notice that some good things are slipping away. Still, it fits with the push for secession coming from states like Texas and California.

Humor isn’t that easy to write these days. No matter how much you exaggerate what’s happening in this country, reality shocks you by going even farther. Yet McKibben pulls it off. This zany story is full of fun and surprises, but never quite loses touch with the real world, or a possible version of it.

The satire is softened by the characters who are forthright but pleasant, stubborn but polite. I loved seeing a resistance movement that is not only nonviolent but also positive. It’s focused on building a better future, not just tearing everything down, and demonstrating how to take action, in a friendly way of course.

Funny and thought-provoking, I hope this novel from McKibben is the first of many more. It’s a departure from his many nonfiction books, starting with The End of Nature, in form if not in theme, and must have been a hoot to write.

Have you read any of Bill McKibben’s nonfiction books? Try this novel!

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

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In my book club’s choice for this month, Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, step out of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” and are brought to life by the author of Hamnet.  When her older sister dies suddenly, Lucrezia is forced to take her place in the politically important marriage with Alfonso. Only 16, she is married to him and carried off to Ferrara in 1560. A year later she is dead, rumored to have been poisoned by her husband.

That much is true, though today historians think she died of tuberculosis. O’Farrell expands the story, creating a rich tapestry of the time and a deep dive into a sensitive young woman’s experience. The narrative alternates between the last few months of Lucrezia’s life when Alfonso has removed her from the castello to a remote fortezza, and the fuller story of her life leading up to this ending.

During her childhood in Florence, Lucrezia leads a limited life, confined to the nursery area where she feels different from her many siblings, older and younger. Imaginative and artistic, she has a rich inner life. And she’s a fierce child, pushing against restrictions and yearning to see the tiger her father has had imported for his personal zoo in the lower reaches of the palazzo.

Since we know from the historical note at the beginning that she will die, the suspense that powers the novel—jacked up every time we return to the threatening fortezza—comes from wondering why it must come to that and whether she is able to resist in any way. Even in the other sections, there are hints and warnings, such as her learning about the Trojan War and how Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia after pretending she is to marry Achilles.

O’Farrell’s luscious writing pulled me in. I felt the prick of hairpins in Lucrezia’s hair, the stiff material of her gown. The “sweet, cloying smell” of lilies in her chamber came to me as did the “waterfall of noise” that “crashes down on her” when “[t]he gates creak open” and the glare in her eyes as she steps out of the palazzo where a carriage waits to take her to her wedding.

After the wedding, she and her maid are carried off to a villa in rural Tuscany. “They travel along a wide road, on either side of which are rows and rows of fruit trees—Lucrezia could, for a while, make out branches heavy with the round curves of peaches and perhaps the tear shape of lemons. But now it is too dark to see anything at all.” Meanwhile, Alfonso has been called back to Ferrara to deal with an emergency: his mother and oldest sister refusing to give up the new, forbidden Protestantism.

Some people in my book club considered the portrayal of a noble woman such as Lucrezia objecting to a political marriage to be an anachronism. Marriage at that time was considered a transaction, especially for rulers. Women such as these were raised knowing that marriages would be arranged for them based on political and/or economic benefits. Instead, this story projects modern-day women’s expectations of personal agency and a loving marriage on both Lucrezia and Alfonso’s sister Elisabetta, who is dallying with one of the guards.

Since I’m also reading Phillipa Gregory’s magnificent nonfiction book Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, I’ve learned that some women did rebel against being subjugated and treated as property, even during this period. Therefore, I didn’t find it hard to believe that, out of all the women in the book who made no complaint about their arranged marriages, there could be a child such as Lucrezia, raised in  isolation and temperamentally different from her siblings, who would find it a terrifying prospect. Nor that Elisabetta, with all the dissension and rebellion within her own family, might give in to the attractions of a handsome guardsman.

I do agree, though, that many—most?—historical novels feature women and sometimes men whose modern sensibilities are at odds with their time period. I assume this is a necessary adjustment to attract the attention of modern readers.

One drawback of being exclusively in Lucrezia’s point of view is that her interest in and understanding of the other characters is limited. Thus, we don’t get to know them very well. I did find Alfonso interesting, with his combination of ruthlessness—necessary for anyone trying to rule in such embattled times—and aesthetic awe of the castrati’s music, not to mention his rare whimsy. I would have liked to know more about Lucrezia’s maid Emilia, too.

