Activity

The beginning of June was hot. I took a journey, and of course, immediately everything was new. When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. The phlox bloomed in its faded purples; on the hillside, phallic pines. Foreigners under the arcades, in the basket shops. A steamy haze blu…

Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never kne…

In the end we are left with an extraordinary apprehension of all that is elusive, haunting, unrecoverable in the human past and, simultaneously, of something proportioned, fixed and flexible in shape, an object to be contemplated: the book, or more precisely this book. What the book cannot hold is …

[...] Whole towns, years, marriages are fitted into a paragraph or two. Juxtaposed, the paragraphs form a map, a grid of spatial and temporal relations within which the narrator exists. We thought we were exploring a single life, and are brought to see that no life can be single, that anyone’s soli…

The paratactic laying-out of details—In Kentucky the “wrinkled, broken jockeys with faces like the shell of a nut,” in Manhattan the affluent young couples “taking off the stoop so that drunks cannot loiter, making a whole floor for the children to be quiet on”—stripped of connective material