The way O’Farrell orchestrates verb tenses captured my attention. Most chapters are in present tense, some, such as the one about the tiger, in past. And there’s even at least two sections in future tense. Usually, as is normal, the past tense is used for memories and flashbacks in present-tense sections, but now and then it is the past perfect. These are not errors, I believe, but a subtle way of capturing the multiple currents of time that swirl around us.

My book club discussed the ending at length. Some found it ambiguous and, indeed, came up with a few different interpretations. I won’t go into that, of course, but would love to hear what you thought of it, if you read the book.

Do you enjoy historical fiction based on the lives of real people? Why or why not?

Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

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The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer: objects of many sorts from the natural world whose strangeness and accidental proximity might inspire wonder and perhaps prompt a larger discussion.

Like the best sort of host, MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders and then lets us make of them what we will. There’s no lecturing. Although she is a presence in the book, it is not about her. Instead, her evocative prose bears witness to these marvels, inviting us to experience them ourselves.

The essays range around the world and into varied environments: from fields and forests to volcanos and the Empire State Building. As MacDonald tells us about wild boars, boxing hares, and several sorts of birds, she encourages us to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of ourselves.  “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has.” We are introduced to animals and birds as sentient beings in their own right, with their own needs and wants.

Another theme that runs through these essays is the effect of the loss of habitat on these creatures: those we have lost, such as the wood warblers, and the adaptions some have made, such as the peregrine falcons nesting on the decommissioned power chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station in Ireland.

For much of the 20th century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites, where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial sites too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality, mountains by virtue of their eternity, industrial ruins by virtue of their reminding us that this too will in time be gone and that we should protect what is here and now.

Although she deplores the idea that the natural world should be preserved because we humans find it useful in lifting our moods or teaching us about ourselves, insisting instead that it has its own right to exist independently of us, she is not averse to showing how we benefit. She says, “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you were watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge.”

Among my favorite parts is the titular essay, which is about chimney swifts and their still mysterious ascent. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, they fly up out of human sight, where “flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly orienting themselves.” Another thing I learned is that “Unlike other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Now, when I walk in the evening and see the swifts whirling above, her words speak to me: “Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.”

Another, related theme in these essays is loss: the lost paradises of youth, the chestnut and elm trees that once graced our streets, the extinction or near-extinction of many species. This spring I was thrilled to hear a cuckoo while walking in England, where their population has dramatically declined. She says:

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

And:

Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.

Yet there is hope here as well, and treasures to embrace. Even her “Eulogy” for her friend Stu is filled with peace and hope along with the sadness, its ending giving me goosebumps just remembering it.

I keep thinking I’ve finished this book, yet find myself coming back again and again to this essay or that one. I love the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world” and opens for me some of its wonders.

What essay or book have you read that reminded you of the wonders of the natural world?

The Send-Off, by Wilfred Owen

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Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

Dance of the Happy Shades, by Alice Munro

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Hearing of Munro’s death sent me back to this, her first book, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1968. One of my favorite authors, Munro wrote short stories exclusively, forcing her to master the art of compression. Even these early stories demonstrate—to my delight—the kind of concise writing we expect in poetry. Munro is lauded for capturing the life of small towns in rural Ontario, drawing on her experience of growing up in one such town where she was born in 1931. As Hermione Lee writes in the New York Review:

Munro’s “real life” ingredients become enormously familiar to us: the childhood in the fox farm on the edge of town, the mother with incurable Parkinson’s, the studious girl reading her way out of the country into university, the expectations for young women in 1940s and 1950s provincial, conservative, colonial Canada; the early marriage and motherhood in Vancouver, the condescending young husband, the adultery, the divorce, the deaths of her parents, the returns home.

Yet even when I come across some of these familiar details, each story feels new to me and each character a new and different person. She establishes the new character immediately, sometimes by starting in media res, sometimes by giving her an unmistakably original voice.

Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on . . . “The Time of Death”

Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “if you don’t remember me you don’t remember much.” “Images”

Setting and mood, as well, are deftly established with just a few sentences. Here, the narrator has returned to her hometown for a visit and is sitting on the steps with her sister Maddy in the quiet night.

At 10:30 a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrolls of blue and red and orange light that said Billiards and Café . . . “The Peace of Utrecht”

This story also illustrates why I value Munro’s work so highly. The tangled relationship between the two sisters, one who stayed to care for their aging mother and one who left, is the fire smoldering between lines laying out the events and memories, the encounters and discords. No story I’d read before this one truly captured the roiling emotions and testy skirmishes between sisters that I’d experienced. Munro is someone who gets me. Was.

Stories, such as “Boys and Girls” where the narrator rejects her mother’s homemaker-in-training chores to join the boys doing far more fun farmwork, speak to me childhood. Others could have been written about my life as a young mother. “The Office” begins:

The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”

Girls and young women populate the stories in this first collection. I’ve read many of her later stories, which only get better, and now am looking forward to reading her last two books.

Have you read Alice Munro’s work? What is your favorite story?

Poetry of Richard Wilbur

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I host a monthly poetry discussion group where we read and talk about the work of a single poet. These sessions give me, and others, a chance to explore the work of a variety of poets whom I might not otherwise have read, with the additional insight gained from everyone’s comments. As a poet myself, I have learned a lot about what different people look for in a poem, what they notice or find appealing, how they interpret certain lines. Lingering on a single poem for a time also encourages me to stay with a poem when I am reading alone and make the effort to draw back the layers, instead of reading quickly and moving on.

This month we read poems by Richard Wilbur. I’d heard of him: a famous twentieth century poet, he was the second poet laureate of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award, and many other awards and honors. However, I’d never read his work.

Known for using traditional patterns of rhyme and meter and for optimistic themes, his work fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s when confessional poetry and free verse became more popular. Eventually, though, the pendulum swung back again, combined with his own tendency toward more personal poems as he grew older. That was when he won his second Pulitzer and was nominated as poet laureate.

A good example of traditional form is Black Birch in Winter, with four quatrains and an AABB rhyme scheme in each. Some people were distracted by the rhymes, but we all liked the careful description of the rough bark and the way he compared it to “mosaic columns in a church” and “the trenched features of an aged man.” Trenched! We found many examples of fresh and surprising uses of familiar words as we went through the poems.

The final stanza lifted the poem into the realm of the extraordinary, where he reminds us that despite their “shriveled skin,” these trees are still “doomed to annual rebirth.”

And this is all their wisdom and their art-

To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.

As I age myself, I know I will return to these lines.

Another poem that surprised me was The Death of a Toad. Caught by a power mower, the toad manages to get to the garden and hid under the cinera leaves. While on one level the scene is about the conflict of humans with nature, on another it makes me consider our own vulnerability; a catastrophe can come out of nowhere and disrupt our destiny and all our plans. Even more, the author’s close observation of the toad and its decline reminds me to pay attention, always, no matter how trivial the subject.

We were all stunned into silence by Cottage Street, 1953, which describes a meeting over tea between Sylvia Plath and the author, hosted by Edna Ward. Ward was Wilbur’s mother-in-law who was friends with Plath’s mother, who is also present at the tea party. Did it really happen or only imagined? Doesn’t matter. What comes across so powerfully is his own humility and shame that having been invited to help her, save her, he finds himself impotent. And the two women, Edna and Sylvia, and the choices they made.

Wilbur’s most anthologised poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, begins during hypnagogia, that is, the moment between sleeping and waking, before consciousness and rational thought fully take over. With images of angels and laundry and nuns, the author explores the interface between body and soul and ends with “keeping their difficult balance.”

I’m grateful for the opportunity to dig into this author’s work, and for the assistance of my fellow poetry lovers. There are so many poets and so much poetry, yet we can explore them one poet at a time, one poem at a time.  

What poet have you heard of but not yet read?

The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

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I’m always thrilled to stumble across an inspiring story based on real events, a story that’s been lost to history. In 1865, the Civil War is over, but freedom has only worsened the lives of former slaves. On the Montgomery Plantation, twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo carries the trauma of her years as a slave: her mother being sold away, her father lynched, and beatings that have scarred her back and soul.

She hates, with all her being, and cannot find room in her heart for love, even for William, the older preacher who loves her. Still, she knows he is a good man and agrees to marry him. She knows what she wants: to make real her vision of a Happy Land where people can live freely and be treated with respect. She envisions a cooperative community, where everything is shared so that all can prosper.

When events make it impossible to stay on the plantation, Louella and William lead a group of former slaves to find a place to settle and build their community. They travel for months, encountering dangers and surprising succor in the post-Civil War South, eventually settling in the Carolinas. Louella and William are appointed Queen and King of Happy Land. It thrives, growing to 500 families, but internal friction develops and threatens all they’ve built.  

Miller’s fictionalised version of this true story captures the drama of Louella’s terrible journey from hate to love. The injustice and outright abuse can be hard to read about, but will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with slavery and Reconstruction. Another aspect that can be off-putting but not unexpected for someone of the time is Louella’s devout Christianity. While no doubt historically accurate, Louella constantly excusing injustice by saying that God has His ways or hoping God would hear her need seemed to take all the air out of the story.

Luckily she often speaks her mind and finds creative ways to accomplish her goals. Such parts kept the story moving. By having Louella take the lead and speak her mind, Miller shows us a complex character. Each of the characters—and there are a lot—is fully depicted as an individual.

Given the egalitarian nature of Happy Land, I was uncomfortable with the titles of king and queen, especially since they were used as day-to-day nomenclature, i.e., referring to King William or the King and Louella likewise. Of course, this is one of the dangers of using real events for a novel. The author shouldn’t go against the actual historical record.

Having just read Erasure, a novel of how the public and the publishing industry only want and will only accept one view of The Black Experience, I appreciated this portrait of a harmonious and loving marriage as well as that of a thriving community.

The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

The book’s language is fairly simple; in fact, I wondered if it wasn’t a Middle Grade or Young Adult novel, though the traumatic violence rules out Middle Grade. However, it’s an easy read and an immensely valuable addition to our understanding of the time and also of what one woman can accomplish. She had a dream, and she made it come true.

What novel have you read that was based on real events?

Erasure, by Percival Everett

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Several friends have recommended the film American Fiction, and of course I wanted to read the novel first. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk in reference to the great jazz musician and composer, teaches at a California college and writes dense, experimental novels that attract almost no readers and the criticism that they do not reflect the African American experience. My immediate thought was: okay, we’re in fantasyland. In real life, such a writer would not be able to have a second novel printed, much less—I think it’s four—and retain a devoted literary agent.

As his latest novel racks up rejections from publishers, Monk is incensed that debut novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a middle-class black woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” is a huge bestseller and will be a movie. It embodies all the worst racial stereotypes, but is being hailed as a genuine and brilliant representation of the African American experience, a criticism frequently aimed at Monk’s work. Apparently it’s a takeoff on the real 1996 novel Push by a person using the pseudonym Sapphire.

Monk is infuriated not only by the praise and commercial success of this exploitative novel but also by the publishing industry and book-buying public’s obliteration of the experience of the many African Americans like himself. So he writes his own parody of these stereotypes and sends it to his agent using the obvious pseudonym of Stag R. Lee. He assumes everyone will recognise it for the satire that it is, and is shocked when it sells for a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal.

Meanwhile, he is wrestling with family issues. His mother and sister in Washington, D.C. need his help, while his brother is suffering the personal and professional fallout of having come out as gay. Presenting a paper at a conference in D.C. gives him the opportunity to see his mother and sister, but also entails encounters with bitter literary rivals of his own.

A big chunk of the book is a complete version of his surprisingly successful novel, which I found painful to read. Well, I didn’t read more than the beginning and the end. I began to think that Everett’s real purpose with this novel was to laugh at all the snobby readers who agreed with Monk’s anger at the praise of anything reinforcing these heinous racial stereotypes, and then devoured and praised an example of the same.

Oh, and look! Commercial success for Everett’s book and now a movie deal. Very meta.

Everett also inserts the complete paper Monk presents at the conference, a send-up of semiotics. A little of each was enough. Satire that goes on too long becomes boring. On the other hand, I thought the frame story of the family was well done, especially the mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I began to think that this would have been better as a good novella or even a short story.

A little more thought led me to the realisation that—trying not to give away too much here—Monk in the frame story is actually doing the same things his protagonist in the parody does and experiencing the same frustrations; only the details are different. More meta; interesting, but not enough to sell me on including all the dreck.

Another thing I liked about the frame story was the representation of a writer’s mind. Every now and then Monk would get a story idea and create a short scene for it, or a thought would prompt him to create a short dialogue between two historical figures, philosophers, artists, etc. Plopped right into the story, these were brilliant. Been there, for sure.

There were a few more fantasyland moments, undercutting the supposed realism of the frame story. Overall, though, I found a lot of the book hilarious, boring at times, infuriating at others. A good workout!

Have you seen American Fiction or read the novel on which it’s based? What did you think of them?

The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

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Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?